Death Was in the Picture (18 page)

“Marjorie, what on earth,” I said to her almost as soon as the door to the dining room was closed behind us. “Did you win the Irish Sweepstake?”

“Whatever do you mean?” she said, the picture of innocence while she tucked leftovers into waxed paper for future consumption. She made tidy little packages, then secured them with rubber bands she saved for the purpose. She was pleased with herself about the dinner; I could tell. So I played along.

“That fish dinner. It seemed so extravagant. It was like Christmas Eve or something.”

“It did seem like that, didn’t it?” she asked, smiling, pride in her eyes. “But no, alas, no Sweepstake. And the fish was … well, it was really very cheap.”

“Cheap?” I said. “How could that be?”

“Marcus … oh, Miss Katherine. You simply mustn’t tell. Do you promise?”

I shrugged. Nodded. “Sure.” Who would I tell, in any case? I doubted that either Dex or the newspapers would care very much.

She lowered her voice, almost to a whisper. “Marcus caught it. At Santa Monica. At the pier.”

“He did not,” I said, suddenly paying close attention.

“Oh, but he did,” she said.

“But Marjorie, those weren’t little smelts or pile perch. I know: I ate it. That was the flesh of a large, white fish. What on earth could he have caught—at Santa Monica? At the pier—like that?”

Marjorie looked around conspiratorially, as though someone might be hiding in the kitchen to hear her revelation. Satisfied we were alone and unobserved, she leaned toward me and lowered her voice still further.

“Well it could have been halibut. But it was not. And it could have been queenfish or guitarfish. But it was not, either. Not this time, at any rate. No, that tonight,” and here she dropped her voice so low I had to lean in to hear her, “that was shark.”

“What?” I asked, certain I’d heard incorrectly.

“It was shark, Miss Katherine. Marcus caught a mudshark.”

“And we
ate
it? Whatever were you thinking?”

She didn’t look abashed, as I thought she might have done. Rather she faintly glowed with pride—though if it were in herself or Marcus’s abilities as a fisherman I could not have said. Perhaps both.

“I was thinking right enough, Miss. You said it yourself: it was like a feast day.”

I couldn’t argue with that. But I had to think again about the times in which we now found ourselves. And I had to think about my father, as well. Was he spinning now, I wondered? Was he spinning in his grave while his old housekeeper fed his daughter the flesh of a fish he would have considered inedible? And if I were to tell the truth, I’d not only eaten it, I’d enjoyed it: and it was the fullest my stomach had been in months. From the looks of things, too, there might even be fish sandwiches for lunch tomorrow. Maybe even fish omelettes for breakfast.

“Well, fish omelettes might be pushing things too far,” Marjorie said when I mentioned it. “But look what I found,” she went to the cupboard and brought out a tiny bottle filled with an evil looking brown substance. “It’s liquid smoke, Miss Katherine.” She sounded terribly pleased with herself. “If all goes well, we’ll have kippers with our breakfast.”

“Mock kippers?”

“Quite,” she replied, nodding her head in satisfaction.

I embraced her then, a fast impulsive hug. There were not many people who would have found joy in our predicament, but Marjorie did. She found joy wherever she looked. It was a trait I decided I’d have to try to learn.

IT SEEMED AS though I closed my eyes—my stomach full of illicitly procured white fish, my head full of shadow figures and unpleasant possibilities—and fell asleep instantly. And then what felt like five minutes later I was brought back to consciousness by the self-righteous screaming of a nearby bird with an overbalanced sense of propriety. And he was right outside my window.

I opened my eyes to full light and the inexplicable sense that I’d missed something. The squeal again. So apparently what I’d missed had not been the bird.

In the kitchen, Marjorie still looked vastly pleased with herself.

“You look like the cat what swallowed her canary,” I said to her, still thinking of that noisy bird.

She smiled—Cheshire-like this time—and nodded and said, “You’ll see.”

I’d overslept and was doubtless going to be late getting to the office, but I decided coming in late just this once wasn’t going to hurt anything. Especially since Dex pretty much left it up to me to decide when to open things up in the morning. It’s not as though he was ever there at the crack of nine.

On this day, Marjorie wouldn’t let me help with the breakfast service, but asked that I join the gentlemen in the dining room. She was like a mother arranging a surprise for her children. I could feel her anticipation and her glee and decided to play along.

And then breakfast. It was beautiful. It reminded me of the breakfasts of my childhood on those rare occasions when we’d
had a house full of guests. Marjorie carried too much food out of the kitchen on serving plates overflowing with home fries and scrambled eggs, thick slices of Marjorie’s home-made bread turned into golden browned toast and … kippers. I had a hard time not laughing out loud in delight and wonder at her creation. The creamy white flesh that we’d had with dinner the night before had been cunningly tinted a beautiful caramel color and artfully shaped to resemble the salted fillets of the much smaller fish.

Even though Marjorie never shared how close to poverty we were with her boarders, I often had a sense that everyone knew. We were all in boats of similar creation. The same boat, in a way, even if there were to be differing destinations, different ports of call.

So we reveled in this feast, all of us. We laughed and we chatted emptily about happy nothings and we ate until we were full.

At one point, I looked up to see Marjorie regarding me with a secret expression. She touched a finger to her lips, winked at me. I winked right back. Far be it from me to give away her kippers as the flesh of the carnivore shark or, more to the point, the fish that was free at a time when real fish was very dear.

Walking toward Angels Flight, I found the day coldish, but I minded it less than I might have done on another day this chilly. I knew that this was partly because I’d been so well fed two meals in a row: I generally didn’t have much extra in my body to sacrifice to the cold, so I felt every drop in the temperature.

Today, however, I felt pleasingly the way a fat seal must feel slicing through Arctic waters: I felt protected from the bitter cold and even invigorated by the world that came with it. As I boarded Angels Flight, I noticed clouds pulling themselves sluggishly through a dull gray sky; the other riders on the little
railcar were bundled against inclement weather: overcoats and even scarves and hats. Someone from Chicago or even San Francisco might have laughed at the sight because, truly, by those standards, it was not
that
cold. But by Angeleno standards, it was a day to bundle up. A day to stay at home and sit by the fire if that was an option.

At our office door, I gave a start: the door was unlocked. I moved inside cautiously, afraid of what I might find until I recognized the smell of coffee in the air. Dex. I checked the clock on the wall. Nearly an hour before ten and my boss was at his desk. I got the feeling that floats to you when you play with the idea of miracles and unlikely endings. It was more than I would have wished for and I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.

“I didn’t even know you knew how to use that thing,” I said, motioning toward the percolator.

“I don’t,” he said, looking at me and grinning. “But not to take anything away from you, Kitty? It was pretty self-explanatory.”

“So you really
are
smarter than you look,” I said, knowing that it’s one thing to figure out the mechanics: what goes here, what goes there. Quite another to put it all together in the expected way. We’d give it a few minutes, then see how it all turned out.

“What are you doing here anyway?” I asked, taking in his smoothly shaven chin, his clean shirt and collar, his favorite silk necktie.

“The rats and the cockroaches kicked me outta my apartment,” he said. “Told me not to come back until I came up with the rent and an armload of groceries.”

“That may well be,” I said adopting the same tone, “but you seldom get here before me. What made them kick you out this early? You snore? Sing in the shower?”

“Hold off on the thumbscrews, will ya? You’re not exactly the early bird today.”

“You’ve been working me plenty hard, shamus. Girl’s gotta get her beauty sleep.”

“By the look of things, you’ve been gettin’ more than your share.”

“Don’t be gettin’ all soft on me, Dex, or I’ll be playin’ you a few bars of chin music.” I raised my fist in a mock pugilist salute.

Whatever Dex might have said next was cut off by the sound of our front door opening. It was the kid who worked in Mustard’s office dropping off the heap Dex had ordered. I tipped him a short bit. He grinned his thanks and disappeared.

“Wanna come with me?” Dex asked when the kid was gone.

“Out to Oxnard?” I asked. “Why?”

“Dunno. Keep me company, I guess.”

I agreed readily enough—it was an adventure, after all. Something to keep me away from those files.

In the car, though, Dex admitted he had an ulterior motive. “And it’s not that I don’t want your company, either,” he said as the big car rolled up the Roosevelt Highway toward Ventura County. “Just, you know, another woman. I thought it might help, is all. And it’s a long way.”

It
was
a long way. Having a back-up plan—even a slightly lame one—didn’t seem like such a bad idea. I thought about this as we drove past the burned-out husk of Malibu Potteries. I’d read about the fire a few months before but it was worse than I’d imagined. Very little had been left unscathed. As thoroughly burned as the place had been, the owners seemed to be persevering. A tent had been erected not far from the burnt-out building and judging by the buzz of activity, it was business as usual.

North of Malibu, even the little bit of traffic thinned out until it was possible to follow the new highway for several miles at a time without seeing another traveler. At that point, Dex opened the big car up and it ate the asphalt in hungry bites. I
felt I could have watched the ocean sail past the car windows endlessly: sand dunes here, tree-studded cliffs there, and everywhere mile upon mile of sand. As we neared Oxnard the highway veered away from the ocean, and the sandy cliffs and white-capped vistas gave way to countless acres of cultivated fields.

“Sugar beets,” Dex said, noting my interest.

“You mean like pickled beets?” I asked, thinking of the jars of jewel-like vegetable Marjorie put up each fall.

“Well, I guess,” Dex said. “But mostly, they use them to make sugar. Hence the name. And for some reason, I think these aren’t red, but white.”

“Oh,” I said. I’m a city girl. I always have been. I tend to find unfettered nature and blatant agriculture a little disconcerting. It was, therefore, a relief when the endless fields began to give way to signs of civilization. A diner here. A gas station there. A residential neighborhood where one perhaps had not been ten years before.

The town of Oxnard itself was lovely: imagine a sweetly self-satisfied little city in a perfect setting at the edge of the sea and that would be Oxnard as we found it on that day. I could see it all so well because we spent some time driving around it. While I looked at everything with interested curiosity, while enjoying the day, I could feel Dex’s mood slipping and his temper flaring. He didn’t say anything, though. Just drove about with his brows pulled into a single dark line above his eyes and a scowl marring the strength and cleft of his chin.

“Are we lost?” I asked after a while, knowing as I did that it was probably exactly the wrong thing to say.

“Naw. We’re still in California.”

“OK,” I said. “Well,
that’s
reassuring. Something’s wrong, though.”

“The address Wyndham gave me,” Dex groused. “It doesn’t match up with anything we’ve seen.”

“Look,” I said, pointing. “There’s a Richfield station. Why don’t we just stop and ask?”

Dex shot me a look, but did what I’d suggested, pulling the car up to the pumps and asking the kid who worked there to clarify our directions while he filled ‘er up.

“Oh, I can see why that would have confused you,” the kid said when told the address. “That’s out Port Hueneme way.” Leastways, that’s what I knew the word to be. What he actually said came out sounding more like Port wye-NEE-mee, but we knew from the signs along the way that it was not. Dex wasn’t in the mood to hang around debating pronunciation and before the windshield even dried from its wash, we were underway again.

Once we were headed in the right direction it didn’t take long to find what we were looking for. As the gas station attendant had told us, the road snaked around until it came nearly to the ocean, where it ended at Silver Strand, Wyndham’s estate. Both Dex and I were struck dumb at the sight of the place, which was saying a thing: me having been born in luxury and Dex used to putting a façade up and his nose in where it did not belong.

You could see the house from the place where the road met the grounds, but only just. Right at the water’s edge, Wyndham’s country place was a modern mansion, with gardens, a pool and garages for the motion picture star’s cars. Away from the ocean, it looked as though the estate might go back for miles and board-fenced paddocks housed Arabian horses who frolicked in equine abandon, their tails held high in the air. I watched the horses play as we followed a long tree-lined drive-way. When we came to the house Dex pulled our borrowed car under the porte cochere. I looked around for some lurking servant in a uniform but didn’t see one, though it was the kind of swank joint where a liveried footman or six wouldn’t have been out of place.

There was no activity—no cars coming or going, no planes on the airstrip we could see beyond the pasture, no horses being taken to or from the barn—so we left the car where it was and headed for the door.