Just Desserts : A Bed-and-breakfast Mystery (11 page)

It made him different—and daring.”

And stinky, thought Judith, but kept her mouth shut. It seemed to her that, given Dash’s background, he didn’t need any embellishments to cut himself from the herd.

But Ellie was speaking again, now very serious and with an air of dignity. “Dash wouldn’t have come here to meet Wanda. He’s having second thoughts about Gwen.” The gray eyes took on a sudden glimmer of life.

“Rico—Dash—has never cared for anyone but me.” On that note, Ellie slipped across the threshold and down the short flight of stairs.

This time, Judith remembered to lock the door.

The newspaper clippings were almost too much for Judith.

At first glance, they seemed to have no bearing on the case—or Wanda Rakesh: a pair of short articles about a man with amnesia, a gossip column, and a brief story
78 / Mary Daheim

about a hit-and-run accident, all from L.A. papers. The amnesia victim had been found by a chicken farmer near Chino, then had disappeared a day later without being identified.

The gossip column featured a world-class model, a temperamental actress, a bigamous producer, and a jet-setting social-ite.

Judith paused over the last snippet:
Cynthia O’Doul is back from Europe and rarin’ to go
on the annual Tiara Ball for St. Perry’s Hospital. The
scintillating Cynth is still laughing at her husband, the
well-known Beverly Hills surgeon, Dr. Jack O’Doul, who
not only forgot to meet her plane, but insists he forgot she
was in Europe! Oh, Doc, you’re such a cut-up!!! Where’ve
you been operating lately? Just kidding, we know you’ll
both put the sparkle in the Tiara next month at the Bel-Air Hotel…

The date was October 26, 1979. The stories about the man with amnesia were from the same week, October 23

and 24. Either Dr. O’Doul was an absent-minded surgeon—or an amnesiac. Judith couldn’t imagine why Wanda would have kept the clippings together unless there was an important link. She had worked at St. Peregrine’s Hospital—St. Perry’s to the chatty columnist—perhaps as far back as 1979. But what did a decade-old incident have to do with the Brodie family?

The last article was also about a surgeon, Stanley Edelstein, forty-two, who had been killed in a hit-and-run accident outside of Star of Jerusalem Hospital in November 1981.

“Edelstein,” the news story ran, “had gone off-duty at 10

p.m., some 20 minutes before the tragedy. A Los Angeles Police Department spokesman said it was possible that heavy rains obscured the unknown driver’s vision. The victim was already dead when two hospital workers found him sprawled over a manhole.”

Some faint memory stirred in Judith’s tired brain. But nothing came into focus. She read through the final para-JUST DESSERTS / 79

graph: “A native of Houston, and a graduate of UCLA’s Medical School with an undergraduate degree from Baylor University, Edelstein had interned at St. Peregrine’s Hospital.

He joined the staff of Star of Jerusalem in 1980. Survivors include his mother, Thelma, and a sister, Rachel Pierpont, both of Houston…”

Edelstein, like O’Doul, had been on the staff of St. Peregrine’s. But so what, Judith asked herself. Maybe they were the doctors in the snapshot with the nurses. Maybe Wanda had a crush on both of them. Maybe she was a clipping freak.

Maybe Judith should take a break.

Judith decided to take a shower. The clock showed five a.m. It was too late for a nap: Judith always got up at six to start breakfast for her guests, should any of them be early risers. The hot water and British National Health soap she swore by revived her a bit. She took more time than usual with her makeup and donned a bright red turtleneck sweater and black slacks. She nodded approval at the mirror. Her color scheme was symbolic—red, to show that she was un-defeated by tragedy; black, to signify that she was mindful of murder in their midst. Resolutely, Judith descended the stairs and prepared to face the new day.

The policeman on the second floor was alert, drinking coffee from a thermos, with three glazed doughnuts on a napkin at his side. Someone was in the shared bathroom at the far end of the hall: one of the Otto or Lance Brodies, Judith reasoned.

Hurrying down to the kitchen via the back stairs, she turned the lights on to fend off the morning gloom. To her consternation, the dining room table remained off-limits. She couldn’t possibly seat more than six around the kitchen table.

Maybe her guests wouldn’t all show up at once.

Sweetums was clawing frantically at the back door. Judith let him in, stuck her tongue out at his infuriated face, and fed him a lavish breakfast. For a moment, she stood on the back porch, breathing in the cool, damp air. Fog had settled over the city, drifting among the apple trees, creeping up the driveway, playing hide-and-seek with the
80 / Mary Daheim

Rankers’s house. A car started up across the street, a dog barked, the paper boy aimed, fired, and missed. Scooting down the back steps, Judith hurried to the front of the house where she retrieved the morning edition from a rhododendron bush.

“Hey, Dooley,” she called softly as she tried to make out the boy’s form in the fog, “you didn’t try out for basketball, did you?”

“Archery,” replied Dooley emerging on the walkway. “I’m real good.”

“I’ll bet,” said Judith, unfolding the paper and holding her breath as she scanned the headlines.

“Anybody else get whacked during the night?” Dooley asked, his fair hair sticking up at various angles.

Judith stared at Dooley. The relief of not finding Hillside Manor on page one fled. “How’d you know?”

Dooley shrugged his thin shoulders and grinned. “Mrs.

Rankers called my mom last night. Got her out of bed, but I was still up reading a spy book. It’s all about some mean Bulgarians.”

Judith sighed. No doubt Arlene Rankers had called everybody but Mavis’s producer at KINE-TV. Even if the murder hadn’t made the morning news, Arlene’s Broadcasting System—or ABS, as it was known in the neighborhood—had probably already alerted most of Heraldsgate Hill.

“Poisoned cream puffs, huh?” queried Dooley, his jug-handle ears all but bending forward. “Cyanide? Strych-nine?

Curare? You’d be surprised, there are all kinds of poisons in the stuff you keep around the house. Look at the labels, I’ll bet you don’t pay attention to most of the warnings they put—”

“Whoa,” she said, holding up a hand. Despite her dilemma, she had to smile at Dooley, who often showed a propensity for offbeat knowledge that was unusual in a fourteen-year old. As far as Judith was concerned, his secret weapon was safe from most other teenagers: Dooley was a voracious reader. And, when warmed up, quite gar-JUST DESSERTS / 81

rulous. “No word yet. When it comes down, Arlene will be the first to know.”

Dooley wasn’t impressed. “She doesn’t know everything.

She didn’t even see those guys out in the back yard last night.”

“What guys? The police?”

Dooley gave Judith a condescending look as he juggled his bag of newspapers. “Naw—this was before the cops showed up in the Ericsons’ driveway. About one o’clock. I was, you know, just going to bed.”

“You need more sleep, Dooley, especially when you have to get up so early on the weekends,” Judith said in her mechanical mother’s voice. “What did they look like?” She glanced up at the Dooley family’s Dutch colonial which was perched behind the Ericsons’ architectural madness. The fog obscured both houses, but Judith knew that Dooley’s bedroom had an excellent view of Hillside Manor and its garden.

Only last summer, Gertrude had pitched a fit when she discovered Dooley’s telescope had caught her in the altogether.

Dooley was reflecting, enjoying his moment in the spot-light. “Well…there were three of them, two who came up the drive, probably from a car parked down the street. The other dude came out from around the front of the house. He was big, you know, walked sort of odd.”

Lance, thought Judith, and tried to remember what she’d been doing at one in the morning. Cleaning up in the kitchen while Joe interviewed her guests, as near as she could recall.

“They just…talked?”

“The first two guys did most of the talking. Then they went away and the one with the funny walk went back in the house.” Dooley chewed on his lower lip, clearly trying to dredge up more information. “The dude from your house acted like maybe he was being chewed out. He sort of…slunk, you know.”

Judith remembered the phone call to Lance. Perhaps he had arranged to meet someone at Hillside Manor. It might be quite innocent. The call had come long before Madame
82 / Mary Daheim

Gushenka had arrived. “You have a good eye, Dooley,” said Judith, starting back up the walk. “I ought to hire you as a detective.”

To Judith’s surprise, Dooley actually blushed. “I’m staying on the lookout,” he murmured. “It’s sort of my hobby.”

“Keep that telescope lens clean,” said Judith with a wry smile. “and learn to read lips.” Waving through the fog at Dooley, she hurried back around the house and into the kitchen. To her amazement, Lance Brodie was sitting at the dinette table in a big plaid bathrobe, a steaming towel on his left knee.

“Good morning,” chirped Judith, remembering to act like a hostess. “I’m just getting breakfast under way. Hurt your knee?”

Lance smoothed the folds of the towel and grimaced. “It’s an old injury,” he explained in his vague voice. “The fog makes it worse. The damp from the fog. Or
in
the fog.”

Talking to Lance was a lot like talking
to
fog, Judith thought uncharitably, but presented a sympathetic exterior.

Indeed, she couldn’t help but feel sorry for the poor man, with his gimpy leg and faded dreams of gridiron glory. A dark stubble grew at his chin and along his jawline; his eyes looked faintly hollow, as if he’d spent the night listening to Mavis rant about freedom of the press.

“I’ll put the tea kettle on so you can soak that towel again,”

she said, already plugging in the coffee maker. “You played for the Stars, didn’t you?”

“They folded,” Lance said without expression. “They went broke.”

Judith was filling the tea kettle at the sink. “It’s been a while,” she said, sounding almost as vague as Lance. She wondered if his condition was contagious. “By the way, did you see anyone in our back yard last night?” She purposely made the question ambiguous.

“Did I see anyone?” Lance’s face was blank. “I guess I did.

Nobody you’d know,” he added, suddenly gloomy.

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Turning the heat on under the tea kettle, Judith searched her brain for the appropriate queries which would pry the truth out of Lance. “A neighbor said they were…odd.”

“Odd.” The word seemed to stick on Lance’s tongue. “No, not really. Stubborn. Like”—he gazed around the kitchen, his eyes coming to rest on Gertrude’s Democratic Party donkey atop the refrigerator—“a mule,” Lance concluded.

“Stubborn friends can present problems,” sympathized Judith, setting out the makings for buttermilk pancakes. “They are friends, I take it?”

“No.” Lance shook his head, then reconsidered. “You mean to me, or to each other?”

Judith ground her teeth as she cracked eggs into a big blue bowl. Abandoning subtlety in the face of Lance’s literal mindset, she plowed ahead. “I mean, why did they come here if they weren’t your friends?”

“That’s a good question.” Lance actually seemed pleased, especially since he had an explanation: “They came about Club Stud.”

Judith might be insulated from the local social whirl, but even she had heard of the sports-oriented chain of disco-nightclubs up and down the Coast. She had not, however, associated them with Lance Brodie. Until now. “You have an interest in Club Stud?” she asked, slicing ham into thick pieces.

Lance nodded. “I own them.” He looked faintly puzzled by the statement. “Now. Before, I had a partner, Calvin Tweeks. We played together for the Stars. Then he married Gwen.”

“Calvin Tweeks.” Judith matched up the name with a Sunday afternoon TV image of rugged bellicosity, tearing apart the opposition by merely breathing on them. “The nose guard?” She saw Lance gesture in the affirmative. “He was a great player. I didn’t realize your sister had been married to
that
Tweeks.”

“She’s been married to a lot of guys,” Lance said matter-of-factly. “It’s hard to keep track.”

84 / Mary Daheim

The tea kettle whistled. Judith poured water into a plastic basin, took the towel from Lance, soaked it, and gingerly handed it back. “Speaking of weddings,” she said, trying to sound casual, “what year were your parents married?”

To a keener mind, the question might have seemed odd, even cheeky. But Lance evinced neither curiosity nor resent-ment. “Gosh, let me think…” Judith girded herself for the effort, half expecting to hear wheels grind and motors whir.

“I was born in 1945 and Gwen in 1948, so they must have been married in 1944.”

Judith didn’t try to cope with Lance’s rationale, but took him at his word. The date made sense; even if Otto’s divorce from Gloria hadn’t been of the quickie variety, it should have gone through by ’44. “Was your father in the service then?”

she asked, hoping to sound guileless.

Lance shook his head. “Oh, no. He was deferred because of his allergies. And he was in the defense industry. He got extra ration book coupons for sugar and butter.” There was a note of pride in Lance’s voice as he boiled World War II down to the Brodie dinner table.

“That sounds very important. He must have done a fine job. Did he travel a lot?” Judith winced, aware that Lance’s speech patterns were contagious, too.

Lance considered, rearranging the towel on his knee. “I don’t remember much about the war. I wasn’t alive then.

But I know he went to Hollywood because he got Betty Grable’s autograph.”

A few more blank spaces were being filled in, Judith told herself. But she sensed that Lance was a blank for further information about Otto’s wartime past. She changed the subject, hoping to catch Lance off guard, if it were remotely possible that he was on guard in the first place. “Were those men you met last night your new partners?” she asked, again trying to sound casual.