Mildred Pierced (11 page)

Begun in 1919 by Dr. Hubert Eaton, more than 87,000 people had been laid to rest inside its iron fence.

Dr. Eaton, known as “The Builder,” still around and perpetually upbeat—partly because he was reported to be clearing two million dollars a year—was fond of saying, “I believe in a happy eternal life.”

Forest Lawn’s income came not just from interments but also from christenings, fifteen-dollar marriages, casket sales, and the peddling of life insurance.

Flowers and fountains were all over the place, and soothing recorded music came from speakers throughout the park.

The service for Mildred Minck was held in a massive chapel with a giant stained-glass window depicting
The Last Supper.
Sitting on a small table covered in blue velvet in front of the chapel was an orange fake-oriental urn.

Handcuffed to a detective, Shelly sat there, blinking at the nonsectarian service being read by a tall, lean woman minister in a white robe. The woman came with the service, like pickles come with a hamburger.

“Her smile lit up a room. Her laughter brought a smile to those in need of a smile,” the minister said in a soothing, singsong voice.

I didn’t remember Mildred ever smiling or laughing. To Mildred the world had seemed to be a very sour lemon on which she had been mistakenly placed to pucker and complain.

There were only eight other people in the large chapel and more than one hundred empty chairs. I sat at the back where I could see everyone.

“Faith, hope and charity were always in her heart,” the minister went on.

I’ll give Mildred “hope.” She was always trying, but she had faith in nothing but the dollar, and charity to Mildred was definitely a foreign word used only by backward people.

To my left sat the Survivor quartet. Lawrence Timerjack, his right eye aimed in the general direction of the droning minister and his left fixed on me. He wore a black shirt with an orange tie and black pants over combat boots. Pathfinder Lewis, he of the pink cheeks and blowgun, sat on Timerjack’s left. He, too, wore a black shirt and slacks but no tie. He slouched, arms folded, as he looked at the back of Shelly’s head. To Timerjack’s right, sat Deerslayers Helter and Anthony. Same black shirt and slacks, the dress uniform of the Survivors. With them were two more members of the group wearing black. One of the two was a young bull of a man with a military shaved head and a protruding lower lip. Next to him sat another man, about forty, with a head of full dark hair and a well-trimmed bushy mustache.

Professor Geiger, in no uniform but a droopy herringbone jacket, sat five rows in front of the Survivors.

Mildred had a brother. No one knew where he was. No one had known for as long as she had been married to Shelly.

There were none of Mildred’s several lovers. No friends. Not even her hairdresser, who had taken an ample chunk of Shelly’s money over the years. I take that back. There was a solitary man sitting alone near the exit door. He wore a sport jacket and tie and kept glancing at his watch. He looked a little like Warner Baxter.

“… to contemplate what good she may have done had her life not been ended at so young an age,” the minister said.

Contemplating what hell she could have brought to Shelly and all who chanced to meet her would have been a more realistic enterprise.

I had called Marty Leib between funerals. He didn’t have to bother to tell me that using his services on a Sunday morning meant double the per-hour fee. Shelly would be paying for it and, according to Leib, Shelly would soon be able to afford it.

“Good news, bad news, neutral news,” Marty had said. “Which one first?”

Marty had talked to the company in Iowa that wanted to buy Shelly’s snore-away device.

“It was a joy, Peters,” Marty had said. “It started as negotiations and ended as an agreement to surrender. Sheldon Minck will get a cash payment of $172,000 plus one percent of the retail price of every device sold. The $172,000 will not be an advance against that one percent.”

“Your cut?” I’d asked him.

“Ten percent,” he said.

“Now the bad news?”

“No, let’s do good-bad news,” he said. “Mildred was worth a total, including jewelry, real estate, insurance from her parents’ death a few years ago, of about $200,000. She left no will. Shelly gets the whole caboodle.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“
And
bad. Motive, Peters, motive. Mildred had filed for divorce. If the divorce had gone through, whatever she had would now go to some distant relative, perhaps that long-lost brother. Have you got anything for me?”

I told him about the kid finding the bolt in the park. I told him what Shelly had said to the kid about thinking Mildred had a heart attack.

“And that’s enough to convince you of Sheldon’s innocence?” he asked.

“Enough,” I said.

“Enough to convince me, providing we can prove the bolt you found was fired from Dr. Minck’s crossbow and that he had not fired it earlier. Still, it provides some obfuscation. Not as much as a qualified ophthalmologist will, but something.”

“It gets a little more complicated,” I had told Marty. “I found out this morning that there were no fingerprints on the bolt we found in the park.”

“I’ll have to think about that one,” he said.

We hung up. It was funeral time. First Ruth’s and now Mildred’s.

“The kingdom of the Lord in the Land Eternal,” the minister was saying now, her arms outstretched, her robe hanging like wings. “And we all say—”

“Amen,” the cop cuffed to Shelly said. The rest of us added our amens.

The woman in the white robe beckoned toward Shelly and the cop. They rose and made their way up the platform to the podium.

Shelly squinted out at us, cleaned his glasses on his shirt and said as he looked at the orange urn, “Mildred had good teeth and gums. You’ll have to believe me, those of you who didn’t know her, but I’m a dentist and I know good teeth. Heredity accounted for a lot of Mildred’s dental health, that and hygiene.”

The cop handcuffed to Shelly looked at his prisoner with an expression that suggested he thought he might just be needing backup.

“I didn’t kill Mildred,” Shelly went on. “At least, I don’t think I did. Maybe I did. I know she’s dead.”

Someone in the audience—I think it was Martha, the Deerslayer—coughed. Shelly squinted toward the back row.

“My friends know I loved Mildred, loved her with … for her sense of humor, her beauty, her compassion, her … Well, not for her compassion.”

Which, I thought, was as evidently nonexistent as her sense of humor and beauty. All that Mildred had lacked to make her picture perfect was snakes where her hair was.

“She left me. She took up with other men. That bothered me, particularly when she picked up with that little guy who she thought was Peter Lorre. You remember that, Toby?”

Everyone turned to look at me. I nodded to show that I remembered.

“See?” Shelly said. “And did I forgive her? For that? For everything? For taking the house, all the money in the bank accounts, the car?”

He was still looking in my direction. I nodded again. It wasn’t enough for Shelly.

“Tell them, Toby.”

“He forgave her.”

“Mildred’s favorite food was lobster tail,” Shelly went on. “Her favorite writer was Pearl Buck. Her favorite radio show was
Big Sister
, though she liked Dinah Shore. Now she’s in heaven. Mildred, not Dinah Shore. I’m sure Dinah Shore will go to heaven, but not for a long time.”

Shelly looked at the cop who looked away, feet apart, eyes now forward, waiting.

“I met Mildred when I was in dental school,” he said. “She came into the clinic. I cleaned her teeth and we fell in love. In spite of what some people said at the time, she didn’t marry me just to get away from her father who was involved in bootlegging and was facing eight federal charges, as was her mother. We never had children. Mildred didn’t like them. She said they don’t clean under their fingernails, even the really good ones, unless they’ve got some kind of mental thing about keeping clean.”

Shelly paused, his eyes moist. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes with the sleeve of his uncuffed hand. Then he faced us again and continued, “What was I saying?”

The cop whispered something to Shelly. Shelly nodded and, facing us again, said, “Amen.”

We all repeated it. The cop started to lead him away, but the pudgy dentist stopped short and called out, “I’m not sure where I’ll keep her ashes. I don’t know if I can have them in prison, but if I don’t go to prison, I’ll keep Mildred in my office. I spend more time there than anywhere else. You can come and see her whenever you want. And since you’ve come to this service, I’ll offer all of you a twenty-percent discount on all dental work.”

This time the cop yanked Shelly from the platform and an unseen organ began to play “Coming Through the Rye.”

The Survivors gathered at the rear of the chapel. Professor Geiger moved to the center aisle to put a hand on Shelly’s shoulder as the cop hurried him out. Shelly gave me a pleading look. I smiled and winked and probably did something with my shoulder to suggest that I had everything under control.

When he was gone, I started toward the door. Lawrence Timerjack and the two burly mourners I didn’t know blocked my way.

“Peters,” he said, Lewis on one side, Helter on the other. “I intend to tell you something. I intend to tell it once. I intend it be acted upon or, maybe better, not acted upon. You understand?”

“No,” I said.

“Peaches,” said Timerjack.

I looked at young Pathfinder Lewis, he of the pink cheeks and the blowgun. Lewis grinned.

“Some people read tea leaves or palms,” said Timerjack. “I read peach pits.”

“And what do the peach pits say?” I asked.

“That you’re all wet and sticky, and that if I wanted to make you more than just wet and sticky, well, you wouldn’t have been here today to hear Pigeon Minck’s heartfelt speech.”

“So you want me to stop trying to find out who killed Mildred Minck?”

“I’m a straightforward man,” Timerjack said. “Don’t know how to be anything else. You’ll find out anyway, so it’s best if I’m straightforward with you.”

“Find out what?”

“Dr. Minck’s will left everything to his departed spouse. In the case of her death, which is the case, everything of Pigeon Minck’s goes to the Survivors.”

Which, I knew, meant a little under four hundred thousand dollars.

“But Shelly has to die for you to collect,” I said.

“We do not want that,” said Timerjack.

There was a long, long pause while Timerjack waited for me to figure something out.

“With Shelly dead, you get everything. With Shelly in jail, you figure you can talk him into giving you a lot of money.”

“While we fight the government to free him from an unjust charge,” Timerjack said. “If you meddle, anything could occur.”

“Like Shelly going free and having time to think that being a Survivor might not be a very good idea?”

“We are prepared to hire you,” Timerjack said. “Deferred payment when we start receiving money from Pigeon Minck. All you need do is two things. First, you stop looking for someone else who might have killed Mrs. Minck. Second, you help convince Pigeon Minck that I am his best hope for freedom.”

“How much of a payment?”

“Five thousand dollars,” he said.

“What if I said twenty thousand dollars?”

Timerjack glanced at Anthony at his side and then looked back at me.

“We would consider it,” Timerjack said, now standing at parade rest. “Consider it seriously.”

All of which suggested that Timerjack definitely knew about Shelly’s no-snore deal and probably knew about Mildred’s money.

“So will I,” I said, stepping forward so that the two guards had to step out of the way or else put their hands on me. I look tough. I even work out at the downtown YMCA playing handball with Doc Hodgdon and punching the light and heavy bags.

The problem is that none of this assures me of winning a fight. My record would keep me far off the rankings of contenders in middleweight, my weight class. All of which means that I lost more than I won if victories were counted in blood, bruises, and broken body parts. But I had one thing going for me: I didn’t give up. Whoever took me on or out, including the two bodyguards, were going to have to work like hell to keep me down and would be taking care of their own first-aid problems.

“Let me guess,” I said. “These are the last of the Mohicans, Uncas and Chingachgook.”

“Your knowledge of the canon is admirable even if your sense of humor isn’t,” Timerjack said, motioning for the two goons to let me pass.

Shelly and the cop were nowhere in sight when I left the chapel. I headed across the lawn to the sound of a rippling harp in the direction of the parking lot.

Had Timerjack just admitted to Mildred’s murder? Not quite, but it was clear he wasn’t going to make it a long mourning period.

My list of suspects was short. Considering Mildred’s charm and taste in men, there had to be more.

The next stop was the house where Mildred had lived, sans Shelly, for almost a year.

T
HE HOUSE WAS
on Orange Grove just off Pico. It was a two-story red brick building with a sloped roof and two steps up to a cherry-wood door with a shiny brass knocker shaped like a lion’s head.

Shelly had always wanted a knocker in the shape and color of a gold tooth, but Mildred had shot down that idea before he could even describe the tooth. His backup idea had been a curled mink, but Mildred had argued—reasonably, for a change—that not everyone would recognize it was a mink.

I didn’t use the lion’s head knocker. No one was supposed to be home. Mildred had changed the locks so I couldn’t go to the flower bed on the side of the house for the spare I knew about. If there was a spare, I didn’t have time to look for it, anyway.

My decision was simple. Shelly owned the house. Even if I were caught breaking in, I’d tell whoever caught me that I had Shelly’s permission and, providing jail time had not turned his brain to apple butter, he would back me up.