Murder Never Forgets (33 page)

Something comes and sits on his face, a little flinch like you’d get from a cold washcloth. He puts his free hand on top of mine, where it’s resting on his other hand, and says, “Carly, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

I remove my hand from our hand-sandwich.

“We go round and round about this,” he says. “Let’s give it some air.”

I wait a while longer, and he continues, “You’re emotional because I’m in the hospital.”

Well, no argument there. “Okay,” I say, “yes, of course, well, natch. And so what? How’m I supposed to react? Jesus, Rob, do you have to be so fucking practical?” And I go out the door of Rob’s room and leave the field to Susie, who will come in later that day.

 
 
Which is not okay with Susie, who comes see me that night and asks what’s the matter. I tell her, “Nothing at all, Sue, you’re imagining it,” and the next day I’m back at Rob’s bedside with a new book,
Hey, Waitress,
which is interviews with waitresses, and he and I are perfectly cheerful with each other and even do some giggling and have a friendly argument about the preferred amount for a server’s tip.

Rob reaches over in the middle of a waitress-monologue and tells me that he loves me. Go figure.

He’ll be out of the hospital the day after tomorrow.

 
Guess who has gotten to be my new best friend?

Mrs. La Salle. We got together first by discussing Mrs. Dexter.

“I’m still not used to it,” I tell Mrs. La Salle. We’re in her apartment with the great Japanese prints and a new beige-and-gold
shoji
screen and some new copper-colored African lamps. Mrs. La Salle herself wears a hand-woven something with leaping fish on it. “I always liked your clothes,” I tell her.

She shrugs. “But not me.”

I don’t say, “I liked you fine. I just thought you wanted to marry my father for his money. And maybe were a murderess.” Instead, I say, “I suspected everybody.”

“But not Louise—Mrs. Dexter.”

“It was the walker,” I decide. “It made her seem vulnerable, and plucky. And innocent, some way.”

“Well,
I knew
about the walker.”

“You knew she didn’t need it?”

“I thought she only needed it part of the time. Turns out it was none of the time. She told me she used it for a while right after the accident and figured out then that it made a good cover, got her seats on buses. Then she decided that she’d use it whenever she needed a seat on a bus or some other perk that life wasn’t going to give her. That accident made her pretty negative about things.

“I also knew about her background in Del Oro County and how much she hated her uncle.

“Mrs. Dexter had been a resident of the Manor for only four years,” Mrs. La Salle says. “I don’t think she moved in with those ideas about the oil and buying the place. I think that plan crept up on her. But, then, she always kept it a secret about knowing Dr. Kittredge. So maybe she
was
planning something from the beginning.”

“Or was ashamed of knowing him.” I’m remembering the look on her face when she said Patrick had been a little Mexican child on their ranch.

Before she came in to the Manor, Mrs. Dexter lived with her ninety-year-old mother in a California town named Modesto. Mrs. Dexter was a tax accountant with an office in the Modesto mall. I tell Mrs. La Salle that, yes, I can picture all this. Modesto is one of those hot, dry, dusty places where you understand that someone could quietly lose track of their personality.

“What about Kittredge?” I ask.

“Well, what about him?”

“I always suspected him of something, but just the same I was surprised it was this bad. After all, he’s a doctor. He had a life.”

“He’s an
unsuccessful
doctor. And a fraud. He wasn’t who he pretended to be: Patrick Kittredge, the Irish man-about-town. He had to play a role all the time. He was angry, and Louise would know how to work on that. She probably promised him the earth. A clinic in Switzerland.”

I sigh.

“Don’t brood about it,” Mrs. La Salle says. “There’s nothing you or anybody else could have done.

“Here, we’ve got another half-martini for each of us.”

Something I really like about Mrs. La Salle is that she gives you martinis instead of tea.

 
 
Another new interest of mine is the new chef. The guy who caught Mrs. Goliard when she went out the window.

He isn’t a new chef any longer but that is still what everyone calls him. His name is Wayne Lee, and he turns out to be Chinese, that is, a Californian of Chinese ancestry, and six-foot-four and quite handsome, with sturdy athletic shoulders, which helped him in catching Mrs. Goliard. He was a student at Santa Cruz, in Human Relations, like me. But we don’t talk about that at first. What we talk about is my aunt Crystal, whom he knew, “Well, hey, a little bit. She came around and talked to me a couple of times and left me some books. She’s your dad’s sister, right?

“Great old lady,” he says. “Awesome. Lots of spirit. Ordered everybody around. I like that in an old person, makes them seem younger, y’know?” He shifts when he says this and moves a shoulder forward; he was on the basketball team at Santa Cruz, and he has that basketball player’s gracefulness.

Aunt Crystal must have been really bored here before she began her fatal research into oil. What she wanted with Wayne was some shreds and memories of California Chinese history, which Wayne, although he’s California Chinese, didn’t know anything about. But he offered to write to his great-grandfather, a patriarch who still lives in Locke, a crumbling Chinese town in the California Delta.

“I loved it that she got so excited about that stuff,” Wayne says. “Made me feel guilty for losing track of it. But she had that buzz, y’know? That real aliveness? You got a bit of it, too. Must run in the family.”

Wayne asks me to come bodysurfing with him. “I’ll coach you,” he promises. “And maybe borrow a wet suit some place. Terrific exercise. And it’s real easy.”

So I go bodysurfing, and it isn’t that easy, but Wayne is a good companion. It turns out to be one of those exercises where it feels very good when you stop. He gets me into running, too.

 
 
Mrs. La Salle, Susie, my dad, and I are climbing, bush by bush, through the woods in back of the Manor.

“This will ruin your shoes,” I tell Mrs. La Salle. “It’ll wreck your stockings.”

“My shoes were ruined ten minutes ago. I had to do this.”

We’re on our way up to examine the assay hole that Rob and I thought was a well.

Mrs. La Salle has been actively curious about all aspects of our murder story, and especially about Daddy’s and my involvement in it. I remember that she used to write a gossip column for a San Francisco magazine and suspect her now of planning a book-length true-crime exposé of our Manor murders. The
San Francisco Chronicle
features the Manor murders on the front page at least three times a week: “How Death Stalked the Retirement Colony.”

I hope she won’t get too curious about my father and his account of the woman on the beach. So far, the
Chronicle
hasn’t caught on to that at all. The Manor Murders are just two murders, as far as the
Chronicle
is concerned.

“Your shoes are handsome,” Susie tells Mrs. La Salle. “And a restorative shade of green. But perhaps not perfect for hiking.”

“God, no,” says Mrs. La Salle. To my surprise she and Susie like each other. Susie thinks Mrs. La Salle is beautiful and smart and fashionable; she tells her so. “Did you have Botox injections?” she asks.

Mrs. La Salle says, “No, but I plan to. Will you?”

Susie agrees, well, maybe. “There’s an Indian tribe somewhere—I read about them. Botox resembles a naturally occurring substance, you know.”

Susie isn’t a fast uphill climber because she keeps getting distracted by nature. “Look at the shape of this,” she says with each interesting clump of something brown, speckled, or striped. So she admires the manzanita shapes and pulls off pieces of bark and says they would make a lovely red dye, as she puffs lackadaisically along behind, catching her hair and letting the blackberry thorns pull at her long print skirt.

“Robbie is a
great
deal better,” she announces forcefully into the air. “He is fighting his way through to wellness. And it is
all
owing to Carla.”

“Surgery helped some,” Mrs. La Salle says mildly. She suspects about Wayne and me and understands the subtext of Susie’s pronouncement.
Robbie and Carly are the ideal couple. They are made for each other. No one should get between them
.

Behind us is my father. He’s behind only because he finds so many interesting things to step into and investigate. He’s still perfectly spry and shows no bad symptoms from our active two months here. Of our visit to Conestoga, Homeland, and environs, he seems to remember only that he slept in the grass. “Which was frightening,” he admits. “Now, why would that be frightening? But Carla found me. She always does.”

“I believe,” he says now, “we are on our way to Dark Lake.”

I wonder why he decided the assay hole was Dark Lake. Maybe it reminds him of some place he knew early in his relationship with my mother, when they were in love. Well, they must have been in love once, mustn’t they? People don’t marry each other without being in love, do they? I think about this sometimes.

“I have found,” he says, holding up a tiny, architecturally defined mouse skull, “an archaeological specimen.”

“A skull is an ultimate,” Mrs. La Salle says. “I have an artist friend who made an exhibit of ultimates.”

Mrs. La Salle and I have talked about her friendship with my father. “I could see it in your face,” she says. “You thought I had weird designs. Predatory woman fastens on senile old millionaire. Well, it’s hard to talk about, but I knew perfectly well he wasn’t a millionaire. Fact is, I’m doing reparation of sorts; my brother died with Alzheimer’s, and I wasn’t good about it. Not at all. He was so young, I took it personally. So now I work it out, paying up a little, with your dad. Susie would understand.”

I tell her I understand, too. I don’t add that I thought of an explanation like that and then dismissed it because I couldn’t picture her in the penitent role. And I still don’t, exactly. But I believe her.

“Your father is a very sweet man,” she tells me.

I reach for her hand and call her, “Daphne.” You see how far this experience has moved me along life’s treadmill; I’m calling Mrs. La Salle by her first name sometimes.

Another reason why I’ve gotten closer to her is that she’s all that remains of the trio. Mrs. Cohen has left the Manor. “I truly found every minute of it interesting,” she says. “And now I am managing my emphysema much, much better and am able to return to the world. Oh, how I will miss all of you.”

Kittredge and Mrs. Dexter are being prosecuted for Mona’s murder, for which the sheriff must have good evidence. He just looks bored and satisfied when I ask him about it, and when I ask about Mrs. Sisal’s murder, he chews gum. Maybe I wiped off too many fingerprints around her office.

I tell Sheriff Hawthorne maybe I never thanked him for saving my life. “Well, I’m doing it now. I’ll think of you when I’m eighty. And that was pretty deft of you, arriving in the so-called ultimate nick of time. How’d you manage it?”

We’re in a hall of the Manor. The sheriff leans against a wall and does more gum-chewing. “How did I get there so ex-pe-ditiously? Well, it was partly your friend Mrs. Cohen, who is nowhere near as dumb as she looks. She was worried about you; you talked on the phone, remember? But mostly, I’d been stickin’ close to both you and Mrs. Dexter ever since you had your bunny rabbit incident.”

“Bunny rabbit?” I have a moment of confusion and then realize he’s talking about the hare, the poor little skinned
Lepus townsendii
. This man has a weird sense of humor.

“Yep. Because your boss, Belle, found this dried stinkin’ rabbit skin in Mrs. Dexter’s apartment. Seemed a bit off to me. I kept an eye on her after that.”

“So you followed us, were behind us the whole time.”

“Summa the time.” He gives me the
And that’s all you’re going to get
stare.

But before he goes I try to pump him about Mona. “I mean, she came to me for help.”

He regards me slit-eyed. “Help? Sweetpea, you couldn’t have helped that little lady. She had the victim’s personality package: devious, deceitful, dumb, a druggie. Scares easy. The sort that changes sides. And telegraphs when she’s gonna do it. The other conspirators tend to catch on, right?”

I try to read his face. Does he mean Mona came to him with information? I can’t read anything; all that Juicy Fruit action interferes.

Nobody mentions Aunt Crystal. The evidence about her being the net-woman is all in Daddy’s head, and I think the sheriff suspects that Aunt Crystal is truly disappeared and that her going was arranged by Kittredge and La Salle, with Mona involved some way, but the one time I talk about it with him, he just shrugs and looks at me and says, “You think you can prove that? Wanna put your dad on the stand?”

And Belle has started proceedings to buy the Manor. Belle is another of those people who acts bored when you ask them questions. “Well, you’re right, I didn’t use to have any money,” she says. “But now I do. You remember Mr. Rice?”

Of course I remember Mr. Rice, who locked his door with four different locks and told me I had really tried to help him.

“Well, him and me got married.

“It’s a marriage of convenience,” she says, probably in answer to what she sees in my face. “The convenience for me is money and for him is care. Real professional care. It’s a bargain on both sides. We’ll both keep it, and now I’m rich.

“An’ I always thought I could run this place a lot better than most of the lamebrains that were trying.”

Belle is going to completely revise the Permanent Care Policy. Clients will be able to buy out any time they want.