Not A Girl Detective (19 page)

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tle on the upper right side. On the back there was something written in black crayon: “L. Sands #3.”

Farrell studied the photograph intently, turning it

over several times.

“She looks like you,” he said finally. “In some odd

sixties incarnation.”

“Maybe that’s why Edgar gave it to me.”

“Did he say anything about it?”

“Just that he was starting me on a collection. I’d told him I didn’t collect anything, which wasn’t exactly

true. I do collect something.”

He displayed not the slightest curiosity about what

that might be.

“This is worthless.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“It looks like a stock photograph. It was probably

used in an advertisement. Or for some kind of commer-

cial work.”

“Who’s L. Sands? The photographer?”

“Never heard of him.”

“It could be a her.”

“Never heard of her.”

“Maybe this woman’s not posing. Maybe somebody

was following her.” And maybe Edgar was warning me

about something.

Farrell rolled his eyes. “You have an active imagina-

tion, Cece. She’s a model. She’s acting. Can’t you tell?”

You can’t always tell. But someone like him

wouldn’t want to hear that.

He stood up. “Listen. Why don’t I keep it for a while, ask around, give you a more specific answer?”

“I don’t think that’s necessary.” I took the photo-

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graph out of his hand, slipped it back into the envelope, and tucked it into my purse. It wasn’t what he’d expected, that much was obvious. But he wasn’t entirely satisfied that it was unimportant, and neither was I.

He walked me back up to the front.

“Excuse me, Mr. Farrell,” the girl said.

“Yes?”

“They called from Book Soup. The books you or-

dered are ready.”

“That’s fine, Melinda,” he said sharply. “You can get them after lunch.”

“My neighborhood bookstore,” I said.

“I thought you were dyslexic,” Melinda said.

“I buy cookbooks. I like the pictures. Fancy canapés.

Ganaches.”

“Please show Ms. Caruso out,” Farrell said, picking

up his mail. With that, he was gone.

“This must be a fun place to work,” I said.

She blinked again.

“So long, Melinda.”

“Please, Ms. Caruso, won’t you take a catalog? You

can give it to a friend.”

“Okay. Sure.” I didn’t want to get her into trouble.

God knows what he’d do to her if she were stuck with

leftover catalogs at the end of the week.

“I’ll get you a fresh one from the back.”

She was gone only a minute or two, but that was

enough time for me to go through her drawers. I had no idea what I was looking for, but, like I said before, if you want to find something, you usually will. Only this time I didn’t find much of anything—not in the drawers, at least. But right on top of the desk, near Melinda’s voluminous to-do list, was definitely something.

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It was a color postcard, announcing a one-night-only

cabaret show on Sunday the eighteenth at a nightclub in Silver Lake. I picked it up. I wasn’t all that interested in cabaret, but I was extremely interested in the headliner.

She had chopped-off red hair, thick black eyeliner, and green fingernails.

Nancy Olsen.

Another person with a talent for posing.

And for turning up in the strangest places.

I HAD TO GO to Book Soup anyway. What with the whole

Andrew commotion last time I was there, I hadn’t had a chance to pick up my
Chicago Manual of Style.

It was less frenzied today. A different clerk was on

duty. She went over to the
C
’s and pulled my book from the stack.

“Would you mind checking the
F
’s? The name is Farrell. I’m picking up some stuff for my boss, too.”

“Sure.”

I looked away guiltily.

She heaved a thick stack of books, wrapped in a

white piece of paper, onto the counter.

“Here you go.”

“Great.”

“These are going to cost your boss a pretty penny.

Some were ordered from Europe. He speaks French?”

“You wouldn’t believe what he’s capable of.”

I unwrapped the white paper and took a look.

La Double Vie de Salvador Dalí.

Dalí in the Nude.

Conversations with Dalí.

The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí.

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Salvador Dalí: A Panorama of His Art.

Homage à Salvador Dalí.

Six big fat books on Salvador Dalí. What was going

on here?

The clerk cracked open the one on top.

“What a freak! Look at this!”

It was a sculpture of the Venus de Milo as a chest of drawers. Her nipples were the drawer pulls, and she had eight of them. Underneath the sculpture was a small

painting of a woman whose face was being consumed

by ants. Freaky indeed. But I needed to get out of there if I didn’t want to cross paths with Melinda. I made a show of searching frantically through my purse.

“Look at that. I must’ve forgotten my corporate

credit card. I’ll have to come back for these tomorrow.

But I’ll take my
Chicago Manual
.”

“Sure. Have a nice day.”

“You, too!”

I paid for my book, then walked out to my car.

A nice day.

I didn’t think that was in the cards.

There was way too much to think about.

19

Icame home loaded down with supplies. Post-it

notes in four sizes. A three-pack of index cards in pink, blue, and classic white. Yellow legal pads. A package of pointy No. 2 pencils, which can be used for self-defense in a pinch. A Pink Pearl eraser. And last but not least, a whiteboard—three by three feet, as unblem-ished as a baby’s bottom.

I set up shop in the dining room.

“Edgar is dead,” I wrote on the top of the white-

board. I took a bite of a Milano cookie and chewed

thoughtfully.

Then I wrote “Who killed Edgar?” directly under-

neath.

This was hard. But I’d spent so much money on

supplies.

There was Mitchell. I wrote “Mitchell” in red capi-

tals, and drew an arrow from Edgar’s name to his. Why would Mitchell have killed Edgar? I ate another cookie, then went into the kitchen to pour myself a glass of

milk. Horizon Organic. It didn’t taste as good, but the 170

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last thing I needed was more hormones. Back to

Mitchell. There were many reasons he might’ve wanted

to kill Edgar. Because he was jealous of Edgar’s relationship with Jake, for one thing. A crime of passion.

Mitchell comes upon Edgar and Jake in flagrante

delicto. He’s wild with rage. He can’t think straight. He storms into his bedroom and pulls out his twenty-two.

Does he own a twenty-two? It doesn’t really matter.

Someone who’s determined can get a gun, though that

would rule out the crime-of-passion theory and point

directly to premeditated murder.

I walked back into the dining room and stuck a Post-

it note onto the whiteboard. It read “Premeditated murder: a whole different ball of wax.”

Moving on to Nancy Drew.

Jake said that Edgar had been worried and that it had something to do with Nancy Drew. Now that I gave it

some thought I realized it was probably just a line,

something to reel me in with. But it was worth considering for a moment.

For Nancy Drew, I needed a yellow pad.

Edgar was obsessed with Nancy Drew. Mitchell was

privy to the details. Did he share the obsession? Did he want to get his hands on Edgar’s books? That was

ridiculous. The whole lot couldn’t be valued at more

than, say—I started scribbling numbers on the yellow

pad—$50,000, maybe. That wasn’t worth killing for.

Unless, of course, you were a member of the Nancy

Drew Society of Chums. I’d get to them later. Which

led me to the matter of the missing portrait of naked Nancy, if it was indeed missing, which I was willing to bet it was. I drew a red arrow on the whiteboard from Mitchell’s name to the words “Blue Nancy Drew.”

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Where was that painting? All of Edward’s things

were exactly where they belonged. The fans were still in the dining room, the kitchen knives in the kitchen, the books in the blue bedroom. But the painting wasn’t in the closet where I’d last seen it. And it hadn’t been found anywhere in the Palm Springs house. And

Mitchell and Asher Farrell kept asking me if Edgar had given me anything, which tended to suggest that they

were looking for something that wasn’t where they

thought it was supposed to be. Which begged the ques-

tion of why either of them should know. Or care.

Asher Farrell. He merited a big piece of whiteboard

real estate. He was already a convicted felon, for

starters. You learn all sorts of things in prison, and I don’t mean the finer points of tax fraud. He sold Edgar the aforementioned painting of Grace Horton, and

though he was acting blasé about it, there was more to the story. That was a given.

Asher Farrell was a bad guy. And he knew I knew.

Maybe Edgar knew, too, and he (Asher) knew it (that

Edgar knew). And maybe what Edgar knew was that

Farrell was up to no good once again. One of his signature scams was selling multimillion-dollar artworks using invoices with fraudulent out-of-state corporate

delivery addresses, to avoid sales tax. He’d been caught once, but you know what they say about old dogs and

new tricks. Well, reverse it. Of course, you need the co-operation of your client to get away with this one. And your gallery staff. Maybe Melinda wasn’t so innocent.

Maybe Edgar, good citizen that he was, was ready to

blow the whistle on everybody.

And what did Salvador Dalí have to do with it? Was it mere coincidence that Mitchell and Asher Farrell were 172

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both interested in Salvador Dalí? Why had his name

rung a bell? Salvador Dalí was now a pink index card.

Suddenly I remembered Lael. I’d left her another

message on my way to Book Soup, but she still hadn’t

called me back. I’d try her one more time.

Lael’s fifteen-year-old son, Tommy, answered the

phone. That couldn’t be good.

“What are you doing home? Is everything okay over

there?”

“Sure. Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Well, aren’t you kids supposed to be at the dads’

houses for the weekend?”

“Yeah, but my dad’s ulcer was acting up. He wasn’t

that into having me around, so I came home.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“He eats for shit, that’s why.”

Tommy and his eleven-year-old half sister, Nina, had

recently become vegans, much to Lael’s distress.

“Do you want to talk to Mom?”

“Yes.”

“She’s out.”

“Where’d she go?”

“I don’t know.”

“But everything’s fine with her?”

“Sure.”

“Have you actually seen her?”

“I just said so.”

“No, you said she was out.”

“I saw her.”

Thank goodness.

“Yeah and she looked like shit, too. All that refined sugar. The body can’t process it.”

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“Your mother is gorgeous. Show some respect,

young man.”

He laughed. “Yes, ma’am.”

“ ‘Ma’am.’ I like it. Don’t forget to tell your mom I called.”

Speaking of parents and children, you wouldn’t want

to forget the Olsens, mother and daughter, Big Psycho and Little Psycho. I hung up the phone and wrote their names beneath Asher Farrell’s, then drew red arrows

back up to Edgar. My flow chart was starting to get very congested.

The daughter was a practiced liar, somebody who for

the hell of it would pretend to be her own neighbor.

Well, maybe not for the hell of it, but to stick it to her mother via me. What else would she do to hurt

Clarissa? Would she kill Edgar to ruin her mother’s

Nancy Drew convention? That seemed a bit far-

fetched. But I’d still never gotten a straight answer about what she was doing with a slide of Edgar’s painting—a painting that would undoubtedly unhinge the

woman in question, not to mention compromise the

book she was working on, the bona fide, true-life,

G-rated story of Grace Horton, patron saint of nude

models.

What exactly is an artist who sings?

I dialed Gambino at work.

He’d called me last night while I was at Asher Far-

rell’s party, then again this morning while I was at the gallery. That art-dealing scumbag was ruining my social life. I walked back into the kitchen for another glass of milk. There was no answer, of course, but I left him a long and rambling message asking if he’d like to 174

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go see a cabaret show tomorrow night in Silver Lake.

He was probably going to be stuck out in Yucaipa again.

I couldn’t wait until that murder investigation came to a close so we could get back to the more pleasant business of being in love.

Let me try that one more time.

I am in love with Peter Gambino.

Hmm.

I am in love with Peter Gambino.

Interesting.

So what about Clarissa? Maybe she’d found out

about the painting somehow and done the dirty deed