The Beholder, a Maddie Richards Mystery (35 page)

For seven years before my incarceration Fidge and I had worked homicides together for the Long Beach police department. Fidge was a solid detective, content with his work, a man who appeared to need nothing else. Well, perhaps a diet-and-exercise program, but Fidge was a man who would do anything to stay in shape except eat right, exercise, and drink less beer. I left the force ten years ago but stayed in touch with Fidge and his wife, Brenda, whose pot always held enough to fill one more plate. I often sought out Fidge for his up-to-date cop’s angle for my mystery novels.

The master bedroom, where Garson Talmadge slept alone, was immediately inside to the right; his door loitered partially open. Clarice stood in the middle of the living room, clutching her Chihuahua, her wet eyes pleading for help. I put my open palm straight out toward her so she would not come to me, then my finger to my lips signaling her to stay quiet.

“I’ll be with you in a minute Matthew,” Fidge hollered from somewhere deeper into the condo.

I waited in the foyer while the police photographer finished shooting Garson’s bedroom. A liquid had been spilled or thrown against the bedroom door. I touched the wet carpet and smelled my fingers. Coffee, with cream, I thought. A moment later, the photographer came out of Garson’s bedroom. I couldn’t place his name, but I’d seen him around. We exchanged nods as we passed in the doorway.

Sometimes you strain so hard listening for the quietest of sounds that you don’t hear the loudest. The shot that had hit my neighbor Garson Talmadge just above the bridge of his nose had come so fast that before he consciously heard it, he had stopped hearing everything.

The edge of Garson’s bedcovers was pulled back exposing a foot too white to be a living foot. A modest amount of dried blood soaked Garson’s pillowcase, and stippling surrounded the entry wound. My elderly neighbor had taken it from up close.

I started toward the bed and heard a crunching sound. I stopped. The gold carpeting between the door and the bed had been sprinkled with what looked to be cornflakes. I stood still and looked around. A man’s billfold sat on the dresser in front of the mirror, the corners of a wad of cash edging out where the wallet folded over. Five boxes of cornflakes stood at attention along the wall at the end of the dresser, the flaps on the end box rigid in mock salute.

A hissing sound led my gaze to the sliding door to their ocean-facing balcony. The slider was open two inches with the air fighting to get inside. The room was cold enough that I would have closed the door, but not in a crime scene. I pulled the sleeve of my sweater down over my fingertips, reached as high as my six-three frame allowed and opened the slider far enough to stick my head outside. Halfway between the door and the railing, a zigzag print from the sole of a large deck shoe smudged the dewy balcony. The sole print testified that the step had been toward the condo. I pushed the slider back to its original two inches. Moving to avoid the cornflakes, I went into the walk-in closet. There were no shoes with that sole pattern, and no shoes of any kind under or beside the bed. Whatever clothing Garson had worn, had not been left over the high-back leather chair or the bed’s foot rail. Garson had always struck me as an everything-in-its-place kind of guy; his room proved it. He would not have wanted to see the jagged out-of-place blood stain on his pillow.

Sergeant Fidgery came through the doorway, his posture slouched, his stride short. “Hey, Matthew, just finished your latest,
Murder on Overtime
. Your best yet.”

“Thanks, Fidge. As always, your technical tips helped. Where’s your new partner?”

“What’s this new stuff? You know George has been with me since, well, since that stupid stunt you pulled on the courthouse steps ten years ago.”

“Anybody since me will always seem new. So, then, where’s George?”

“Sick,” Fidge said. “I’m soloing. That’s why I approved your coming down here.”

“By the way,” I said, “happy birthday old man. Sorry I didn’t make the party last weekend. Forty-seven, right?”

“Yeah, sure,” Fidge said sarcastically. “We go through this every year. I’m forty-seven, you’re forty-six, but only for a couple of months, then you’ll be forty-seven like me. Brenda said to tell you she hasn’t forgiven you for missing the party.”

“Hey, man, you know I would’ve been there if I could. My agent scheduled an out-of-town book signing without checking the date with me; she won’t do that again.”

“No sweat, Matthew. I’m just yanking your chain. Brenda understands.”

“Thanks. Look, I stepped on the cornflakes before I saw them. They blended with the carpeting. It looks like the flakes had been walked on before I got here. You?”

“Who the hell expects cornflakes on gold carpet?” Fidge asked. “Christ almighty, on any color carpet.” Fidge put a steadying hand on my shoulder, crossed one knee with his opposite ankle and looked at his sole, then did the same with the other foot. Neither of us saw anything on the soles of his shoes.

“Did Clarice walk on ‘em?” I asked.

“Says so. Says she got up, threw a load of clothes in the washer, put the coffee on, showered and slipped into what she called ‘a little thing,’ then came in here to wake her old man.”

“What about the uniform at the door,” I asked, “did he come in, too?”

“I cursed when I stepped on the flakes,” Fidge said, shaking his head. “A bit too loudly, I guess. Officer Cardiff came running. Now stop poking around, Matthew. I let the wife call you because she said she had been with you last night and that you might have a key to this place, not so’s you could play detective. Tell me about her, and keep your voice down.”

“What can I say? She’s got her own teeth, great hair, and this and that.”

“Yeah. Right off I noticed her this and that. Also the ‘little thing’ she said she put on this morning is hanging behind her bathroom door. You ought to take a look, or maybe you’ve already seen it, with her in it.” He looked at me from the corner of his eye, and then added, “I haven’t heard you deny she was with you so tell me about her visit.”

“Clarice came down during the night. Said she thought someone would try to kill her husband. Looks like she had that right.”

“What time did she get there?”

“It had been dark for a while. She woke me and I had been zonked. I went to bed around ten. So, midnight would be a good guess.”

“What did she say? I want all of it and I want it exactly.”

“Page one, colon: The doorbell woke me a few minutes after midnight. I found Mrs. Talmadge leaning on my door jamb wearing a man’s white button-down shirt, a strategic gap formed by the mismatching of a southern buttonhole with a northern button. Her blond hair teased her shoulders. She was wearing a pair of shiny gold sandals, her toenails painted red to match the bloody mary she held, a celery stalk standing tall in the short glass.”

“Knock it off, Matthew; this isn’t one of your novels. You know what I want. Give.”

I nodded. “Her opening line was ‘something bad’s gonna happen.’ She brushed past me, her sandals slipping as she stepped down into my sunken living room, her shirttail failing to fully cover her backside. Oops. I forgot. You said no descriptions. I asked her what she was talking about. She said, ‘Somebody’s going to kill Tally.’ That’s her pet name for her dead husband.”

“Then what did she do?” Fidge asked.

“She took a big drink, chomped the end off the celery stick that had poked her in the cheek, and oozed her bottom over the arm of my leather chair, creating two small miracles. She didn’t spill a drop, and her face showed no reaction when her bare bottom settled onto the cool leather.”

Fidge screwed up his face.

“Okay. Okay, just the facts, Sergeant. I asked why she thought that. She said, ‘Three days ago, I answered the phone. Some guy with a raspy voice asked for Gar. Only he made it sound like jar. I told him there’s no jar here and hung up.’”

“Was her dead husband there?”

“No. But her live husband was.” Fidge gave me the finger. I ignored it and continued. “She said her husband just sat at the table drinking coffee but that he turned white when she mentioned
Gar
. To illustrate the color she held up her short white shirttail, her unblemished skin the color of light milk chocolate. She had no tan line. I know you said to can the descriptions, but I figured you’d like that one.”

“What did her husband say?”

“He told her that some former business acquaintances in Europe used to call him Gar. Then he told her to hang up when they called back.”

Fidge put one hand in the air like he had been busted back to directing traffic. “When? Not if?”

“I asked her that, too. She definitely said, ‘when they called back.’ And, before you ask, she said there were no more such calls, at least not while she was home. She got in Garson’s face about that call again the next morning, and they fought.”

“How well did you know this guy?”

“Not all that well,” I said. “I went out to dinner two or three times with the Talmadges. Garson was a bon vivant. He and I played poker with a few men in the building, maybe four times.”

“Did the Talmadges go to dinner with you or you with them?”

“What’s the difference?”

“Who invited whom?”

“I don’t recall.”

“Who drove? That’s usually the person who extended the invitation.”

“That I remember. Clarice. She gets motion sickness in a car. She found it didn’t come when she drove. Garson said it had something to do with her vision and hearing senses getting the same stimulus.”

“When I was a kid,” Fidge said, “my uncle always drove for the same reason. You mentioned you played poker with the deceased and a few other men in the building. The wife’s about thirty-five and a real looker. The dead guy’s around eighty. Was she also playing with some of the other men in the building?”

I ran my hand through my hair, wrinkled my lips, and then said, “Yeah.”

“You?”

“I expect it’ll come out, so here it is. One afternoon, two days before they moved in last summer, Clarice knocked on my door. I had seen her and Garson in the building earlier, but hadn’t been introduced. She said … no, she didn’t say, I assumed she and Garson were father and daughter.”

“But she didn’t say otherwise, right?”

“She didn’t say otherwise. Before she left, we, well, you know. Then I found out they were married. It’s rumored several other fellows in the building have also taken turns. I don’t know any names, but I suspect you’ll find wives eager to spill their suspicions.”

“Someday,” Fidge said, “I need to give you my sex-without-deep-feelings-is-worthless speech. I just don’t have time right now.”

“Oh, too bad, I’ve been so looking forward to that one. But it’s a load of bull. Sex for pure lust is not worthless. Not all of us are fortunate enough to have someone we love deeply in our lives every time we get a case of the hornies.”

“You’ve obviously given this a lot of thought, Matthew. But may I bring you back to why we’re together this morning?”

“You brought it up.” I sighed. “Go ahead.”

“What do you know about Garson Talmadge’s background?”

“Less than I know about his eating habits. During one of the dinners, Garson said he came from Europe, but shied from anything beyond generalities. I can tell you he spoke some words with the softer consonants common to the French. Once when the poker talk came around to Iraq, Garson pronounced ‘Allah’ with the back of his tongue raised to touch his soft palate as is done with Arabic.”

The sun broke through the clouds to reflect off the ocean and brighten Garson’s bedroom. We moved a bit to avoid the glare.

“What else happened while she was at your place?”

“She took another bite from the celery stalk. A drip of bloody mary fell onto her skin to slalom down her abundant cleavage until blossoming into a pink splotch on her white shirt.”

“Knock off the colorful bullshit, Matthew.”

“You know, you’re the only person since my mother who regularly calls me Matthew. Brings back memories. I like it.”

“I told you to knock it off.”

“Sorry. It’s the novelist in me; I think that way now. Clarice said the next morning when Garson went into the bathroom she saw a bunch of passports in an attaché case he’d left open on his bed. They all had his picture, but different names. She didn’t remember any of the names, but from the way she told it he had enough to start his own phonebook.”

“They fight a lot?”

“According to her,” I said, “at least since that call asking for Gar. She also heard him on the phone speaking some language she didn’t understand. Said it wasn’t French. That she didn’t speak French anymore, but had taken French in high school so she’d recognize it. After the ‘Gar’ call, she said her husband never again left their condo except a couple of times to go to the workout room and spa area in the building.”

“What else?” Fidge widened his stance, taking care not to step on more of the cornflakes.

“Did I mention her fingernails were painted to match her toenails?”

Fidge flipped me off again, then asked, “What time did she leave?”

“I didn’t look.”

“Guess.”

“I’d put it at a little after three in the morning. And, yes, the skin on her fanny made a popping sound when she pulled free of the leather chair.”

“She stayed more than three hours? Just what were you two up to?”

“We talked. Her life, well, her life some. Mostly mine, I guess.”

“And you spilled your guts, right?”

“Some stuff. Yeah. The woman knows how to get a man talking.”

“I’ll bet. Her naked under a man’s white shirt, mismatched buttonholes and all. I supposed you told her your wife got a divorce after you went to prison?”

“Yeah.”

“And that she had been ready to file even before that, because you shot her father’s prize hunting dog? You told her that, too?”

“That damn dog was hunting me, Fidge, charged me in the study, saliva hanging from its teeth. For heaven’s sake, you had to be there. That animal took down game with that mouth. What would you have done?”

Fidge laughed. “I’d’ve brought along Milk Bone when I visited the in-laws.”