The Manipulated (Joe Portugal Mysteries) (26 page)

Johnson eyed me, turned to Claudia, said, “I’ve got to consult with my colleagues from the Sheriff’s Department. If there’s nothing else …”

There wasn’t, and he took his leave. I asked Claudia how she found out what was going on.

“Fred called me,” she said. “He owed me one.”

Of course he did. “Why’d you come? Being retired and all.”

“I don’t know. I guess I missed it a little. The excitement.”

“How’d New York go?”

“It’s not going to work out.”

“Sorry.” I looked into her eyes. Realized whatever fleeting attraction we’d felt before was gone. We’d both been at emotional odds, both dealing with life-changing events, both vulnerable. Hormones took over. In the overall scheme of things, it didn’t amount to a hill of beans.

“Look at her,” she said.

“Who?”

“Linda. She hasn’t a clue.”

“The teeming masses won’t mind.”

“I suppose not. You getting anywhere?”

“I’ve solved the crime.”

“Oh?”

I flicked a hand at Sean McKay’s house. “With him dead, I’ve eliminated all of my suspects. Therefore, no one killed Dennis.”

“Wow. You’re really good.”

“The best.”

“Look, I have to go. You be careful, okay?” A perfunctory hug, and she was off to her car. I hung around a little longer. I watched Linda Madera do her standup. All things considered, she wasn’t half bad.

SPACE BREAK

Ronnie’s car was in the driveway when I got home. I hadn’t talked to her since my lunch with Eric. I hadn’t decided what to do about him yet. Partly, I was waiting to see if he would do the right thing and tell Ronnie what had happened.

With two days gone by, he’d had time enough for that. I went over and rang the doorbell. We sat on the front porch and made small talk. It was quickly clear that she’d seen Eric since I had, and that he hadn’t confessed.

So I did it for him.

“I don’t believe it,” Ronnie said. She was angry more than hurt. Still, I could see a piece of armor fall into place.

“Understandable.”

“
He
drugged us. Not Dennis.”

“He drugged you. Then you drugged me.”

“My Coke.”

I nodded.“Eric gave you the mickey in it, then you shared it with me when I said my throat hurt. There was enough in there to knock us both silly.” Maybe there was. But I was already so badly wrecked that I hadn’t even remembered getting the Coke. It may not have taken much to render me senseless.

“Let’s call the police,” she said.

“My first impulse too.”

“So what are we waiting for?”

“We’re not going to be able to prove anything, at least not without a long, stupid trial.”

“I can deal with that.”

I said nothing.

“There’s something else,” she said. “Isn’t there?”

“Yes.”

“The kids.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Don’t you think a man who did what he did might not be fit to raise them?”

“The thought did pass through my head.”

“And?”

“Have you met them?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“Ten minutes ago, I would have said there was no chance in the world he would ever do anything that would hurt them. Now, I’m not so sure.”

“Aren’t you?”

She gave it some thought. “Know what? No matter what he did to me, I still can’t believe he’d hurt the boys.”

“But we would, if we made what we know public.”

“So now what?”

“I have another idea.”

“Like what?”

“I’ll tell you if I decide to do it.”

She looked me over, realized I meant it, got up and leaned against the railing. “If Eric drugged me, how come Dennis said on the phone he was going to talk to us about what he did at the party?”

“Dennis did do something to us at the party. I’m guessing he came along before Eric had a chance to spirit you off somewhere, and he saw what was going on. Maybe he threatened to expose Eric. Made him leave. Whatever. Then he undressed us and dumped us in bed together.”

“But why that? I mean, he could have done all sorts of things to us. Why make it look like we’d slept together?”

“I’ve been trying to figure that out too. I’ve only been able to come up with one thing. I told him I was your father figure.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Earlier that night, I ran into him, and we were talking about you, and I just said it. I was loaded already. Dennis had issues with women. I think he had some unresolved feelings about his mother.” I didn’t know where that last part came from, but it seemed to help my argument. “So he thought, let’s see what happens if she wakes up with—”

“Why did you tell him that? That father figure thing.”

“I told you, I was loaded.”

“It must have come from somewhere.”

“It came from … hell, Ronnie, I do have paternal feelings about you. You must know that.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Last year, when Aricela was around, Gina suddenly got all these motherly instincts she never had before. Biological clock stuff.”

“What’s that got to do with you and me?”

“Something she said one day. That she didn’t want to deal with diapers and all that, but that it might be nice to have a grown child. I picked that up from her. And then when I started giving you advice—”

“I said I wanted to be your protégé.”

“I remember. But somehow it transformed into this surrogate daughter thing. Like you were the child I never had.”

I looked up at her. She turned away. “My father’s dead.”

“I know.”

“I don’t need another one.”

“I just thought … I don’t know what I thought.”

“You’re a good friend. And you’ll always be my first one out here in California, and that’ll always be special. But that’s it.”

I looked out at the street and nodded.

“I don’t ever want to hear this kind of thing again.” I nodded again.

“It makes me very uncomfortable.”

I didn’t even manage a nod. Without another word, she went inside.

Gina was plodding through
Cold Mountain
. I read the same paragraph in the
Times
Calendar section over and over. Something to do with an opera at the Disney Hall. It didn’t make sense. The Disney was supposed to be for the Philharmonic. Opera was at the Dorothy Chandler.

I gave up and turned out my light. Gina did the same. We lay there. Then we did it some more. We’d eaten a whole pizza between us. A medium, but still. The cheese roadblocked my gut. The salt raced around my head, toting thoughts behind it. One kept coming back. The gist was, maybe if I hadn’t visited Sean McKay he’d be alive. If I hadn’t gone over there, his actions over the next two days would have been a tiny bit different, and he wouldn’t have been in the kitchen just in time to see the little boy by the termite tent, and he’d be alive. Then there was the roundabout version. When I parked the truck a piece of paper got stuck under the tire, and if I hadn’t come that piece of paper would have blown into the kid’s yard, and instead of wandering away his attention was drawn to it, because there was a picture of a doggie on it, and he stayed in the yard.

Again, with the alternate universes
, I heard my father say, the way you hear voices when you’re teetering on the edge of sleep. It jarred me wide awake.

I looked over at Gina. Only an ounce of light seeped in through the windows, but it was enough to tell me she was in dreamland. I leaned over to kiss her cheek, feared it would awaken her, slipped out of bed instead.

I padded into the living room, flipped the TV on. The same people who’d been selling penis enhancement were hawking something called the Bosom Builder. The woman who’d told us size did matter in the other ad was recounting her miraculous sprouting from a 34B to a 36C, “almost a D.” I clicked her away.

I wound my way through the channels, stopping briefly on a Korean soap opera here and a
Gilligan’s Island
rerun there, and eventually found what I was looking for. I settled in on the sofa, lying on my side with my head on a cushion.

I was back where I started. With the Dennis Lennox murder, and with James Bond movies. But this time
Dr. No
was just beginning. I could catch up on the part I didn’t see however long ago. Then there’d be Ursula Andress again.

A couple of people got killed in Jamaica. Bond was dispatched to find out what was going on. He went home to pack. He opened the door. He switched on the light. He heard a noise. He flipped the light off again.

A simple gesture. One everyone does a dozen times a day.

I muted the TV. I sat up. I thought it all through, and it continued to make sense. I got up and went to the bathroom, and when I came back it still made sense.

Poor Miss Moneypenny. Never did get in the sack with James, and finally she was too long in the tooth and they traded her in for a newer model. The new actress: Samantha Bond. Quite a coincidence, that last name. Maybe she’d changed it. After all, actors often did just that to advance their careers.

I switched the sound back on and resumed the position. Soon Gina wandered in. She sat on the couch, then nestled spoon-like in front of me. I wrapped my arm around her and she took my hand in her own. We lay there quietly until the commercial.

“You figured something out,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I did.”

“Want to tell me?”

I did.

“Makes sense to me,” she said.

“You think?”

“I think.” She disengaged our limbs and sat up. “Come back to bed sometime.”

The flashing light from the television illuminated her exit. The T-shirt she was sleeping in was shorter than most. It barely covered her behind.

The movie was back on. I knew what was going to happen. I turned off the TV and followed Gina into the bedroom.

Late Saturday morning I rang the doorbell at Ike Sunemori’s house. The young woman who answered wasn’t Vikki Rodman. She had a badge, but I didn’t bother looking at it. “Mr. Portugal,” she said. “Mr. Sunemori’s not here.”

“Does the whole staff know me on sight?”

“Pretty much.”

“Actually, I didn’t come to see him. I came to see Vikki. Is she here?”

She was. The other woman led me through the house, opened one of the French doors, closed it when I’d passed through.

Vikki was pruning roses. It was a little early in the season for that, but L.A.’s climate lets you get away with a lot.

She was sucking on the side of her hand when I walked up. She saw me and winced. “I stuck myself.”

“I figured.”

“I was so proud of myself because I’d been doing this for an hour and hadn’t gotten thorned. Then I let my attention wander and gave myself an owie.”

“Let me see.”

I took her soft young hand in mine, inspected the tiny wound. There was a bit of skin pulled away. The moist layer underneath showed. A bit of blood rimmed the edge of the damaged area, but she’d sucked most of it up already.

I gave her hand back. “You’ll be fine,” I said. “Put some Neosporin on when you get back inside.”

“I will.” The way she looked at me made me wonder. Did she know I knew everything? Or did she just know I’d figured something out?

“Tell me,” I said. “Did you decide to change your name as soon as you became an actress, or did you try Rodriguez for a while first?”

She smiled, took another taste of the side of her hand, picked up the pruning shears she must have dropped when she poked herself. “I never intended changing it at all. But when I got my SAG card, there was already a Valerie Rodriguez. So I changed it. It didn’t seem like such a big deal. Anyway, my agent said I’d get more work if I anglicized my name.”

“Why not Valerie Rodman?”

“My agent suggested Vikki. Said it worked for Vikki Carr.”

I already knew everything there was to know about her agent. He sat in a tiny office in North Hollywood, living off one leftover star from the fifties, and thrilling dozens of hopefuls who couldn’t believe their luck at getting an agent with such a history. He was a relic of the glory days of Hollywood, unable to understand that things were different now. Unable to get his clients any work.

Valerie/Vikki snipped off a cane, looked it over, cut it again a couple of buds down. “My father was furious.”

“I’ll bet.”

“But he got over it.”

“They do that. Fathers.” The expert speaking. I had such good luck with fatherhood, even the surrogate variety.

Another cane bit the dust. She stuck the pruner in a leather sheath hanging off the waistline of her jeans, began gathering up what she’d removed and putting it in a waste bin.

“You should be wearing gloves,” I said.

“Living dangerously, I guess.”

“Is that what you were doing when you went out with Dennis Lennox?”

“Do you know if we got married and he took my name, he’d be Dennis Rodman?”

“He’s dead. He’s not marrying anybody.”

“Don’t tell me you think I killed him.”

“I won’t, because I don’t. But I think you know who did. Or at least suspect.”

She watched me, expressionless.“What you said, a minute ago. About Dennis. He did change, you know. Ike told me.”

“How’d you get mixed up with him? Dennis. Not Ike.”

“I ran into him at the studio. I was on an audition.”

“When?”

“Beginning of October. I passed him in the hall. He didn’t recognize me. Just gave me the once-over.”

“Why would he recognize you?”

“I’ve known him a long time. Not well, but enough so he would have recognized me before. But I’d changed. A lot of people kept saying I’d get more work if only this, or if only that, so I changed a few things.”

Her seeming familiar to me … it wasn’t from auditions. It was because I’d seen the
before
. In the photograph John Santini had given me.

“What did you change?” I said.

“I had a receding chin. We built that up some. And took a little off my nose. And once I had the work done, I redid the hair, makeup, the works. I look a lot better now.”

“You getting more work?”

“No.”

“Did you really expect to?”

“It was worth a shot.”

“Okay,” I said. “So Dennis sees you, doesn’t recognize you, moves on—”