A Corpse in a Teacup (19 page)

“
Are you planning a new venture?”

Rainey said, “Duh! Didn’t I just tell you I have a new job?”

Tuesday explained. “You might have more than one thing going on in your life. People have day jobs and then they do other, creative work.”

“Not me. I creatively watch TV after work.”

If Tuesday had suspected Rainey might be the killer, her last remark squelched that idea. Rainey didn’t have the imagination to murder anyone.

“Rainey, I can put your mind at ease
. I don’t see danger in your immediate future. In fact, I see many signs of birth, rebirth. You know, that could mean you are about to give birth to a new you? A hidden part of yourself? A talent you didn’t know you possessed might be ready to burst forth? Does that sound like something you want for yourself or something you’ve been working on?”

Tuesday had the
thought that if she put a fistful of money in the cup, Rainey would complain about having to spend it. Then she caught herself. Not good, Tuesday girl, to have negative thoughts during a reading. A little compassion for Rainey is in order. Maybe she has had a life full of disappointment and can’t see the bright side of things.

Tuesday took another look at the bottom of the cup. The leaves represented
baskets, another symbol of prosperity and motherhood, a sprig of leaves that could also mean children in her future. Then a small shape in the bottom of the cup caught her eye. She turned the cup this way and that to be sure of what she was seeing. Yes, she was positive. Oh, no, not again. It was an M. Not another murder. She held the cup closer, eyed it carefully, then from a distance. Yet there was no clump that represented a body. Just the M. This puzzled her. Was she losing her grip? Was the recent stress of the murders, the missing cat, the conflict with Marco, and the worst stress of all, a new man in her life, all those M’s, interfering with her skills as a reader?

Nothing else was coming to her, nothing that would explain the appearance of the M.
Unless it was, of course. Motherhood. She had to discuss this with Rainey.

“There is one more thing that appears in your cup. It is the letter M. Does that have any significance for you?”

“Of course it does, Tuesday. Of course it does.”

Tuesday leaned forward. “Can you tell me what it is?”

“I would have thought you’d picked that up. Everyone tells me it’s in my aura. It’s all around me. The M stands for misery.”

Tuesday fell back in her chair. She
’d just given the woman half a dozen positive symbols. How could she see misery? “Well, just notice what’s in your life in the next week or two and something else may come to you. I think our time is up.”

As
soon as Rainey left, Tuesday turned on her phone. It immediately began beeping, signaling a text message. A quick glance told her it was from Mr. G. Not now. She couldn’t let him into her thoughts. She had other calls to make, but first she cleared away the tea things. There was still a cupful of tea in the pot so she poured it for herself while she pondered what his text meant.
I need to talk to you ASAP!!!!!!! Call me!!!!!

All those exclamation points. She texted back.
What’s up!!!!!!!!!!

Next, s
he called Holley, who had just heard the news about Zora on TV.

“You know what’s hard, Miss Tuesday?”

“What’s that, sugar pie?”

“When you hear that someone has died, but
you didn’t like them very much and don’t feel bad. I must be a really terrible person.”

“Holley, girl, that’s the last thing you are. Miss Zora didn’t do very much to make people like her. Sort of her karma if she do
esn’t get sympathy when she dies. Right?”

“I guess.”

“Maybe you and Tessa can do a little meditation together to help you with the shock.”

“Okay, Miss Tuesday. You always know what’s best.”

“I’ll see you real soon, okay?”

Little did Tuesday know how wrong she was.

Tuesday swore at her phone, actually it was the phone tree at LACMA that bore the brunt of her wrath. For twenty minutes now the automated system had transferred her from department to department until somehow she ended up at Security
.

While she waited, she put an ice cube in her tea since it was already cold, downed it, and, out of habit, read the leaves. There was only one figure in the cup, starting along the side and draping itself across the bottom and up the other side. One figure basically took over the whole cup. No mystery about what it meant. A cat. It was the Mulberry Cat.

An automated voice
jolted her out of her shock. It told her to push a button if she wanted to report an incident. Yes, she fist pumped to herself. Finally.

Of course she didn’t want security at all, but it was the first extension that was answered by a human voice in real time. In fact, it
was a cheery voice that said, “You want somebody in acquisitions. Let me get Selma for you. She’s a friend of mine and she can help.”

Selma, also of the cheery voice brigade, couldn’t help
Tuesday, but she found someone willing to look up Roger Brand’s name to verify that he was indeed exhibiting two of his photographs in their collection.

“
One moment please,” the Hispanic accented person said. Tuesday prepared herself to wait on hold another twenty minutes, but the acquisitions guy came back on the line within thirty seconds. “Sorry, ma’am,” a note of genuine regret in his voice, “we have no works by an artist by that name. Are you sure you have the correct spelling?”

“How hard can it be to spell Roger Bra
nd?” she said and then, embarrassed at her uncalled snappishness with the helpful guy, she apologized, thanked him profusely and hung up.

So Roger was not the sweet as pie, too good to be true character he
played in public. He had lied to her, he had lied to Holley and he had a motive to kill Zora.

Tuesday had narrowed her suspect list down to Roger and Goren.
Of course, she argued to the defense attorney on her right shoulder, you’re right. What motive could Goren possibly have for sabotaging his own film, his future career by slaughtering his stars and staff?

But he’s mean-spirited, short-tempered and most likely a lush
, answered the prosecutor on her left shoulder. You saw all that at the memorial service. In the heat of the moment he’s capable of anything. Don’t you watch the Dumb Criminals shows on cable? The jerk who robbed a bank but forgot to put on the mask? The clown who stole a car, parked it by a hydrant, and paid the ticket, idiotic enough, but with a check with his address on it? Liquored up, Goren could have made any scheme plausible to himself.

Roger, though was more likely. He glossed over his attention to Holley, and she’s too innocent to see a stalker when he’s phoning and texting nonstop.
People who are obsessed will stop at nothing to satisfy their cravings. Tuesday couldn’t figure out why he had gone underground the last two days, but obviously he had crawled out from under his rock, offed Zora, and crawled back under. Promising photographer my bohonkus she said to her exercise bike. He’s a garden variety scam artist, cum murderer. But how was she going to find him, or prove it? She would need help. She would need to talk to Vera.

In her business she knew psychics who specialized in communicating with the dead, with animals, with lost objects and with diseased bodies. However, this situation called for a specialist she knew only casually, but was the best in the business. A crime fighter of the psychic persuasion. Vera Vespers.

Vera
picked up on the first ring. “I have twenny minutes, Toos, that’s all I can give you.”

“I’ll take what I can get, Vera. This is life or death.”

“In my business, it always is. C’mon over.”

Still waiting for someone to help her unpound her car, Tuesday had to call a cab to get across the three miles of congested city streets to the bungalow Vera had inherited from an uncle. Tuesday rang the bell, then knocked loudly when she didn’t answer. Eventually, the psychic came lumbering to the front door and pushed open the screen to welcome Tuesday to what she called her inner sanctum.

“
What can I do you for, Toos?” she said waddling down a hallway. Tuesday followed behind the wide lumbering figure into what looked like an occult museum filled with objects she believed Doctor Dora would love to add to her sandtray collection. A shrunken head, Mexican Day of the Dead figures, plaques with ancient Egyptian symbols and Chinese characters rolling down silk scrolls were the few she recognized.

“This is quite a collection.” Tuesday said, her voice full of admiration.

Vera waved her hand in a gesture that both dismissed her figures with an air of disgust and indicated Tuesday should take a seat.

“Pfffft. I ge
t this junk at garage sales. It impresses the clients.”

Vera knew Tuesday was in the business and spoke freely.

“I can tell a woman at a street fair the last words her dying mother said to her twenny years ago and she’ll insist somebody told me ahead of time. But if she comes here and sees I have a little statue of a witch holding a crystal ball on my table, she’ll believe any garbage I tell her. Go figure.”

She turned around
suddenly and pointed a stern finger at Tuesday. “A figure of speech you understand. I don’t tell anyone garbage.”

Tuesday knew f
rom friends they had in common that Vera was an intuitive, someone who could sense, see or hear things others could not. Vera told people what she saw and what spirits told her. If her readings helped people, that was enough. “I just tell you what comes to me,” she’d told Tuesday once. “You figure out what it means.”

Vera
would do readings on the phone, on Skype, on supermarket checkout lines. She couldn’t stop herself from passing on information she thought a person needed to hear. But Vera was a businesswoman as well as a psychic. If people were willing to pay more for shrines to fairies and obscure goddesses, then that’s what she gave them.

Already wheezing from the walk from her front door to the
recliner in the fern infested reading room, Vera huffed and coughed until she settled down and got her breath back. Behind her back people called her Vera the Voluminous because of her size. Tuesday thought of her as Vera the Victorious, because she was like a pit bull on a case and her visions were spot on.

She was one of the few psychics who could say the mayor took her calls. Her track record for finding missing children, buried bodies and hidden weapons was unmatched by any psychic in the business.
Vera claimed it was because she had been abducted in a previous life in the middle ages. Victims, dead or alive, spoke to her because she felt their pain. That’s what she told People Magazine when they interviewed her after she led investigators to a two year-old girl, daughter of an Academy Award winner, who was found safe but scared after inadvertently locking herself in a closet. The closet happened to be in the home of a pedophile.

In real life Vera
only knew that when she was twelve a ceiling fan poorly installed in a fast food restaurant fell on her head and knocked her out. When she came to she had developed a life-long craving for French fries and an ability to see victims of crimes if she touched the top of her head. The blow eventually opened up a lucrative career and over time added two hundred pounds to her petite frame. The visions, which, she explained, came to her in the form of photographs and voices from the spirit world, were stronger if, like a bloodhound, she had something that belonged to the victim in her hand. For the sake of theatrics she would hold the item to her head. In reality, she just needed to have it in her presence.

Tuesday described the series of unexplained deaths and her connection to Holley. She didn’t mention her suspicions about Goren and Roger. She decided see what Vera came up with on her own.

Vera stuck her hand out. “Gimme something. I need something that the victims
touched.”

Tuesday exp
lained that she didn’t know Ariel personally and had only met the other two briefly. “I don’t have anything that belonged to them. Is it necessary?”

The session was costing her $150. She hoped it wasn’t in vain.

Vera settled into her chair, extending the recliner’s footrest, her feet, shod in rubber shower shoes, pointing at Tuesday. “I’ll see what I can do. Give me something of yours. We’ll see what happens.”

Tuesday handed Vera her house keys and the psychic went to work.

Vera held the keys to the top of her head and closed her eyes. “I’m seeing three bodies. They’re all women. Is this the right case?”

“Oh it is. Yes.” Tuesday had not said the victims were women. Hoorah. Vera was on to something.

“They aren’t together. They’re close to each other. Were they friends? No, no way. Those girls weren’t friends. But something drew them together.”

This was all good. Tuesday was sure Vera would nail the killer.

“Were they killed together? No, I’m not seeing that. They were killed separately. Different places, different times.”

“You got it, Vera. Can you see who did it?”

“Oh yeah. Clear as a bell.”

“What’s his name?”

“Oh, I don’t get names. I just get pictures. But I can pick the perps out of a lineup, no problem. They can’t get by me.”

“Well, can you describe this guy?”

“Yeah, well, the thing is, I can’t tell if it’s male or female.”

A
light bulb went off for Tuesday. She’d never thought this person was capable of violence; he/she always seemed so passive. But if Vera couldn’t tell if the killer was a man or a woman it could only mean one thing. An androgynous person. And that could only mean Dark Star. No, Gray Star. She said the name out loud. It’s Gray Star, isn’t it?”

Vera took the keys off her head and placed them in her lap. She opened her eyes, done with the reading. “I do
n’t know if that’s the name. Is it multicolored? Like a tabby?”

Tuesday was flummoxed. “What do you mean, like a tabby
? We’re talking about a person here.”

No, it couldn’t be. Vera was getting the murders and the missing
cat sculpture mixed up. She was somehow reading Tuesday’s mind and picking up on both cases.

Vera
shook her head. “No, we’re not talking about a person. We’re talking about a cat. It was a cat that killed those three. Were they allergic, were they bitten and they bled to death, did they trip over a cat and have a bad accident? I can’t tell you that. But you find that cat and you’ll have your killer. That’s all I can tell you. I take credit cards or cash. No checks.”

It took Tuesday a few puzzled shakes of her head before she realized Vera had ended the session and wanted payment. Tuesday was kicking herself. She knew Vera relied on an object that belonged to the victim to generate her visions. She should have asked Holley to
drive over and give her a piece of jewelry or something before she made the appointment. It was her own fault this was a bust. She gave Vera her ATM, retrieved her keys and left,