A Cry for Self-Help (A Kate Jasper Mystery) (6 page)
Read A Cry for Self-Help (A Kate Jasper Mystery) Online
Authors: Jaqueline Girdner
“Like the bottoms of Yvonne’s vases,” I breathed.
“Yeah,” he said, his eyes lighting up. “You saw them, right?”
“Great big tall brass vases with brass stars for bottoms,” I confirmed.
“Well, they found the friggin’ brass vases too, not far from the stiff.”
My mind was trying to picture it now. Had the murderer pushed Sam Skyler over with those vases? Maybe grabbed them where they curved in at the top and then slammed his shoulders with the star-shaped bases? That would do it, the way Sam’s top-heavy body was leaning. But why? Why not use your bare hands? Fear of fingerprints? Fear of hand prints? Goose bumps rose on my arms as if I were back there on that cold, windy bluff.
“The murderer blew it, man,” Felix went on. “If the looney tunes had just pushed with his hands, the cops probably still wouldn’t know it was murder, but with the imprints of the vases, it’s as sure as dentists suck.” He shook his head. “Friggin’ vampires.”
I had a feeling Felix had been to the dentist lately or not much of the last part made sense. Not that much of any of it made sense.
“And then there’s these oily hand prints,” he went on. “On the back of the poor geek’s jacket—”
“Skyler’s, you mean?” I asked. I was getting lost again.
“Yeah, good old guru Sam Skyler. Guru on the rocks. It was some kind of massage oil. They’re having it chemically identified now. Technical whiz-bang, you know. Presto, pronto, and they come up with a brand name.”
“But that means two sets of imprints then,” I reasoned slowly. “The vases and the oily hand prints—”
“The cops don’t have a clue, either,” Felix interrupted cheerfully. “Skyler left a will splitting his estate three ways. His tantric sweetie, Diana, gets a chunk. And his nerdy son, Nathan. And his mother, this hot old lady, you wouldn’t believe her.”
“So, theoretically,” Wayne put in, “the police have motives for two of the people who were actually present.” His frown told me he wished Diana wasn’t one of them.
“Yeah,” said Felix. Then he bent forward again. “And 1 bet plenty of other people had motives too.”
I took my cue. Felix would know everything soon enough anyway. I told him about Campbell shaking his fist and Ona’s dispute with Skyler and everything else I could come up with. And then we just sat there eating and talking theories, connections, and personalities until C.C. came in, yowling for food.
I was scooping out cat food when I suddenly stopped to ask myself how come Felix knew so much and hadn’t bugged me before.
“Why weren’t you out there with the rest of the media pack?” I demanded.
He grinned so widely his face seemed to disappear behind his mustache.
“Now, what good would that have done?” he asked rhetorically. “You wouldn’t have talked to me. You never talk to me, your old pal, your compadre. Leave me out in the friggin’ fraggin’ cold every single friggin’ time. But now I have an exclusive.” Then he leaned back in his seat and laughed.
Had we been had? I looked over at Wayne. His eyebrows were descending fast. Had Felix sicced the media on us in the first place just so he would look like the lesser of two evils?
Is the Dalai Lama a Buddhist?
Wayne stood up and stepped around the table.
Felix stopped laughing and sat up straight in his chair.
“You’re the one who sent the media here in the first place,” Wayne accused, glaring down at Felix.
“Well…” I could see the war on Felix’s face. Part of him wanted to tell us how cleverly he’d worked us. But the other part was afraid. I didn’t blame him. I wouldn’t want Wayne towering over me with that look on his battered face. I just wished I could pull off the same towering stance myself.
“You’re leaving now,” Wayne growled and hoisted Felix up by one arm much more gently than I would have. But very effectively. He guided Felix to the door, Felix objecting and wheedling the whole way, and then slammed it behind him.
We waited until we heard the final footsteps down the front stairs, and then Wayne turned to me. I flinched and waited for him to say “I told you so” about Felix. Not that I needed any more blame. I was already kicking myself. My gut had sprung a whole set of miniature flailing feet. But Wayne didn’t say another word about Felix.
All he said was, “Time to talk to Ray Zappa.”
The Quiero police had just stepped from Ray Zappa’s doorway and were heading down the tanbark path when we got to Ray’s condo in Sneath Hills. Chief Woolsey gave us a curt nod but said nothing as we passed and Wayne knocked on the door.
“Wondered if I could speak with you,” Wayne asked when Ray opened up, his voice low and serious. Man to man. My skin prickled. Damn, I hated all this man-to-man stuff. It was like I wasn’t even there. But I kept my mouth shut, because it seemed to be working.
Ray nodded and opened the door wider. Still, his reluctance was clearly evident in the stiffness of his shoulders and the frown on his long, handsome face.
His living room was surprisingly neat and orderly with a blinking computer on a desk next to a neat stack of papers and a couple of bookshelves filled mostly with true-crime books. Ray and Felix. Two of a kind. Ugh.
We sat down on a worn leather couch across from Ray, and Wayne started in.
“Sam Skyler—”
“Police business,” Ray interrupted instantly. “I don’t talk about police business. You gotta understand something here, buddy. I was a real wild kid. Then I joined the Marines. There’s a code, you see. Same with the police. Anyway, the Skyler case isn’t even in my jurisdiction.”
“I understand,” Wayne replied quietly. “But I’m concerned about Kate. How would you feel if the police suspected Tessa?” More man to man. Would it work?
Ray bared his teeth in a shadow of his usual good ole boy smile when Wayne mentioned Tessa.
“Tessa’s a great lady, isn’t she?” he said. He pulled a pencil out of his shirt pocket protector and started chewing on it. Then he frowned again.
“I’m with the Sneath Police Department now. Desk job. Got less than a year till retirement. You understand?”
Wayne nodded, but I could see his mouth opening for one more try.
The doorbell rang before he could make it.
Ray answered the ring, opening the door about six inches. I couldn’t see who was there, but I could hear.
“Hey, howdy-hi,” came the all too familiar voice. “Saw a couple of my pals come in—”
“Is this little weasel of a reporter a friend of yours?” Ray asked, turning to Wayne and me.
“No,” came our two voices as one.
“Not today, anyway,” I added more fairly. Felix was Barbara’s sweetie, after all. Unfortunately.
“Sorry,” Wayne said, rising from his seat with a sigh. “I’ll take care of him.”
And then I followed Wayne out, where he escorted Felix away from Ray Zappa’s doorway and down the tanbark path toward the curb where our cars were parked. That was it for our interview with our one possible police contact. So much for the man-to-man approach.
“Hey!” Felix was objecting. “I’m walking, I’m walking. Holy moly, you don’t have to be so twitchy, guy. I was just—”
And then we heard the sound of cars driving up. And saw a white truck with the Channel 7 News logo. Reporters came scrambling out of their various vehicles. A recurring nightmare under construction.
Was this more of Felix’s work? I turned to look at his grinning face just as Wayne released him. Wayne and I shuffled down the path quickly, passing some of the same people who’d surrounded our house, our faces turned away. But they didn’t even notice us, they were so intent on reaching Ray Zappa’s condo.
“Corruption in the police department…” I heard.
“Cops take care of their own…”
“Whaddaya know about this Zappa guy?”
And Felix was nowhere to be seen.
By the time we made it to my Toyota, I felt like we’d run a marathon. It wasn’t about us this time, but it could have been. At least that’s what my pulse seemed to believe.
“Do you think Ray will be all right?” I asked Wayne as I got out my keys.
But before he could answer me, a whole new fleet of cars drove up. And the people who got out weren’t reporters. I could tell by the puppets on their fingers.
They grouped together at the foot of the tanbark path. Ten or fifteen of them, male and female.
“Grief into growth!” a man yelled, sticking out the puppet on his ring finger in a Nazi-like salute.
“Grief into growth,” more voices chanted in unison.
“Denial into determination…”
And then they began marching up the path en masse, puppets extended.
I unlocked the Toyota as quickly as I could with shaking hands. And then we were out of there.
Wayne and I were halfway home before either of us said a word. My mind was still trying to detoxify from the media, Felix, and the puppeteers. The puppeteers had to be from the Institute for Essential Manifestation. And they weren’t cute. They were spooky.
“Think he’s really just worried about his retirement?” Wayne finally muttered.
It took my brain a moment to find the right box. Not the Institute. Not the puppets. Ray Zappa.
“Or himself?” I suggested. “If anyone could carry off a successful murder it would be a policeman.”
“But then why use the vases?”
I pondered that one as I took the curves from the highway toward home.
“Maybe he’s protecting Tessa?” Wayne offered as I pulled into the driveway.
I mulled that one over as we walked up the stairs. Neither of us noticed what was pinned to our door until we were on the deck, not a yard away.
We both came to a halt in the same instant and stared.
There was a long hollow metal tube pinned to the wood, right where a door knocker would’ve been if we’d had one.
The thing had to be close to two feet long. And the big fluffy red Christmas bow wrapped around it was almost as wide as the metal tube was long. Worst of all, the tube seemed to be dripping blood from the sharp point at its bottom. Slowly dripping blood down the door, onto our doorstep.
“What the hell is that?” I whispered, totally absorbed by the sight.
“It’s a mortician’s trocar,” a voice from behind me answered.
I whirled around, raising my arms defensively, and then looked into the eyes of Chief Woolsey of the Quiero Police Department.
- Seven -
A trocar’s the tube that morticians use to drain the blood from a body,” Chief Woolsey went on as I slowly lowered my arms. And seemed to feel all the blood drain from my own body.
I kept my eyes on Woolsey’s lean face as he kept talking. At least I wasn’t looking at that thing pinned to our door.
“Dead bodies, that is,” he said, throwing back his forearms as if in explanation. Officer Fox, standing a few inches behind him, ducked a forearm. “Part of the embalming process. Not as ecological as some other choices, but commonly used.”
Morticians? Embalming? Did this have something to do with Tessa? I wanted to turn and ask Wayne. But if I turned, I might see the trocar again. I reached out with my hand instead and felt his reassuring grip.
“Is that…is that real blood?” I asked Woolsey.
“You tell me, Ms. Jasper,” he shot back, his voice louder now, hostile. He thrust his face toward mine and I noticed the little diamond stud he wore in his left earlobe. Was Chief Woolsey an ex-hippie? Or did the left side mean he was gay? Then I shook my head to clear it. What was he saying now? “The trocar’s pinned to your door, Ms. Jasper.
Your
door.”
“Well, I didn’t put it there,” I snapped. “Do you think it’s my idea of a Christmas decoration or something? I—”
“It isn’t anywhere near Christmas, Ms. Jasper,” the chief informed me.
Damn. Chief Woolsey was not only hostile, he was humor-impaired. Not that there was really anything funny happening here. My stomach could tell you that. It wasn’t feeling amused at all, just sick.
“Neither Ms. Jasper nor I have anything to do with pinning that thing to our door,” Wayne stated absolutely.
Chief Woolsey shifted his glare in Wayne’s direction.
“Do any of your friends have very strange senses of humor?” Woolsey demanded.
Most of them, my mind responded. But I kept my mouth shut. No one, not even Felix, was the type to pull a practical joke this weird.
“None of our friends or acquaintances pinned a trocar to our door,” Wayne answered clearly, his low voice sounding calmer than I was sure he was feeling. “Don’t you think it’s more likely to be related to the Skyler murder?”
“How should I know?” Woolsey shot back. Then he abruptly threw out his arms, to their full extension this time. Officer Fox ducked again, no expression on his round face. Apparently he’d had a lot of practice avoiding Woolsey’s arms.
“Fox!” Woolsey shouted, though the man was less than a foot away from him. Poor guy, I thought, he was no fox, not with that doughy round face and recessive chin. But he was quick.
“Yes, sir,” he answered promptly, standing at attention.
“Go check out that…that thing,” Woolsey ordered.
My eyes followed Officer Fox as he checked out the trocar. I couldn’t seem to stop them. He drew out a handkerchief and pulled the trocar a little away from the door as if to look at its underbelly. He sniffed the red fluid leaking ever so slowly from the sharp point at its bottom. Then he put out his finger, touched the fluid, and gingerly put it to his tongue.
“Catsup,” he announced finally.
We all let out little sighs of relief, even Woolsey.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of it, since Chief Woolsey decided the trocar on the door
did
have to do with Sam Skyler’s death. But we didn’t live in the city of Quiero. We lived in Tam Valley, just outside the city limits of Mill Valley, so the county had jurisdiction over whatever crime had been committed by whosoever had done our early Christmas decorating. Finally, Chief Woolsey asked if he could come inside and call the Sheriff’s department.
I took a deep breath and walked up to the door. Woolsey’s brain kicked in just as my hand touched the doorknob.
“Don’t touch anything!” he bellowed.
“Jeez,” Fox muttered under his breath.
Was that “Jeez” supposed to mean I was an idiot? Or did it refer to Woolsey’s volume? The former, I decided as Wayne and I led the officers around the side of the house to the back door that led into the kitchen, Fox never farther than a few feet from Woolsey’s side.
Once Woolsey had called the Sheriff’s, the four of us all settled down around the kitchen table for a nice chat. Chief Woolsey even accepted an offer of herbal tea after first checking the box to make sure the tea was really caffeine free. And once Woolsey had accepted, Fox followed suit.
“Vegetarian?” the chief asked as he scanned the cookbooks and jars of dried grains, beans, and spices on the kitchen shelves.
“Yeah,” I answered eagerly, noting the first hint of approval I’d heard yet in his voice.
Wayne kept his nonvegetarian, nonstupid, mouth shut.
“And you?” I asked conversationally, turning the flame on under the teakettle.
Woolsey nodded, then looked off to the side. Was he embarrassed?
“Me too,” Fox chipped in. I should have known. I’d have bet that if Woolsey walked on fire, Fox would be there tiptoeing along after him, singeing his little tootsies.
“Notebook, Fox,” Woolsey ordered, all friendliness gone from his voice.
“Yes, sir,” Fox answered, pulling a spiral notebook and a much chewed pencil from his pocket.
“What were you doing at Ray Zappa’s today?” Woolsey demanded.
So much for our nice little chat.
“We wanted to know what was going on with the Sam Skyler case,” Wayne answered succinctly.
“Why?”
“A man fell onto the rocks within yards of us,” Wayne answered, his tone even. “We’d like to know why. Did he fall? Was he pushed? Did he jump?”
I looked at him in surprise for a moment, because we both knew he was pushed. I even opened my mouth to say so, then remembered that we weren’t supposed to know Sam Skyler had been murdered, and closed it again.
Woolsey must have noticed my mouth moving.
“Something to say, Ms. Jasper?” he asked, bending forward abruptly, his eyes glinting as brightly as the diamond stud in his ear.
I sat for a moment and then opened my mouth once more.
“Yeah,” I answered. If he could accept my tea at my kitchen table and be hostile, I could be hostile too. “Did you follow us from Ray’s house?”
He sat back in his chair and looked off to the side again.
He had been following us! I was sure of it. How else had he ended up on our heels so conveniently when we found the trocar? And if he was following us—
The scream of the teakettle cut off my train of thought.
Wayne motioned me to keep my seat and got up to fill the teacups. I wished he hadn’t, because my mind was racing again and I was sure Woolsey could see it in my face. Did he think one or both of us had killed Sam Skyler? Was that why he’d followed us? Or had he just become curious when he saw us go into Ray Zappa’s house, and waited for us to come out again? Or did he think we were in on it with Zappa? Or…
“Honey?” Wayne offered as the smell of cinnamon, ginger, and chicory filled the kitchen.
Woolsey shook his head violently.
“We don’t use honey,” Fox put in virtuously. “The bees are oppressed by the honey farmers. The bees work to make their honey, and then it’s stolen from them.”
I’d heard the theory before. And I was pretty sure we’d just lost our vegetarian points with Woolsey.
It didn’t take long to verify the loss. Woolsey began the real interrogation between sips of unsweetened tea. He asked us about everything. And I mean everything. Our interest in this case. Any past associations with Sam Skyler. Our involvement in earlier cases. Even our positions on the environment.
I was trying to explain that I wasn’t really against Greenpeace, I just wished they wouldn’t ring my doorbell while I was working, when the doorbell rang.
But it wasn’t Greenpeace this time, it was Sergeant Tom Feiffer from the Marin County Sheriff’s Department. Damn.
I’d known Sergeant Feiffer as long as I’d known Wayne. Longer. And he still looked the same, tall and muscular with curly blond hair and blue eyes. Blue eyes that always brought uninvited lustful thoughts to my mind. No matter how hard I tried to keep them out. I tried picturing a sign that said, No Lust or White Elephants Allowed Here. It didn’t work.
It was something about the longing way the sergeant looked at me. (And at my pinball machines. The man was a pinball addict, too.) Even C.C. felt something libidinous for Sergeant Feiffer. She wandered in and rubbed up against his ankles, meowing low in her throat, as I escorted him into the kitchen.
“Got the evidence crew working on the trocar,” he told us, his blue eyes on mine, his tone a caress. I turned my head away, blushing from the look and its implications, and realizing at the same time that I hadn’t seen the trocar on the front door when I’d let him in. Wayne just glowered.
And then Feiffer started asking his questions, no more blush-provoking caresses in his tone now. And when he was done, Woolsey started in on us again. It was after five o’clock by the time the last representative of law and order left our house.
When the final police car was gone, I dropped onto the living room couch and reached out my arms to Wayne.
But he was muttering something under his breath. “Feiffer,” was part of it, but I couldn’t make out the rest. That was probably fortunate.
“At least he told Woolsey I didn’t do it,” I pointed out. No use pretending I couldn’t hear anything.
“Yeah,” Wayne growled. “The old ‘karma’ routine.”
“Well, it’s better than the old ‘you look like a murderer to me, Ms. Jasper’ routine,” I argued, lowering my arms and crossing them defensively.
“The way Feiffer looks at you—”
The doorbell rang again. We both jumped and turned our wary gazes toward the front hallway.
We looked back into each other’s eyes as the doorbell rang one more time. Then Wayne got up with a sigh that was about an eight on a scale of one to ten of tragic sighs. (Wayne should have been in the sigh Olympics, he was so good.) Then he trod ever so slowly toward the door, opening it an inch or so and peering out as if for armed enemies.
“Hey, how you guys doin’?” a high, resonant voice asked, and Emma Jett was past Wayne’s guard and into the house, without even pausing to take a breath. Wayne was clearly doing a better job of sighing than guarding at that point. “See, I thought I’d just come right over without calling, you know. More of a surprise that way. Don’t you just love surprises?”
She’d danced her way into the living room before she’d even finished her introduction and was patting one of the pinball machines. I would have told her I wasn’t all that fond of surprises. If I’d had a chance.
“Wow, this is really cool,” she rattled on, fondling Hayburners’ side rails, her reddish hair hanging in her face on the side that wasn’t cut to the scalp. “I mean this machine’s one of the totally legitimate ones. You can shake it, and feel it, and fight with it.” She trotted lightly around the side of the machine in her lace-up boots and ran her hand down the colorful backboard. “Not like all that electronic bullshit they make now. The real thing—”
“So,” Wayne put in. “You—”
“Anyway, I thought it might be a cool idea to talk about this Sam Skyler thing, you know,” she plowed on. When did she breathe? “I mean, that was some experience. Boom, gone. Just like that. And the cops and everything.”
And then she spotted the hanging chairs.
“Wow, way cool,” she caroled and pranced over in a flash of army fatigues with brass epaulets, her outfit for the day. The epaulets matched the brass studs in her ears and nostrils nicely. A bright touch of theater. Hadn’t she mentioned she was in theater or something—?
“Campbell told me you talked with him at the store,” she said, lowering herself into the chair and pushing off with her feet to put it in motion. “Campbell’s, like, a complete sweetie, you know. The gentlest man I know.” Her voice slowed for a moment. And took on weight. “He wouldn’t hurt anyone. I want you to know that. And I’m not bullshitting. You can ask anyone who knows him.”
“The police will find that out—” I began. But her mouth was still moving.
“And he’s not stupid either,” she went on. “He wouldn’t shake his fist at the guy and
then
push him over. The person who did it would act like they liked him first.” She screwed up her narrow face in a scowl. “If Skyler was even pushed. I don’t know why the cops are on everyone’s case—”
“What do you—” Wayne began.
I sent him a consoling look as Emma cut him off. He missed it as he sat down in the swinging chair across from her.
“If they’re gonna hassle anyone, it oughta be Yvonne O’Reilley. I’ll bet she knows—well, knew—Sam Skyler a lot better than she’s letting on. And Ona, I mean, all she can talk about is how much she hated the guy. And then there’s his space-cadet girlfriend.” I found myself nodding at the description, then stopped as I caught Wayne’s look. “You ask me, she’s more interested in Skyler Junior than she was in Skyler Senior.
“Anyway,” she summed up, popping out of the chair like a jack-in-the-box. “This whole thing is getting too intense. I mean, Campbell is put right off his music. He’s a wonderful musician you know, traditional stuff. Celtic. And I can’t even write, I’m so uptight. It’s all too weird. I mean, how can I get into Connie the Condom’s mind when all this bullshit is exploding around us?”
“Connie the Condom?”
A smile replaced the scowl on Emma’s narrow face as she walked across the living room to the newest of the bookshelves Wayne and I had built. I caught the mixed scent of cigarette smoke and coffee as she passed.
“Oh, Connie the Condom’s my children’s book series,” she explained, picking up a novel from Wayne’s futurism section.
That seemed appropriate. “See, she’s this cute little pink condom, you know, with perfect blond curls and a little rosebud mouth. See, it really points up the ambivalence we have about sexuality, and good and evil. And predestination and all of that stuff. Anyway, she’s, like, this guardian angel and helps kids who are in trouble. I write
and
illustrate the books. I blew up some of the pages to three feet by five and had a show at the Newmind Gallery. People thought it was really cool. But selling the books is another thing. Since they’re for kids, none of the stores will touch—”
This time she stopped herself.
“Anyway, about this Skyler thing.” She put Wayne’s book back on the shelf. Her voice gained weight again. “I don’t like it. And I think it could be really dangerous. Especially to investigate. You gotta figure it’s a lose-lose situation. If the guy wasn’t murdered, what’s the point? If he was, who’s gonna stop the murderer from murdering again? You know what I mean?”
And then she danced back across the living room to the front door.
“I’ll bring you a copy of a Connie book if you’d like,” she offered and was out the door in a flash of brass before either of us had time to accept or decline the offer. Or say goodbye for that matter.
“Was that some kind of warning?” I asked Wayne once I felt able to speak again.