I Dreamed I Married Perry Mason (11 page)

I
t's a sign of how well Lael knows me that she didn't seem at all surprised when I called her at two
A.M.
the following morning and asked her to help me break in to Mrs. Flynn's.

“I love you, Cece, but I think you've lost it,” she said. I heard the rustle of sheets. Lael was reaching around for her reading glasses, which she had dropped on the floor late last night just before falling asleep with a book, most likely a cookbook, on her stomach. I knew her as well as she knew me.

“I also think you're searching for excuses not to work on your book. And that you don't want to accept what's going on with your daughter and son-in-law. And that you're afraid of a real relationship. And that you've been watching too much TV, reading too much crime fiction, and fantasizing about how great you'd look in a black catsuit, scaling a wall. Am I right or wrong?”

“When did you become such a know-it-all? I need you, Lael. I can't do this alone.”

“And why exactly do you want to do this at all?”

I had sat bolt upright in bed when I remembered. The
lockbox was in that house, and I needed to find out what was in it. The shock of seeing Mrs. Flynn dead had knocked clear out of my head my reason for being there in the first place. I had the keys, but she had the goods, and I had to find out if I could help Joseph Albacco or not.

Time was running out.

The parole hearing was in a week. And Father Herlihy had as much as told me that Joe wouldn't live to see another one. That he was on the verge of committing a mortal sin. I couldn't let that happen. There was no way the police were going to hand over that box so I could check its contents. Not right away, at least, and probably not ever. And it wasn't like I could explain how I came to be in possession of a dead woman's keys anyway.

I went through all of this calmly and rationally with Lael, but she wasn't buying. So I reverted to bribery.

“Will you do it for a Scooby snack?”

“Cece,” she said, laughing.

“How about two Scooby snacks?”

Like the pooch in question, Lael was true blue. And she tolerated my obsessions, unlike certain daughters I could name. I heard the water go on, then a jacket being zipped up.

“I'll be waiting outside.”

“With a flashlight and a nail file?”

“Check.”

At that hour, there was no one on the road, and I broke the speed limit without even trying. You might think it would've dawned on me that I'd been breaking a lot of laws lately, but that realization came when it was already too late. At three-thirty
A.M.
that Monday morning, as we cut the motor and got out of the car in front of Mrs. Flynn's, I was
still caught up in the fantasy not only of me in a catsuit, but of fixing something that had been broken beyond repair.

“Put on your gloves. And don't forget the stuff,” I whispered. “What's that thing?”

“It's Tupperware.”

“You brought food? We don't have time to eat right now,” I said, frowning.

“No, it's for peeing into.”

“What?”

“You know, for the stakeout.”

“Lael. We're not waiting for anyone. We doing a quick B and E. In and out, you know the drill.”

“I don't, I'm pleased to say.”

I gave her a look. “Leave it in the car.”

“It was a good idea. You're just annoyed you didn't think of it. Maybe we'll have to flee the house and hide in the car for hours. Maybe the killer is in there right now, or on his way back.”

“Why'd you have to say that?”

“I'm sorry,” she said, not meaning it, and unzipped her windbreaker.

“Sssh—are you trying to wake the neighbors?”

“I said I was sorry.”

Looking around to make sure no one was watching, I lifted up the tape in front of the house, and we ducked underneath. When we got to the front door, I started fumbling around with the nail file. I had seen people pick locks millions of times on TV, and though I had never been stupid enough before to believe anything I'd seen on TV, at that moment I was operating on full loco mode. But the door pushed right open.

“That's what happened the last time I was here,” I said.

“It is strange the police didn't lock up.”

“Let's not get spooked here. We're going to get this over with and that'll be that. Lael, you search the back part of the house. I'll start up here.”

“No way.”

“Oh, fine.”

Lael stuck to me like glue, which made it hard to maneuver in the dark. Plus, the place was the same mess it had been the day before. Lael held the flashlight, I did most of the poking, and we tried hard not to trip over anything or each other.

It took a solid forty-five minutes to make it through the house. With every “ouch” and “oof” and “sorry,” I watched for the neighbors' lights, but they appeared to be heavy sleepers, thank goodness. We searched every cupboard, every drawer, every closet. The worst part was seeing Mrs. Flynn's clothes. They looked so frail on their hangers, like phantoms. We looked behind the armoire, in the hampers, in the shoeboxes. I even checked the freezer. Nothing. The lockbox was not in the house. It was gone.

“It's gone,” I said to Lael.

“Gone,” she echoed.

Of course it was gone. What a fool I'd been. Whoever had broken in to Mrs. Flynn's house that night hadn't been looking for money, or jewelry, or anything like that. He had been looking for Jean's lockbox. And he'd found it. Mrs. Flynn had been killed because she'd gotten in the way.

“Lael, we need to get out of here right now.”

Lael turned off the flashlight and opened the front door.

“Wait, I hear something.”

“Stop playing around, Cece. Let's go.”

“No, I'm serious. Something in the backyard.”

“It's probably crickets.”

“I don't think so. It sounded like crackling leaves. I'm going to check.”

“Oh, no, you're not. We're leaving this second.”

“Sssh. Go outside and call Detective Lewis. Tell him what's going on.”

“Where's his number?”

“Damn. It's at home.”

“I'm going back there with you.”

“Be quiet, then.”

We tiptoed to the back door and opened it very slowly. Outside, it was pitch black. I couldn't see a thing. Lael was breathing down my neck.

“There! Did you hear that?”

But before Lael could answer, someone whipped past us at lightning speed, knocked me down onto the wet grass, and shot through the house and into the night.

“Cece, are you all right?” Lael gasped. “Who was that?”

“I'm fine. I didn't see him. Did you?” I picked myself up. I was shaking only a little bit. Less than the other morning when that Camaro guy had followed me. Maybe I was getting used to it. Big trouble, I mean.

“No. It was too dark.”

“You're telling me,” I said, peeling off my gloves.

“This isn't funny.”

“Do you see me laughing?”

“We're going now.”

“Wait.”

“No!”

“But do you think he's still out there?”

We made our way to the front window and peeked through the curtains. They were beautiful, ivory lace. The street was deserted except for a pair of crows in Mrs. Flynn's jacaranda tree. They sounded like they were arguing.

“The coast is clear.”

“I'll be right there.”

I fished Mrs. Flynn's ruby ring out of my pocket. I hadn't meant to take it with me yesterday. I hadn't meant any of it. But having my heart in the right place wasn't something I had a right to be proud of. Not anymore. Facts were facts. I had put Lael in danger. I had put myself in danger. Worst of all, I had put Mrs. Flynn in danger, and I'd have to live with the consequences forever. Disgusted with myself, and more scared than I was willing to admit, I put the ring back on the dresser, where Mrs. Flynn had left it on the last day of her life, and went outside to ask my best friend if she would take my keys and drive us home.

I
t was close to seven
A.M.
when we got back to Lael's. She needed to get everyone up and ready for camp, so I went out to breakfast alone. At that hour, there weren't many choices. I picked Norm's on La Cienega, where it's Day of the Dead every day. Somehow, it seemed appropriate. Norm's was the sort of place where the vinyl seats were never wiped down between customers, and chances were good you'd sit in someone else's syrup, or worse. I attracted a bit of attention in my cat burglar ensemble, and I suppose it didn't help that I ordered bacon, sausage, and a Denver omelet. I was hungry. The slack-jawed patrons were electrified, the waitress was impressed, and the cook, well, he was bowled over and threw in a complimentary side of home fries, with lots of fresh onions and peppers. I would have liked to have reported that it was delicious, but I couldn't taste a thing. By the time I'd finished my third cup of coffee, it was the respectable hour of nine
A.M
. I went home and pulled Detective Lewis's card out of my desk drawer.

Unfortunately, he was out sick, so they connected me to
his partner, Detective Moriarty, the smug one with the drawl. Actually, they were both kind of smug. I asked him how Mrs. Flynn's case was progressing.

“Nothing's changed. We're still looking for the boys.”

“I thought you were keeping tabs on them.”

“We were, but they're smart for a pair of dummies. They knew we'd come looking so they flew the coop, both of 'em.”

“How is that possible?”

“Damon's stuff is still at his apartment. He left in such a hurry he didn't even bother to take his favorite cowboy boots. That's what the building manager said. And Gil, well, that son of a bitch—excuse my French—ripped off his girlfriend to the tune of five hundred dollars and hasn't been seen or heard from since early Saturday morning.”

I wasn't sure how to broach it. I was scared of getting sucked in deeper than I was. But I had to try.

“Do you think, Detective, that there's a possibility someone else could have been responsible? I mean, isn't it kind of strange that the boys would have trashed the house like that? Wouldn't they have known where their mother kept her money?”

“I told you they were dummies.”

“But it doesn't exactly make sense.”

“How's that, Ms. Caruso?”

“Well, for heaven's sake, why would they have left their mother's ruby ring behind?”

“What ruby ring?” he asked sharply.

Me and my big mouth.

“Didn't you see it, Detective? It was on Mrs. Flynn's dresser, in plain view. You must have missed it in all the hubbub.”

“Suppose so.”

“Check again.”

“Thanks for the advice.”

I ignored the sarcasm. “Listen, could there have been some other motive, some other person you might consider? Like maybe Lisette Johnson—have you come across that name?” She was the person Meredith Allan had mentioned. “I think she might've been an old enemy of Mrs. Flynn's or something—”

He cut me off. “Lisette Johnson?”

“You know her?” I asked, surprised.

“Of course I do. This is a small town, lady.”

“Well, excuse me.”

“Lisette Johnson is a Christian Coalition type running for the school board. She of all people isn't running around with a gun in her handbag. And besides, it's not your job to think about the murder of a woman you met only once. That's my job. And I know what I'm doing. You just go about your business, and Lewis and I will call you when you're needed. I appreciate your concern, but let the professionals handle it.”

He hung up abruptly. I was annoyed. I remembered what Joseph Albacco had said about the police investigating his wife's murder. He had said they decided right from the beginning that he was guilty and never considered anyone else. And now it was happening all over again.

I lay on the floor and sulked a little, not sure what to do next. I wanted to talk to Annie. I dialed her number but hung up before it started ringing. I could wait until our date later this afternoon to drive the poor girl crazy. I ate some Moroccan olives and some dry roasted peanuts and watched Mimi play jump rope with Buster's tail. They were pretty
good buddies, those two, except for Mimi's eating disorder. She was always sneaking Buster's diet kibble. She preferred it to tuna. He took his revenge by raiding her litter box, which I found most unappetizing. My train of thought was interrupted by the man of the house, who sprinted to the front door, tail wagging. He always beat the bell by a couple of seconds.

It was the cute UPS guy, struggling with a package. I signed that queer computery thing you sign and told him to dump it in the entry hall. It slid off the dolly and hit the floor with impunity.

It was my order from the Mystery Manor. I had to hand it to them. The bozo over there had found something incredible—a complete set of Gardner's “Speed Dash” adventures, which had appeared in one of the big-time pulps,
Top Notch,
in the twenties and thirties. I loved Speed Dash. Perry Mason was invincible, sure, but Sidney “Speed” Dash was a superhero. He could climb anything, plus he had a photographic memory, plus he didn't smoke or drink or harbor at any time or under any circumstances an impure thought. His virtue gave him that little something extra a person needed to vanquish evil.

Gardner had been inspired by something he came across one day in Ventura. It was 1927, and he was walking from the county courthouse back to work when he saw a crowd gathered outside his office building. They were watching Mr. “Babe” White, a human fly, scale the building's four stories without a net. One false move, and good-bye Babe. Luckily, he made it. The crowd went wild. Gardner jogged upstairs full of ideas. Some wonderful stories came out of that experience.

One of the best things about this project was getting to look through old issues of
Top Notch, Black Mask,
and
Best Detective
. They were called “pulps” because they were printed on cheap wood-pulp paper, unlike the higher-toned and more expensive “slicks.” I loved the gaudy illustrations, full of blood and cleavage, the advertisements for things like mustache wax, and the sheer pleasure of stumbling across a story by somebody like Raymond Chandler, who'd claimed, somewhat improbably in my opinion, that he'd learned to write by dissecting one of Erle Stanley Gardner's Ed Jenkins novelettes.

There were sports pulps, Western pulps, adventure pulps, fantasy pulps, science-fiction pulps, and sexy pulps (the
Spicy
series is one of my favorites). At their height, the two hundred pulps that were published once or twice a month needed hundreds of millions of words' worth of stories a year. Eager to get in on it, Gardner had tried his hand. The first story he submitted to
Black Mask
was “The Shrieking Skeleton.” It was a dog. One of the big muckety-mucks at the magazine read the story and sent a note around the office saying the characters talked like dictionaries and the plot had whiskers on it like Spanish moss hanging from a live oak in a Louisiana bayou—obviously a frustrated writer himself. They sent the story back, but someone had inadvertently left the note between the second and third pages of the story, and Gardner read it. Instead of falling into a depression, as I would have, he stayed up for three nights rewriting the story. He typed with two fingers, and when he pounded his skin off, he just kept hammering away on the blood-spattered keys. He was that kind of tough guy. Finally, he sent the story back and it was accepted, mostly,
he suspected, because the editors at
Black Mask
were so disconcerted by the whole incident.

My book was going to be good. This guy was great material. I was going to figure everything out. And I couldn't wait to get my hands on my newest acquisition. Only I couldn't lift the box. I got a knife from the kitchen and sliced through the tape right there in the entry hall. The box was full of those styrofoam peanuts, which I tossed on the ground to Buster's and Mimi's delight. But what I found underneath was not a collection of
Top Notch
magazines. It was Jean Albacco's lockbox, and it seemed to be made of solid steel.