I Dreamed I Married Perry Mason (9 page)

I
heaved a sigh of relief to be out of there, and promptly popped the snap right off my Pucci skirt. It served me right for drinking that woman's tea.

I found a safety pin in the glove compartment and fixed myself up, without drawing blood. A good sign, I thought. Of what, harder to say. That success comes to those who don't self-mutilate? That she who does not expose her ratty undies to strangers will be lucky in love? Though I'm loath to admit it, I believe in all that stuff—signs, omens, astrology. Where I draw the line, though, is fairies.

Fairies. The stink of oil. And blackmail? Was that what Meredith Allan had meant by Jean's little sideline? I wasn't prepared to make sense of what had just happened. Not until I got home and had a pen in one hand and a glass of Pinot Noir in the other. I pulled onto the 101 and tried to empty my mind. But Scorpios are notoriously uncooperative. I focused on a splat on the windshield that used to be a bug. I opened the window a smidge, then closed it, diverted by the staccato blast of air. All right, that was it. Plus, I was hungry.
I dug around in my purse for something to eat and found a Snickers bar that was only slightly mashed. I washed it down with the remains of a bottle of Diet Coke that had been rolling around the floor of my car for a week or so. It was warm and flat, but at least it wasn't raspberry iced tea.

Working the caramel out of my molars took a while. Start with the little things and the big things will follow. I think it was Perry Mason who said that. Ellie and the gym teacher. It sounded like the name of a Sandra Dee movie. Only Sandra Dee never got mixed up in anything as sordid as blackmail. The worst it ever got for her was probably a tardy slip. Then I had a great idea. But I had to get off the freeway that second or I'd blow it. Honking the horn like a she-devil, I maneuvered my Camry across three lanes to exit.

Schools often look like prisons, but Ventura City High looked like a mausoleum. I parked outside the front entrance, which had the monumental geometry of a Pharaonic tomb. The graffiti on the facade heightened the effect; like hieroglyphics, it anointed a doomed power elite. Even the
GO COUGARS
banner draped across the chain-link fence seemed vaguely funereal. Maybe it was the missing exclamation point.

The student stationed at the front desk couldn't be bothered to look up. She jerked a beautifully manicured thumb in the direction of the library. As I walked down the hall, my eyes darted nervously about. I felt like I was about to be busted. High school will do that to you. The air reeked of french fries, B.O., and benzoyl peroxide.

The librarian was absorbed in a book. I couldn't make out the title, just the chapter heading “Retribution as Ritual.” She didn't seem to like being interrupted and was
discombobulated by my request. Her tiny, wizened head alternated between bobbing up and down and shaking back and forth—yes, no, yes, no. I thought she was going to pass out or, worse yet, put a hex on me, but she disappeared into the back and tottered out with a foot-high stack of dusty yearbooks.

I promised to be careful with them and settled down at a desk in the back. There was a kid behind me, smoking. Though it was a fire hazard, I decided not to turn him in.

I opened the 1954–55 volume. That year's theme, printed in florid, Old English letters at the top of the first page, was
“Quo Vadis?”
Talk about lofty. That was just the question to ponder if you were eighteen, unqualified for everything, and staggering around under the weight of postadolescent hormones. I would've killed myself. When I graduated from high school in 1981, the yearbook editors picked the rainbow as our theme. Very profound. You can be blinded by its colors or confront the spectrum.

Now I smelled Cheetos.

I flipped to the index and found Joseph Albacco. Pages 49, 65, 67, 69, 101, and 111. Football team, debating society, yearbook staff. Voted Best-Looking and Most Likely to Succeed. I studied the boy in the picture. There was nothing left of him except maybe the smile. “What we seek we shall find.” That was his class quote. You couldn't even call it ironic. It was bigger and sadder than that.

I picked up the next book in the stack. The theme for the class of 1956 was “Seize the Day.” Jean Albacco had graduated that year. Jean Logan had been her maiden name. I knew that from the transcript. And there she was, looking exactly like every other girl on the page. Short dark hair, neat white
blouse, a string of pearls around her neck. Jean's quote was also from Emerson: “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.” What cheek.

The Fairy Queen had graduated the same year as Jean. I looked her up in the index. Absent on picture day. And she'd missed the make-up day, too. Why did that not surprise me? But she was listed on page 107. Father-Daughter Night, 1956. A local band named the Whirly Birds sang doo-wop, and the guests drank cherry Cokes until they were fit to burst. I scanned the happy faces. The dads were spinning their little girls around, skirts flying. Awards were bestowed—Best Father? Best Daughter? I saw a beautiful girl I thought might be Meredith wearing a dark dress with a Peter Pan collar. Her father was nowhere in sight. My father had never been around, either. There was police business to take care of, leads to follow up, reports to file, double-shifts around the holidays. And I was just a girl anyway.

Back to the little things. The bit players. Ellie. She was the one I came here to find. I turned back to the index. Could she have been Eleanor? No, no Eleanors in that class. What about Ellen? One listed. I turned to her picture. Ellen Sammler wore glasses and looked like the sort of girl who would have been forced by her mother to take her cousin to the prom. She was going to get contacts, move to New York City, start a literary salon, and live happily ever after. You could just tell. Wrong girl. What about Elspeth? Here was an Elspeth Galloway. Oh, she had to be Ellie. Long wavy hair, dreamy expression, a soft chin. She had delusional written all over her.

Phys ed, phys ed. Page 38. Now for Ellie's lover. Well, it couldn't have been Logan Hiney, who had no hair at all and
must've been close to a hundred years old. Here he was. Oh, yes. This had to have been him. Bill Winters. A mountain-climber type with a devilish grin and a Kirk Douglas cleft. Just the type to make a sixteen-year-old's heart flutter. A long time ago Jean Albacco had made his life miserable. Maybe she had. And maybe he had been angry enough to put a stop to it.

On my way out, I stopped at the front office. I needed Ellie's phone number and address. Did they give out information like that?

A matchstick-thin woman pretending to speak no English refused to meet my gaze.

“My mother went to school here,” I said, enunciating as clearly as I could. “She graduated in 1956. Ellen Sammler, that was her maiden name.”

The woman was extremely busy, paper-clipping pieces of paper to other pieces of paper-clipped paper.

“We're visiting from New York,” I continued, my voice getting louder, “and we wanted to get in touch with an old friend of my mother's from high school.”

Now she was slitting envelopes with a daggerlike letter opener.

“Shall I spell my name? S-A-M-M-L-E-R.”

A humongous woman sitting in the way back near a bank of copy machines bellowed up to her colleague, “Lee, we talked about this, remember? You agreed, Lee. Public relations, remember?”

“I do not understand.”

“Yes, you do, Lee. Give the lady an alumni directory right this minute.”

She didn't budge.

“Take two steps forward, reach down, and pass it on. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT make me get up from my seat!”

It was a thankless task, restoring dignity to the term “civil servant.” Muttering to herself, an irked Lee fumbled around behind the counter and eventually produced the goods.

“Ten dollars. Exact change required.”

I didn't sense much of an attitude adjustment, but at least she hadn't asked for ID.

By the time I made it back to the car, I'd found her. Elspeth Day, née Galloway. She was a furniture designer who lived in La Jolla. Oh, god, I didn't want to drive down there. Maybe I could do it by cell phone.

I let it ring five times. Finally, someone answered.

“Mrs. Day?”

“You people!” She slammed down the phone. Probably thought I was selling something. I hit redial.

“Mrs. Day, please don't hang up. I got your name from Meredith Allan—”

“Meredith? I haven't heard from her in years. Is she in trouble?”

Interesting. “She's fine. I saw her earlier today.”

“To whom am I speaking? What is this about?”

Might as well spit it out. “It's about Bill Winters.”

“Why are you harassing me? I don't have to talk to you. That whole business was resolved years ago. Are you a lawyer?”

“No, I'm not a lawyer. I'm a writer from Los Angeles. My name is Cece Caruso.”

“And?”

“And I'm researching an old crime. A murder. Jean Albacco. Do you remember her? From high school?”

“Of course I do. Where is this conversation going?”

“I'm not sure. I guess I want to find out about Bill and Jean. For my research.”

“Listen, I don't want to get into all of that again. Bill's been dead for years. What good can it do to dredge it all up again?”

“When did Bill die?”

“Just after we graduated from high school. It must have been 1958. No, 1957.”

What year was Jean killed? Suddenly I couldn't remember.

“They shipped Billy home in a box,” she said softly. “There was a big memorial service. Everyone in town showed up. It was awful.”

“In a box? I don't understand.”

“Bill had been a big deal in Korea, special forces, I mean. When things started up in Vietnam, they sent him to Saigon to work with the CIA. But the Viet Cong got ahold of him soon after he got there, not that the government ever wanted to acknowledge it.”

This wasn't making sense. “I thought Bill was a gym teacher.”

“He was, in between stints of killing people. Why is any of it your business? What do you want with us?”

“Listen, I'm not trying to hurt anyone, Mrs. Day.”

“I'm divorced. You can call me Ellie.”

“Cece. I'm divorced, too.”

“Tough luck. Was he a bastard?”

“Do you have to ask?”

That got her.

“Everything was so different then, Cece. Men were so different. Bill was really something,” she said wistfully. “He belonged to an important Ventura family. His grandfather
was a state legislator and his father was prominent in local government. The grandfather helped clear the way for the oil business to really take off in Ventura. But Bill didn't have a head for politics. Sexy, but no brains at all.”

She knew she was talking too much, I could feel it, but she needed to know how her life sounded, and I was as good an audience as any.

“After Korea Bill just sat around, not knowing what to do with himself. So his dad got him a job coaching at the high school. That's when I fell for him. I guess Meredith told you about that.”

“She mentioned it.”

“I was young, and he was handsome. Oh, we made fools of ourselves.”

“Did Jean blackmail Bill about your affair?”

“Yes.”

Unbelievable.

“Could he have hated her enough to kill her?”

“Yes.”

I held my breath. “Did he?”

“No.”

“How do you know?”

“Her husband did it.”

“Let's say he didn't.”

“Somebody far away killed Billy first.”

Damn it.

“Jean was there. At Billy's memorial service. I remember perfectly. Decked out in a brand-new black suit. Probably laughing her head off. You never knew her, but, believe me, Jean Albacco deserved everything she got.”

Apparently there was a growing consensus on that.

I
hated driving on the freeway at night. The glare made my head spin. But I made it home safely by keeping two hands on the wheel at all times and turning off the part of my brain consecrated to the Albaccos. The remainder of the evening was spent with
The Case of the Sunbather's Diary,
which turned out to have a surprise ending I loved. Energized, I tromped outside for a late-night session with my flashlight, handpicking snails off the last of my tomato plants. Javier had instructed me to crunch them under my heel, but I took pity and tossed them over the fence. They made a nice gift for my neighbor, who had recently complained to Animal Control about Buster's “obsessive” barking.

I woke up late the next morning, around eleven. Breakfast consisted of leftover ahi tuna with a tapenade crust (one of my specialties, though very pricey), washed down with black coffee since I was out of half-and-half. Following the meal, I returned queasily to bed.

I left a message for Annie, who seemed to have gone AWOL. I resisted my god-given right to worry and flipped
back and forth for a while between a
Perry Mason
rerun and
All My Children
(the yin and yang of duty and pleasure). Then the phone rang. It was Meredith Allan's son, Burnett Fowlkes, asking me out on a date. At least I think it was a date. The man had to be five years younger than I was, at least. He was working on a house in my neighborhood and thought I might like to see it. He'd be over in half an hour.

I snapped out of my lassitude. A choice had to be made: my house, or me. Piece of cake. But I had to do something about the living room. I surveyed the carnage. There were bits of paper everywhere. In a fury, I had cut up a stack of index cards last week while agonizing over the sociosexual implications of Della Street's seamed stockings. The broom was god knows where, so I picked up the offending pieces by hand. As is their wont, the dust bunnies had congregated under the stained-glass window, which offered a view to the great green beyond. I returned those guys to their friends and relatives under the couch. Then I grabbed the carry-on bag that had taken up residence in the entry hall after my trip to New York six months ago, shooed Mimi out, and crammed today's dismembered newspaper in and threw the thing into the powder room, which I prayed Burnett would not need to visit.

While the hot water warmed up, I flung open my closet door. Mimi knew it was showtime and settled herself on the bed.

I could go for something very un-me, like blue jeans, maybe with my embroidered top from Mexico and my beaded Filipino slides with the high wooden heels. I get the latter in bulk for $16.99 a pair from one of my favorite stores. It's in Los Feliz, next door to the Joe Blasco Makeup
Academy, and filled to bursting with wildly colored plastic icons and sheer white baptismal shirts just right for the tropics. And they always throw in a complimentary Imelda Marcos doll. But who was I kidding? I didn't want to look like one of those forty-year-olds who reads
Seventeen
. I like my crow's-feet. Well, I don't hate them. Did Burnett even have any? Mimi purred with satisfaction when I pulled out my favorite old Agnès B. black dress, the one with the cap sleeves and full skirt. It was ladylike with a twist. The twist was the zipper that ran all the way down the front and said, “Maybe, maybe not.” It had worked before.

I had just decided on a pale mouth and dark eyes when the doorbell rang.

Burnett was holding a bouquet of tiny, velvety-looking flowers. They were a deep shade of brown.

It was definitely a date.

“Smell them,” he said, smiling.

“Chicken mole?”

He laughed. His eyes were the crinkly kind. “Close. They're chocolate cosmos. I thought you'd like them.”

“I love them. I'll put them in water, and we can go.”

“Absolutely.” He followed me in and, gentleman that he was, fixed his gaze somewhere above my waist. You can feel those things, even when your back is turned.

“Great moldings,” he said. I put the flowers in a small glass vase and stepped into the dining room, nodding. “Great everything, actually.” I think he was nervous, too.

“Yeah, looking for this place was heart-wrenching. Sort of like looking for love in the personals. Then I found it: ‘New X. Spanish charmer. Emotional.' I fell hard.”

“Isn't that the way. Then you've got to pick up the pieces.”

“Which is where you come in—professionally, I mean.”

“I got that.”

“Oh.”

“Shall we?”

He opened the front door, and the knob pulled off in his hand.

“Whoops,” he said.

I laughed. “It looks like you're holding a disembodied limb.”

“Aunt Martha!”

“You're gruesome.”

“Takes one to know one. I'd suggest a trip to Liz's Antique Hardware on La Brea.”

“I know the place. The guy who installed my French doors was in love with Liz.”

“It's a rite of passage.”

We hopped into his dented white Range Rover. He had just washed it. I knew because the front bumper was still a little wet.

“The house is just a few blocks from here, but since this is L.A., I thought we'd drive.”

“This is L.A. Don't think so much.”

Sitting that close to someone that handsome was disturbing. He was freshly shaven and smelled like pine trees. I'm not sure what possessed me. I leaned over and kissed him on the lips. He took my chin in his hand and looked into my eyes for a good, long while. Then he kissed me back for a good, long while, and that was that, for the moment.

We pulled up in front of a house that was demented. Well, that wasn't fair. It was magnificently demented. The
lot was small, maybe the size of mine. I could make out a perfectly nice stucco box a reasonable person could have loved, hidden in there behind the latticed facade with its towering double doors soaring heavenward. These were topped by a pediment with a niche holding a plaster bust of Apollo. There were finials, too, at the edges of the stucco. Did I mention the row of eugenia shrubs trimmed in the shape of perfume bottles?

“Wow,” I said.

“It gets better inside.”

The ceiling was low, and the chandelier in the entry hall dripped crystals on my head. There was a trip of a wet bar, decorated with small Doric pilasters, and the most enormous Lucite coffee table I'd ever seen, resting on a zebra-skin rug. Curved glass walls wrapped around a kidney-shaped swimming pool in the back. Behind the pool was a draped pavilion, perfect for a bored housewife nursing a tumbler of vodka.

“It's a Home Depot take on the Hollywood Regency style,” he said. “Amazing.”

“The Hollywood what style?”

“You've seen them all over West Hollywood. Sloping mansard roofs, false fronts like stage sets, oversize carriage lamps? With a little know-how, you, too, could've transformed your Spanish Colonial Revival into a Second Empire townhouse.”

“If only I'd thought of it.”

“Dozens were done in the fifties and sixties. This remodel was a strictly DIY affair. The son inherited it last year and has a thing for camp. He wants to use the place as a backdrop for photo shoots, that kind of thing.”

Said son appeared. He had a goatee and was chewing green apple bubble gum. He ushered Burnett into the pavilion to take some measurements.

“I'll just be a second.”

“Great.”

I took the opportunity to fix my lipstick. Luckily, there were mirrors everwhere. I sat down on the sofa, which was hard as a rock, and found myself face-to-face with a gold Buddha. Under its watchful gaze, I thumbed through an old copy of
Beverly Hills People
.

I looked up when I heard the swoosh of the sliding glass doors. Burnett introduced us. The guy's name seemed to be Barry White. I assumed that was some sort of joke. Barry said hello, and that he liked my dress.

“You know, architecture is just like fashion. Both are species of sexual fetishism. All buildings have erogenous zones, zones of pleasure. Burnett can tell you all about it,” he said with a wink. Or a tic. It was hard to tell.

Burnett looked embarassed, but a client is a client.

“In my fantabulous house, for example, all the orifices—the windows, doors, chimneys, mail slots—are overarticulated. Also the protuberances, you know, the things that can be fondled—door knockers, handles, balustrades, carriage lamps. Please touch, I always tell my guests!”

We decided to go out for a coffee after that. Burnett had a headache. He put four packets of sugar into his tiny espresso.

“I would've asked for sugar for my raspberry iced tea yesterday, but your mother intimidated me.”

“The woman has a gift. So tell me more about your work.”

We talked for a long time. He ordered another espresso, and I had another cappuccino. His head felt better. Memories of Barry White receded into the distance. I told him about my writing, about how much I loved it, puzzling over people, finding them in their books, finding myself in them, too.

“Did you ever want to write a mystery yourself?”

“No, not really. I've thought about it, of course, but I'm more of a forensic pathologist than a killer. I mean, I don't want to do the deed, I want to pick apart the corpse. Does that make sense?”

“Even your metaphors are morbid,” he said jokingly. “But I get it. It's sort of the same reason I became a restoration architect.”

“How so?”

“Well, I was always the kid who wouldn't let the other kids knock down the tower of blocks. I didn't build the tower of blocks, I just protected it.”

I laughed.

“I remember my mother taking me to Venice when I was about thirteen or fourteen. The most romantic city in the world. She wanted to show me the Doge's Palace and St. Mark's Cathedral. The poor woman was devastated to discover they were covered in scaffolding, part of a restoration effort that was going to take years. But I was thrilled. I spent days watching the guys working up there. I sketched the metal framework, the jacks, poles, and brackets, the geometric patterns they formed. Everyone thought I was nuts.”

“No, just perverse.”

“Is that wishful thinking?”

“Don't get fresh with me, Burnett.”

“Give me a reason.”

It was quiet for a moment.

“So, why'd you kiss me like that?” he asked.

“Why'd you kiss me back?”

“Because you're beautiful.”

“I thought I was morbid.”

“Speaking of morbid, what's up with that old murder case you talked to my mother about?”

I told him about finding Joseph Albacco's letter to ESG, and about my visit to Tehachapi. I told him about Theresa Flynn, leaving out the part about the scrap of paper with his mother's name on it. That seemed the politic thing to do. Mostly, though, I found myself talking about Jean. A girl who had gotten in over her head. What exactly had happened to her that night in that small Ventura bungalow?

It was her first wedding anniversary, hers and Joe's. She was peeling potatoes. Everything had to be perfect. It was mid-December and strangely hot. The sweat dripped down her forehead and stung her eyes. She walked into the living room and wiped her hands onto her apron. She cracked open a window. She studied her neighbor's wilted pansies. She watched a cat scurry by, looking for a bird to kill. She had a roast to kill. But Joe was late. Again. She went back into the kitchen and turned on the oven. Then she heard the screen door slam. It didn't take long after that. Did she even have time to scream?

“Whoa! Are you sure you don't want to be a mystery writer?” Burnett asked.

Red as a beet, I shook my head. For heaven's sake, who did I think I was, Erle Stanley Gardner? More like Daphne du Maurier. Talk about your gothic romances. Someone save me
from my lurid imagination. I finished my cappuccino and tried to change the subject. Back to Burnett, Burnett and his mother, Burnett and architecture, anything. But he kept turning the conversation back to me—my family, my daughter, even my divorce. Not many men are willing to hear you complain about old mistakes. Or are sweet and sexy enough to make you want to forget about them. I thought I could get used to that.

Later, when he kissed me good-bye, I thought I could get used to that, too.