Dating Dead Men (18 page)

“That's impossible.” I felt a rising panic. “This is a critical week—”

“Too bad.”

“—with so much at stake you have no idea. Four years of work have led to this, not to mention my night job, which you don't even know about, which is driving me—”

“I know about it.”

I stopped. “You know? About the Dating Project? Who told you, Fredreeq?”

“Fredreeq's in on it?” he said sharply.

“In on it? She practically runs it. What?” I said, at his look of disgust. “You have a problem with this? You, of all people?”

“Why wouldn't I have a problem with it?” he said. “Because I'm an ex-con?”

“Because you're married! Yet you go around winking at people and kissing them and letting them think—look,” I said, forcing my voice back down. “It's unorthodox, but it's a job; I'm not doing it for fun, or even for science, not altogether. I need money.”

“Science?” He laughed. “Jesus. There are other ways to make money, Wollie.”

“Like what, a paper route?” I snapped. “I already put in twelve-hour days at the shop, seven days a week.”

Quite deliberately, he turned his back and resettled himself into the lawn chair, stretching out in the moonlight. “Well, congratulations, then. You're on vacation.”

         

I
LAY ON
the rollaway, listening to sleep sounds emanating from Ruby in the double bed. Doc was next to her, lying on top of the covers, his jeans just visible as my eyes adjusted. What time had he come in? Out the window, the sky seemed lighter, and I judged it to be a little before six, my usual wake-up time. I'd thought I'd be too mad to sleep, but apparently not. I threw Doc a malevolent glance. I hoped I'd snored.

Reaching for the bedside phone, I called home to pick up my messages. There were six, according to the little computer voice. No new ones. None from P.B.

The first message was from Jean-Luc, a simple “Allô, I send you beeg kiss.”

The second was Robert. “I'd like to pick up where we left off. Without your cousin. Maybe Saturday?”

The third was Rex. “Hey, Doris Day. Wish you were here. I'll try you again.”

The fourth was Joey. “Hi, you got one, maybe two guys tomorrow and a box of clothes from UPS. I'll be around to do the Polaroids—the evil sister-in-law is back in town, so I'm spending the night. I'm going out now to get something to eat, but call if you get in and want to talk.” I sat up. Joey had spent the night in the back room? Dear God. Was she safe? I got out of bed and began to search for my shoes.

The next message was almost as bad, in a very different way.

“Wollie?” said Dr. Cookie in her trademark radio voice. “Hope you're having fun with Man du Soir. Well, you must be, since you're not there. Now, this fax you sent me: looks like valacyclovir, which is a herpes remedy. Which I hope to God is not for you. Or, bless your heart, any of the eighteen or nineteen men you've been with the last month or two. Your moonlighting is going well, so don't screw it up with a sexual disease. Call me.”

I could feel myself blushing in the dark, as if Doc, four feet away, could hear it all too. He hadn't learned about the Dating Project from Fredreeq; he'd listened to my messages last night and drawn his own conclusions.

He thought I was a hooker.

Anger returned, overriding embarrassment. I wanted to wake him up so I could knock him unconscious, but there was one more message coming through.

I listened just long enough to note the voice, playful and nasty, and then replaced the receiver. I was pretty sure I couldn't hear the Weasel's message right now and still do what I had to do.

chapter twenty-three

H
obbling homeward was no picnic. The perfect night had mutated into a dismal dawn, and while it was easy, even satisfying, to walk out on Doc, I hated doing it to Ruby, who'd seen enough disappearing acts lately. I wish I'd left a note. But my big concern was Joey.

I moved as fast as I could, which wasn't all that fast, given my heels, and within blocks I was frozen, which numbed my feet, which made me feel I was running on a pair of chopsticks. My braless breasts bounced violently and every thirty seconds or so I looked back to see if I was being followed. Sticking to side streets, my ten-minute trek turned into a half-hour marathon, the last of it in pouring rain.

Joey's Saab was in the parking lot, and she herself in the back room, stretched out on the red velvet sofa bed. I rushed over to make sure she was breathing, and her eyes popped open. Weak with relief, I threw my arms around her thin shoulders. “Thank God,” I said. “You're okay, you're alone, he's not here?”

“Who?” She wiped water from her forehead. “You're wet. Is it raining?”

I stood, wringing out my hair. “Yes, I'm wet, I'm cold, I slept in these clothes. No, not with the mogul. Do you mind coming out front with me?”

I led her to the register desk, dialed my home machine, and put the phone on speaker. My messages started replaying. “I don't know how to fast-forward them,” I said. “This'll take a minute.”

Joey was pulling on a pair of skinny jeans. She'd slept in just a T-shirt and a pair of socks. The T-shirt was familiar—one of Doc's.

Joey saw me staring. “I found it on top of the dryer. I love this shirt. I used to go out with a guy who had this shirt. Where'd you get it?”

“Why? What is it?”

“It's MIT Press. The college newspaper. See?” She pushed aside her Lady Godiva hair and pointed to the logo, seven vertical white lines, with the fifth and sixth elongated. It looked like a bar code. “What's cool about this is that you have to know what it is, or you'd never know what it is.” She traced over it with her finger to show how the lines represented the letters M-I-T-P.

Doc had gone to Massachusetts Institute of Technology? So had the dead man, if his sweatshirt was any indication. Doc had said he didn't know the man, but what were the chances of two unrelated former MIT students meeting on that road? Was there some abnormally large alumni population roaming Ventura County?

My phone machine reached the sixth message. I braced myself and pulled Joey closer.

“You there?” The voice was a whisper, low, gritty as sand. “All right. Anyway. I've been meaning to get together for a little gift exchange, so I'm coming over. Is tonight good? I'll leave my gun at home. I prefer a knife anyway. It's quiet. Ever think about that? I could go up into you, deep inside, scrape you out clean as a turkey and nobody would hear a thing except the sounds you make. It's messy, but I wear gloves. As for your gift to me, I think you know what I'd like. No need to wrap it. Just leave it in plain sight in case you're not going to be there.”

Joey turned to me, her face doing what mine was doing. Like we'd just found ourselves with a mouthful of lemons. “Tell me that's not one of your dates,” she said.

My voice shook. “We gotta get outta here.”

“But he called you at home. Hours ago. This is your shop.”

“It doesn't matter, he knows where I live, he's gotta know where I work, he follows me, he's the one in the Hummer, the pet store, the—bad, he's a bad man, come on.” I threw her her shoes and pulled her outside, into the rain. With still-frozen fingers I searched my evening bag. “Do you have your key, I can't seem to—”

“Yes. Calm down.” Joey pulled me back under the awning and locked up. “Think a minute. The guy on the phone: Why was he calling? What was his objective?”

“To scare me to death.”

“Yes. To what end?”

I tried to concentrate. “I don't know. There's something he thinks I have or can get for him.”

“Strange tactics, don't you think? To threaten you with—disembowelment.”

“You're saying, in case I was home, he wanted me to panic and run?” I asked. “Okay, so what? Look, if I could call the cops I would, but I can't, so—”

“We don't need cops,” Joey said, in a tone of voice I knew well. “Come on.” She headed for her car. I followed.

She opened her trunk and handed me an umbrella, orange with a duck's head for a handle. She searched some more and pulled out something wrapped in a sock. “Does this guy know you can't go to the cops?” she asked, leading me toward the alley.

“I don't know.”

“Okay, my guess is, he's not going to hang around if he thinks they'll show up. Assuming he was at your place, he's long gone now. If I'm wrong, we have an umbrella and”—she reached into the sock—“a Glock.”

“Oh, my God,” I said. “Does everyone but me own a gun?”

“Elliot bought it for me when he left for Europe. I just hope I remember how to use it—not that it will come to that,” she added, seeing my face.

“You know how to use this—this Clock?” I followed her into the alley.

“Glock. Yeah. It's what Gun Girl carried.”

In her acting days, Joey had starred in a TV series,
Gun Girl
. Seeing her eagerness to storm my apartment, I wondered if it had skewed her perspective, made her oblivious to real danger. Maybe she subconsciously assumed there was a camera crew in the shrubbery, filming our approach, ready to stop the scene if things got ugly.

Inside the building, that changed. I felt Joey's hesitation along with my own, a response to the dark. My landlord being too cheap to spring for anything stronger than Christmas tree lights, the entire Minardi crime family could be stuffed under the stairwell, unseen. Normally the darkness didn't bother me, not in the daytime, but nothing about this day was normal. For one thing, it was too quiet. There was rain pelting the roof and the beating of my heart, but where were the neighbor noises, the morning sounds, the Spanish radio, the colicky baby? Had the Weasel murdered my fellow tenants? I took Joey's hand and she gave mine a squeeze.

At the top of the stairs, a door opened.

The wizened face of Mrs. Albertini peered out at us. Her wizened terrier yapped. Mrs. Albertini's eyes went to our joined hands, to my umbrella, to Joey's gun, then back up to our faces. She slammed her door. We continued on our way, up the concrete steps to my apartment.

The door was open.

“Don't go in,” I whispered.

“Why not?” Joey whispered back.

“They tell you not to go in if you come home to an unlocked door. I'm sure I've heard that.”

“They tell you that because it's a sign there may be a burglar inside. In our case, we expect there
was
a burglar, and that he's gone. Going in is what we're here for.” Joey pushed the door open with her foot.

It looked like I'd been evicted. My worldly possessions, plus a few of Doc's and Ruby's, covered every surface. Books were stacked next to bookshelves, pots and pans in front of cupboards. My wardrobe took up most of the living room floor, displayed as if at a yard sale. I felt laid bare. Only the knowledge that most of my photos and artwork and business records were stored in the back room of the shop kept me from coming unglued. I whispered, “It's all so neat.”

Joey moved toward the bathroom, gun drawn. A flapping drew my attention to the kitchen, where the ceiling fan rotated at low speed, a spinning ball of color. I flipped the wall switch and watched the spinning ball slow and become bits of fabric. There was something familiar about the fragments. I reached out and touched a piece of stretchy blue silk shaped like a strand of fettuccine. Underwear. All my bikini panties, mutilated. “Yuck,” I said aloud.

“Weird,” I heard from the bathroom.

Joey stood looking at the closed toilet seat, upon which sat my own Hummel collection, the small porcelain Bavarian children forming a circle. They were headless. Each plump, decapitated body sported a jagged neckline, revealing hollow insides.

“What kind of man would behead a Hummel?” I asked, anger awakening in me.

“Not your average burglar. And not one interested in jewelry,” Joey said, plucking something from the edge of the bathtub. “A perfectly good emerald. Oh, it's a class ring. From . . . 1948?”

“Uncle Theo's,” I said numbly. “A present when I was ten.”

“Guess our guy's not into emeralds.”

“No. It's diamonds he wants,” I said, and proceeded to tell her nearly everything about the events of the last five days.

         

B
ACK IN THE
shop an hour later, I changed into the contents of a UPS box from Tiffanie's Trousseau. I couldn't bear to wear anything touched by the Weasel, not until it had been laundered or sterilized or blessed by the Pope. In any case, I had a lunch date later, as surrealistic as it seemed to go on a date under the circumstances. In the back room, I looked down at myself, all six feet of me, in cream-colored jodhpurs and a skin-tight white shirt, and called out, “They've got me dressed for a fox hunt.”

“It's for some event at the Museum of Flying this afternoon,” Joey said, coming from the shop floor to join me. “Dylan Ellison. Fredreeq's all happy because she can squeeze in a dinner with someone else afterward. No time to schedule the Drive-by, but we're going to let it slide. Come on, let's take the Polaroid.”

“Joey, look, I'm not up to—”

“Yes, you are. Chores. Routine. Very therapeutic. You want this jerk bringing your life to a crashing halt? Come on.”

Joey also agreed it was safe to open the shop. “After all,” she pointed out, grabbing the camera, “why would the Weasel disguise his identity last night, only to show up in broad daylight? This guy's working to keep a low profile, otherwise he'd have confronted you days ago.”

“I'm not so sure,” I said. “Can we truly predict the actions of a sociopath?”

“Sure, why not? Smile.”

I sighed, and struck my sex-kitten pose, feeling overgrown and unconvincing.

Doc walked in.

Behind him came Ruby, carrying Margaret's crate. Ruby looked interested, but Doc, taking in the scene, looked incredulous. A black look dropped over his brown eyes.

“Hi,” Joey said. “I'm Joey and you must be the cousins Fredreeq mentioned.”

Doc collected himself with an effort. He nodded to Joey, glanced at his shirt on her body, then turned to me. “You, I want to talk to. Alone. Excuse us, everyone.”

He took me by the arm and steered me around shelves of merchandise. I put up a little resistance, which strengthened his grip, which annoyed me, so I jerked my arm away. Our eyes met, mine no doubt as angry as his. He said, “I'm not in the mood for this,” and walked into the front of the shop. After a moment, I followed.

“You don't strike me as stupid,” he said, then stopped, taking in my outfit. After a second, he continued. “Is it possible you don't understand how serious this is?”

“Look, this hasn't been my best morning, and it's not even eight o'clock. Can you just manage not yelling at me until I've had breakfast?”

He gestured toward the back room. “Your friend—how much does she know?”

“The whole story, except a few details about you. I thought I owed it to her, as she just spent the last hour with me trying to put my apartment back together.”

“He broke in?”

“Yes. You don't seem surprised.”

“I figured he might. How bad was it?”

“You figured he might? And it didn't occur to you to tell me? Or to do something about it?”

“Jesus. You really want it all, don't you?” He ran a hand over his dark-stubbled face. “I have my daughter to think about, Wollie, and you, for that matter. What did you have in mind, hand-to-hand combat? Me bringing him down with a dinner fork?”

“Or a gun. An Astra Falcon, maybe. If you had one, which you don't, because it's gone.”

His eyebrows went up, then dropped, shadowing his face. “What else is gone?”

“Eighty dollars in cash. Fourteen bisque porcelain heads. That's all I could tell so far. I'd describe it as a violation, but his phone message gives new meaning to ‘violation.' On the plus side, it was a very tidy break-in.”

“On the plus side, you're alive,” he said.

“Joey thinks the Weasel left the message on my machine to give me a chance to leave the diamond and run.”

He leaned back against the muraled wall. “What else does Joey think?”

“That your T-shirt is from MIT,” I said. “Which means you probably went to school there, yet you didn't know the dead man in the road, who also went to MIT. Interesting coincidence.”

“So you suspect me of murdering a man because we shared an alma mater. Interesting motive.”

“I don't suspect that. I give you the benefit of the doubt. There's always evidence that points to the worst in people, if you look for it. I don't.”

“A real Mother Teresa, aren't you?” He plucked something from my shirt collar. It was a tender gesture, strange under the circumstances. “Do me a favor,” he said, and took my hand. “Cultivate skepticism. You'll live longer.” He returned the hand, and turned away. I looked at my palm, at a sticker saying “Inspected by number 3439.”

I was about to ask him how he thought I could turn tricks, lacking skepticism, but the phone rang. I reached for it. Dr. Charlie, my brother's doctor, was on the other end.

“Wollie,” he said, “P.B.'s eloped.”

“Eloped?” I said, bewildered. “With whom?”

“No. Sorry. Hospital speak. It means he's gone. Disappeared, flew the coop.”

Inside me, blood turned to ice water and I began to shake.

My first thought was of foul play, P.B. kidnapped by mobsters in Hummers. My next thought was relapse.

When his illness was dormant, my brother was a real indoor guy, devoted to routine. But gripped by obsession, he would hit the road without warning, without money, impervious to creature comforts, following some inner directive. These episodes were hell for me, not knowing if he was dead or alive, and it was all coming back now, like taking a fast drive through an old neighborhood.