Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers (68 page)

In the dining room, the contents of Belle’s China cabinet resembled the inside of a kaleidoscope—colored glass in tiny pieces on every shelf. Prism-like, the shards cast an array of rainbow images on the walls. About a dozen items remained intact; a goblet here, several wine glasses and a decanter there, the rest reduced to rubble.

Dr. J was quiet for a change. She went in the opposite direction of where he perched in his cage. Once he spotted her, or even so much as heard her footsteps, he would squawk and screech, demanding her attention. There was plenty of time later to smooth his ruffled feathers.

From room to room, she surveyed the damage. Paintings and wall decorations hung askew on the walls. The books in the bookshelves had toppled into a heap on the hardwood planks. Plants and picture frames on the mantle and tabletops had tipped over or fallen to the floor. The disheveled condition of the rooms was to be expected after a quake of that magnitude. She saw nothing suspicious, nothing to indicate someone had broken in.

She had covered most of the main floor and was halfway up the stairway to the second floor when she heard the noise. It came from the vicinity of the kitchen, where Dr. J resided in the nook of the bay window. It was a manmade sound, a clanking of metal against metal. Not a sound a cockatoo would make. Her pulse accelerated. She backtracked, stepping over items lying on the floor in her path. She passed through the dining room into the kitchen. The refrigerator door stood open, food lay scattered on the floor. It wasn’t the only door open. The one to the basement was also ajar. Another clank rumbled up out of the darkness beneath the house. Piper’s body instantly primed itself for fight or flight. Adrenalin surged through her. The reasoning portion of her brain signaled her to back off, to run from the house and call the police.

She gripped her cell phone, backed up, thumbing the nine and the one. A shrill scream filled the kitchen, a scream so piercing she thought her eardrums would burst. She spun around in shock. From the floor tiles, a ghostly whiteness rushed at her, obscuring her vision and lashing against her face. More whiteness floated in the air around her head, surrounding her face, flapping wildly. Dr. J, his wings beating the air, struck out, sharp talons scratched her hand as she held it up in an attempt to protect herself. She stumbled backward, away from him, turning just as the basement door flew open and slammed against the wall with a bang. A man charged at her. Fast, furious. A man she’d never seen before. His hand, raised above his head, gripped a large wrench. She fell, landing hard on her tailbone on the unyielding floor. She ducked her head, her arms raised to protect her head and face from another attack.

Seconds passed. She waited for the blow, defenseless and terrified, too stunned to move. When nothing happened, no attack, no running footsteps, she lifted her head and looked up. The man stood with his legs stretched apart, the wrench raised, prepared for battle. Now she could see his face, and the expression on it was clearly one of alarm and confusion. The arm with the wrench dropped with a thump to his thigh.

“Holy shit, where’d you come from? You scared the hell out of me,” he said, running fingers through his straight blond hair. He reached out to her. “I didn’t know anyone was in the house. You okay?”

Piper grabbed onto a kitchen chair and pulled herself to her feet, keeping the chair between them. “Who are you? What are you doing in here?”

“Luke. Luke Monte. I’m the Vogt’s handyman. Didn’t they tell you about me?”

“How did you get in?”

He jiggled a key ring on his belt. “The key. I have my own. They travel a lot, so I look in on the place while they’re gone. As soon as the ground settled today, I came right over to check for any damage. The security alarm was blaring away. I’m afraid I had to disconnect it. I think it shorted out.”

She brushed at her backside and gingerly rotated her shoulder.

“Are you hurt?” he asked.

“Yes. No. I’ll be all right,” she said. “Can I see some ID, please?”

He pulled out his wallet and showed her his driver’s license.

“I’m Piper Lundberg.”

“Yeah, the Vogt’s told me you were living in the apartment above the garage. I did some work up there before you moved in.”

They stood face-to-face with nothing to say. Piper broke the silence first.

“How did the bird get out of his cage?” She looked toward the room where Dr. J was now back inside his cage, his safe haven, rocking back and forth.

“He was out when I came in. I tried to catch him, but he went psycho on me.” He held up an arm crisscrossed with fresh scratches. “He’s better than any guard dog.”

“How long have you been here … in the house?”

“About thirty minutes. I didn’t get any further than the basement. Broken water pipe. I got the leak stopped, but now I have to pump out the water down there. It’s flooded.” He sucked in his flat belly and slipped the wrench into the front of his tight fitting jeans. He bent, picked up a carton of orange juice, and put it in the refrigerator.

Piper returned the other food items to the refrigerator and closed the door. “I was on my way upstairs when I heard the clanging in the basement and came to investigate. I’ll go ahead and check it now.”

He nodded. “Look for large cracks and broken windows, that sort of thing.”

Upstairs she found two cracked windows and a dozen fine, spider-like fissures in the plaster of two bedrooms. She returned downstairs to report what she’d found. Through the dining room window, she saw the handyman standing in the driveway with hands on his hips, staring up at something on the side of the house.

She joined him outside. “What is it?”

He pointed to the massive brick chimney. Halfway to the top of the tall chimney, on one of the double flues, a half dozen bricks had fallen away.

“That’s gotta be repaired before the whole thing takes a notion to come down. And maybe with it that side of the house. Brick work is my specialty.”

“I’ll call the Vogts.” She started for the guesthouse.

“Tell them I can get everything back into shape in no time. Tell them not to worry.”

Piper forgot about the difference in time zones and woke up an intolerant and cranky Belle in the middle of the night in Hong Kong. After reporting on the earthquake and the damage to their Tudor home, Belle’s annoyance turned to concern.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Dr. Jekyll? Did anything fall on his irascible head?”

“Your bird is fine and as nasty as ever. He scratched the handyman.”

“Tell Luke to get a tetanus shot and add the bill to the repair invoice.”

She told Belle about the interior damage, ending with the brick chimney and the handyman’s concern about it crumbling.

“He knows what to do. Just take pictures of the damage and keep receipts.”

“What about insurance? Should I file a claim?” Piper asked.

“We’ll handle it,” Belle said. “Have Luke ring us if you’ve any problems. He has our number. Oh, and Piper dear, remind him about the time difference, would you?”

“Sorry, I forgot. I’ll let you get back to sleep.”

“I’m wide awake now. Anything more on that poor dead woman, the widow’s housekeeper?”

Piper had been keeping Belle informed through email. “No, nothing yet.”

“Honey, be careful. Stay away from those neighbors. Leave it alone.”

“Right.” She paced the deck. The handyman pulled a pickup truck into the driveway, parking behind her car. She watched him carry a small pump into the house. Moments later, brackish water gushed out through a hose from the tiny basement window into the yard. “How’s the shoot going?” she asked Belle.

“It could be better. The only thing that has cooperated is the weather. You didn’t hear this from me, but we may be calling in a new director. A new director means…” she paused for emphasis “… a new film editor.”

My pulse quickened. “Who’s the new director?”

“Gary Ott.”

Ott had approached Piper two weeks ago in the WB commissary. “You gotta be kidding. Belle—”

“It’s still up in the air, so don’t get too tickled yet. I’ll keep you abreast of the situation.”

“Thanks, Belle. You and Mick are the best.”

“I know. Give Dr. J a big juicy kiss for me.”

“And risk losing my nose. He’ll have to settle for a slice of pineapple.”

They said their goodbyes and Piper hung up. She leaned over the railing and watched as the water continued to gush from the hose, reminding her she had been neglecting her gardening. But for now, she told herself, she had damage control from the quake to keep her busy. Her place had taken a beating too. Books, glassware, and her collection of cassettes littered the floor. One of the windows facing the Squire house had cracked in half, from corner to corner. With nothing around it or hanging over it, the editing equipment had at least come away unscathed.

#

Piper emailed the video clip to Detective Bower and then started the cleanup in the guesthouse. With the Vogt’s handyman at the main house ankle deep in water, tracking it through the kitchen and patio, she decided to wait until he had finished pumping out the basement before tackling the damage there. Since she had very few possessions, her place took no time at all. The most severe damage was to the window. The long crack looked like it would hold until the handyman could get to it. It had held up over a half dozen aftershocks. She patched it from the inside with a strip of duct tape.

With a full wastebasket, she went downstairs to the trash barrel. Luke Monte, taking the small water pump back to his pickup truck, called out, “I got the last of the water up,” he said, tipping his head toward the basement. “If you want to get into the house, it’s all yours.”

She glanced at her watch. Five o’clock. “Are you done for the day?” she had told him that Belle had given him a green light on any repairs that needed doing.

“Not by a long shot, but I won’t be in your way. If you need a hand with anything heavy or high up, give a holler.”

“I will. Thanks.”

“Oh, you’re gonna need work gloves, there’s broken glass everywhere.”

She went upstairs and grabbed a pair of canvas gardening gloves. She turned to leave and ran smack into the handyman on her deck. One of his hands went around her waist to steady her, the other one gripped her upper arm.

She stepped away.

He thrust a pair of gloves toward her. “I found these in the basement.”

She held up her pair.

He smiled and then looked past her to the inside. “That’s not good, that cracked window. I’ll get to it as soon as I can. Until I do, keep away from it.”

An hour later, at the main house, she stood on the ladder in the library returning books to the top shelf of the floor-to-ceiling bookcase. Luke stood below, handing them to her, saving her the tedious chore of having to climb up and down the ladder for each volume. If the Vogts used any sort of cataloguing system for the placement of their books, they would have to rearrange them when they returned home.

Every so often, Luke became preoccupied by a book, reading from it while she waited with an outstretched hand. This time a volume of
Best Loved Plays by Shakespeare
had piqued his interest.

“Are you interested in Shakespeare or in play writing?” she asked.

“Screenwriting.”

No surprise. Everyone in Hollywood and the greater LA area who could type Fade In, Fade Out, and Cut To was a screenwriter with a script. The reality of it was that only about one percent of these writers would ever have anything produced.

“Have you shown any of your scripts to Mick?”

“Naw. I like my job here. I don’t want to blow it.”

“Blow it how?”

“The first thing he said to me when he hired me was that if I was a writer or an actor, he didn’t want to know about it.”

That sounded like something Mick would say. With Mick, gruff was mostly bluff. Mick Vogt was Bambi reincarnated. She was a testament to his soft side.

“If you like, I’ll read one of your scripts. If I think it’s something Mick might be interested in, I’ll put in a good word.”

He grinned and looked away.

Later that afternoon while cleaning up in the kitchen, she tried to make amends with Dr. J for stepping on him earlier. She offered him his favorite fruit, but he ignored it. Instead, he watched her with a wary eye and kept his head down, his way of sulking.

“I said I was sorry.” She reached through the bars and scratched his head. He leaned closer to her fingers, some of his defenses breaking down. “You’re a pretty boy, Doc. Pretty pretty boy.”

“… oy,” he said.

“Hey, you can do better than that.
Oy
, what’s that? C’mon, talk to me. Tell me you forgive me. We’re still buddies, right?”

He pulled back, rising up and wildly flapping his wings, then screeched. It took a second for her to discover what had riled him. Through the glass doors, she caught a glimpse of someone walking by in the direction of the guesthouse. It wasn’t Luke. He was upstairs in the Vogt’s bedroom, removing broken glass from the window frames. She dropped the pineapple slice into the cage and went outside.

She approached the man in the driveway. She recognized the detective from his thick, dark hair and tall, lean frame. He didn’t look like a cop. He looked like an actor.

“Detective Bower, I was expecting a call, not a personal visit.”

“Could we go somewhere and talk?” he asked.

He’d found something. Why come all this way in the aftermath of an earthquake unless he’d found something?

She took him upstairs to her place. He refused her offer of a drink. He seemed ill at ease, edgy.

“You’re an editor?” He ran his hand over one of the monitors in the dining room.

“Yes.” She stared at him. “You have something?”

“Mrs. Wade’s body was released yesterday to Morningside Society for cremation.”

“
What
?” The word
cremation
exploded in her head.

“The death was classified as natural causes. Her heart most likely, though it was not conclusive. The causes are not always conclusive. It’s the coroner’s call. Mrs. Wade’s wishes were for her remains to be cremated. There was no reason not to comply with her last wishes once the body was released.”