Golden Orange (27 page)

“I'll let you know in a year or two.”

“Am I a prisoner here?”

“Yes.”

“Know one a the things I admire about you?” he said. “I like how you talked to your cleaning lady yesterday afternoon. You aren't one a those women they're ever gonna call ‘Uh.'”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I been around these parts long enough to see how Nouveau Newport talks to servants. Like, ‘Oh, call me Jill!
Don't
call me Mrs. Roderick!' But the Salvadoran maid ain't about to
ever
call her Jill, so she ends up callin her ‘Uh.' Gets real difficult sometimes when the maid's gotta yell for the lady a the house. She goes: ‘Uh! Uh! Telephone! Uh! You there, Uh?' You been dealing with servants all your life. You got no problem.”

“I know you well enough to guess that
you're
the one getting around to a problem.”

“What worries me is, what they're gonna call
me.
The help, I mean. If I keep hanging around with you? See, I look like Winnie. I talk like Winnie. I
am
…”

“A love. You're a love. Now stop worrying about our future together. Those things have a way of working out.”

“Or not,” he said.

“So what's our next move insofar as my problem is concerned? My little problem with murder?”

“Okay,” Winnie said. “First thing I wanna do is look through your dad's stuff. Specially his wallet. Maybe there's a name. A phone number.”

“Whose?”

“I don't know. That's why I gotta look. Or maybe a credit card receipt from when he bought gas on the way from the ranch to Little Corona Beach. And if not, I wonder how much gas was in his car when they found it.”

“It was parked by Ocean Boulevard, just above the beach. The keys were still in it. I guess a man doesn't worry about car theft if he's going to shoot himself. Warner had it driven back home to the ranch.”

“A killer might not worry about theft either, if he's in a hurry to unwrap and dump a body he's just taken outta the trunk.”

“Would it have taken two men to do it?”

“Almost certainly,”

“Hack Starkey and Warner? That's what you think?”

He shrugged and said, “Can I see his stuff?”

She retrieved it from the hall closet: the cardboard box still bore the coroner's tape. Winnie took the box into the dining room so he could spread things out on the table.

“Do you mind if I go shopping while you look through his things? I haven't had the guts to open that box yet.”

“Sure, I understand,” he said.

After she'd gone Winnie looked at his watch and saw that it was absolutely not late enough to have a drink. So he had a beer. It was only a light beer, he told himself.

He sipped the beer while unfolding the clothing from the box: a short-sleeved shirt with a button-down collar. A pair of tan poplin trousers, cordovan loafers, blue cotton socks, boxer shorts. Everything was badly wrinkled and the shoes were caked with salt brine. Beach sand littered the bottom of the box.

The wallet was brown calfskin and its contents had been bagged separately. Winnie removed the credit cards, the driver's license, a photo of Tess wearing a mortarboard when she'd graduated from Stanford, a photo of Warner Stillwell as a young man, and ninety-six dollars in cash. He didn't find a gasoline receipt or anything remarkable in the wallet. He was disappointed that there was no address book.

He was folding up the clothes when he glanced in the box and saw it: half a shell. He retrieved it from the box and held it in his palm, a shell no larger than a pearly button. Winnie's heart started pounding almost as it had the evening he'd first seen a shell like this. Back when someone had fired gunshots, probably with evil intent.

Then Winnie found a
whole
shell caught in the cuff of Conrad Binder's trousers, where the cuff was stitched to the leg. He now held in his hand one-and-a-half freshwater shells from an ancient lake near a place called
El Refugio.

He almost ran to his car to look for Tess, but he realized she could have gone anywhere to shop. He sat down to plan his next move. He picked up the telephone and called the Newport Beach Police Department to make an appointment with Detective Sammy Vogel. But before he left Tess Binder's house he poured three fingers of vodka. Just to calm his nerves.

The excitement mounted the moment he walked into the station. Winnie Farlowe was involved in police work again! Sort of. Then a teenager—one of the police cadets who work at the front desk—said, “Can I help you, sir?” And he knew he was just another outsider.

Sammy Vogel took him to the lunchroom, where, at this time of day, they could have some privacy.

“How you keeping in the outside world, Win?” the detective asked, after he bought them both a cup of coffee.

“Can't complain,” Winnie said, sitting at what used to be his favorite table. He'd drunk a lot of coffee at this table.

“Glad to see you didn't get your dick trimmed for that Christmas caper.”

“Yeah, probation,” Winnie said. “I can handle it.”

“So, what can I do for you?”

“It's about Conrad P. Binder? The guy that you fished out last summer?”

“Oh yeah,” Vogel said. “What about him?”

“I'm sorta friendly with his daughter, and, uh, she has some ideas.”

“Yeah? About what?”

“Are you sure,
absolutely
sure he iced himself?”

“You mean could he've been capped by somebody else?”

“Yeah.”

“No way. I was there when they posted the body. There was stippling in his scalp.”

“Yeah, but somebody
else
coulda put the gun there and pulled the trigger,” Winnie said.

“The gun was found beside him, on the sand.”

“Prints?”

“You kidding? Sand. Surf. Elements.”

“I'm jist trying to find out if it was …
possible.
See, she was told there was lividity on both sides, so she got to thinking maybe the body was shot somewhere else and then transported to Little Corona and dumped on the beach. Did the car have a lotta gas in it?”

The balding little detective then began a session in snideness. Sammy Vogel had always been a state-of-the-art smirker. He talked with his hands and fingers as though he was signing to the deaf. “Tell her she watches too much TV. Lividity was caused by the body being turned over on the beach by the tide. It flipped him like hamburger, front to back. After several hours on each side he gradually drifted down toward the water.”

“He was actually floating?”

“Not quite. And the car had half a tank, because he'd filled it the day before, out near La Quinta. His housemate verified it.”

“Usually you need a hard surface for lividity.”

“I told you he was lying on the beach. Wet sand is hard.”

It was plain to see what reaction he was going to get, but in that he'd gone this far, Winnie reached into the pocket of his jeans and took out the button-sized shells.

“They're freshwater shells. From the Coachella Valley. By La Quinta, to be specific.”

“I didn't know there was an ocean out there,” the detective said, smirking.

“There used to be an inland sea. I could probably take these to an expert and prove they didn't come out of the Pacific Ocean.”

“So?”

Winnie removed a whole shell from his shirt pocket. It was identical to the others. He put them on the table, three in a row.

The smirking detective said, “This a new variation of the old shell game?”

Winnie pointed to the one from his shirt pocket, and said, “
This
one came from the cuff of the pants Conrad Binder wore the night he died.”

“What're you talking about?”

“Did you find any other shells like this? Maybe in his shoes or …”

“There were no shells,” Sammy Vogel said. “Damn it, Win, whaddaya trying to stir up here? That was a suicide! I got his stuff from the coroner myself. There were no shells that I ever saw. Whaddaya trying to do here?”

“Well, what if he was shot by somebody out there on his property? What if they dragged him through the desert sand and dumped him in the trunk of a car for a couple hours? Lividity might form on one side after a long drive to Newport. Then they carried him down to the beach and dropped him on the
other
side. And there you find him with freshwater shells in his cuff.”

Vogel hesitated a moment, then said, “I think you been hitting the bottle just as hard as people say you are. I think your I.Q.'s dropped to eighty. Eighty
proof.
”

“You don't have to get hostile, Sammy.”

“Hostile? Me? You come in here and imply that one of
my
cases—a
suicide
—is suddenly a whodunit murder? Because of a little seashell? Why should I get hostile?”

“Not a seashell. A freshwater shell. In his cuff, and half a one in the box his clothes were in. Maybe fell outta his shoe.”

“Who says this was in his cuff?”

“I found it there. His daughter had the box all this time, unopened. I went through it this morning and I found the shells.”

“Well, I guess you'll just have to join the Baker Street Irregulars, Winnie,” said Sammy Vogel. “But you are
not
going to turn this suicide into a whodunit. In the first place, even if there
was
a desert shell in the cuff of his pants, so what? The guy coulda picked up that shell anytime. Christ, he
lived
there! Why couldn't he have a shell or two stuck in his clothes? The guy shot himself and the tide did the rest. Period. Ask the coroner if he killed himself. By the way, the guy was sick. He had a reason for pulling that trigger.”

“Yeah, I know about the HIV.”

“Okay, Win.” The detective stood up. “It's been great seeing you again, but …”

“You know anything about a guy named Hack Starkey? Real name's Hugh Starkey. Used to work for Binder. Used to spend a lotta time out there working around the ranch. Lives in Laguna, I think. I wanna talk to him.”

“You talk to anybody you want,” said Sammy Vogel, “but I'm not gonna run his name through C.I.I. if that's what you're thinking. And I'm not gonna get involved in this because if you start bugging innocent people you're gonna get your ass in a lawsuit. And maybe you got nothing to lose, but I do. So long, Win. If I was you, I'd consider getting in touch with my Higher Power.”

“What's that?”

“Go to an A.A. meeting. You'll hear some speakers who were dysfunctional drunks at one time. I've been dry three years now. Before that, my thought process was getting the way yours is now. The brain starts blowing its horn and careening around like a Cairo cabbie. Think about going to an A.A. meeting. I go every Tuesday and Friday night. You wanna go with me sometime, gimme a call. I'll take you and bring you home afterwards. Otherwise,
don't
call me, Winnie.”

Winnie spent an hour fast-walking to Balboa Island and back for exercise. He tried unsuccessfully to watch a movie on TV, then washed and vacuumed his car in Tess's garage, a job he hated above all others. After that, he showered and put on a cotton knit shirt and chinos. He even wore socks and a belt. He was going to
work.

“The last time I saw you looking this excited, we were suspended in midair on a hammock,” Tess said, when she came in the house with a bag from Louis Vuitton.

“Sit, lady, I've got some news,” he said.

Tess went into the kitchen and got a diet drink from the refrigerator and a Mexican beer for Winnie. She wore a brand-new white and mint-green chemise dress, and he thought she looked radiant.

Triumphantly, he pulled the shell from his shirt pocket and showed it to her.

“Yes?”

“This came from the cuff of the pants your dad wore the night he died! And this …” he showed her the shell fragment, “came from the bottom of the box that contained the clothes! It could've also been in his cuff or maybe his shoe!”

Tess didn't say anything. She stared at the shells as though she'd never seen one before. She took a sip of her diet drink and said, “Is it possible, Win? Is it
possible
?”

“I think so,” he said. “Your father was killed at
El Refugio
and his body was driven down here!”

“But is it
proof
?”

“In a court of law? Of course not.”

“What're you going to do?”

“I've got a few ideas.”

“You're not going to the police?”

“I already have.”

That startled her. “You
have
?”

“Yeah, but Sammy Vogel kissed it off. He was always a little bit lazy. Sleepy Sammy, we called him. He thinks a guy that lived out there in the desert might limp through life with shells in his shoes. Says it was suicide. Period.”

Tess thought for a moment and said, “I suppose he's right. He could've been out hiking and caught a shell in his cuff.”

“We know different, you and me,” said Winnie. “And now I know those shots were no accident. It was a botched attempt on your life.”

“Hack Starkey?”

“
Gotta
be,” Winnie said.

“So what's next?”

“A little police work.”

“I thought you said the police aren't interested.”

“Hey, lady, you're looking at an ace detective! I get to do police work again. And I get to help the girl I …”

“Don't stop now.”

“The girl I been hired to protect.”

“Oh, I'm
hiring
you, am I?”

“Sure, now that I know you're gonna get that ranch someday, I'm gonna bill you soon as you're rich.”

“I'll pay whatever you ask,” she said, and then she put her glasses on top of her head, and moved onto Winnie's lap and kissed him. Then she asked, “So what now?”