How to Succeed in Murder (4 page)

Chapter Six

My self-restraint was incredible. Not that I’d shown any hesitation in tearing through the folder to find the results of Clara Chen’s autopsy. That had been a given. No, where I showed restraint was in not bringing up the subject with my husband.

At least, not right away.

He came home to find me lounging innocently on our bed, reading a bad play set largely in the back room of a stripper bar. Jack called out something or other and vanished into the closet, only to emerge thirty seconds later looking crisp and put together in a clean white shirt and black jeans.

“Charley, are you about ready?” He rolled up his sleeves and turned his head to see the title of the script. “
Pole Dancer Diaries
? I hope you’re doing research for next season and not looking for a new hobby. Although—”

“Chip sent a stack of plays over,” I informed him, ignoring the speculative look in his eye. “Am I about ready for what?”

“It’s Monday, remember? Dinner at Harry’s?”

Damn. I’d totally forgotten we’d agreed to go visit my uncle.

Jack must have seen a look on my face, because he sat on the bed and plucked the pages from my hands. “It won’t be that bad. Besides, we haven’t seen him in a while and I think we’ve both learned it’s best to know what he’s up to.”

True. My uncle, a semi-reformed madman who’d misspent his youth quite vigorously, had settled into his middle years reluctantly, trading in doobies for Cubans, and tequila shots drunk from the navels of beach bunnies for…well, I hoped he’d traded them in.

When my parents died just after my fourteenth birthday, Harry had become my guardian. Back in those days, Harry ran his house as something of a cross between the Playboy mansion and a militia encampment. Perhaps not the best atmosphere for an adolescent getting over the worst trauma of her life, but neither Harry nor I had had a choice.

Harry had taken the term “guardian” to appalling extremes. I was sent to high-security private schools and camps, and I was never without a bodyguard or—when I rebelled against that—private detectives tasked with keeping tabs on me and reporting everything I did back to Harry.

There had been years filled with suspicion and mistrust. And although Harry had mellowed considerably in recent times, particularly since Jack had come along, I didn’t wholly believe my uncle’s fundamental nature had changed.

He was usually up to something, and since that something was fueled by a dangerous combination of energy and paranoia, it was best to keep tabs.

“Oh, all right.” I realized thoughts of Harry had momentarily distracted me from my mission for the evening—finding out how Jack had gotten that autopsy report. “Just let me jump in the shower first.”

“Fine.” Jack leaned back against the headboard and crossed his legs at the ankles. “I’d say I’d wait for you downstairs, but since there’s nothing to sit on—”

“Then my plan is working,” I said, throwing him my best sultry over-the-shoulder look. “If there’s no other furniture, I can keep you in bed all the time.”

“You are an evil genius,” he admitted.

When I got out of the shower, I wrapped myself in a towel to make my way across the room to the closet. Jack’s eyes were closed. He looked completely innocent. Not in the least like a man who’d tell his wife he wasn’t interested in a murder and then promptly go out and lay his hands on a coroner’s report.

I scanned my wardrobe for an outfit that would put Jack in a talkative mood. Something that would reduce him to putty in my hands.

And I learned something: A thirtysomething woman whose highlights are in need of a touch-up and who hasn’t been to the gym in quite some time should not stand in front of a full-length mirror in her undies when she’s plotting a seduction. Even if the undies are La Perla.

To hell with it. I’d get the information out of him the old fashioned way—by tricking him. I threw on a pair of jeans and a cashmere hoodie before fleeing the closet.

Jack was sitting on the edge of the bed, rubbing his face.

“Long day, sweetie?” I sat beside him to pull on a pair of Jimmy Choo boots that I hoped would give my thrown-together outfit the illusion of style.

“Very long.” He turned to me. “You look great.”

I wasn’t even wearing makeup. How could I not be crazy about this man? Still… “Did Yahata have much to say?”

“Not really—”

“Ah ha!” I leapt to my feet, which was a tactical error given that I only had one boot on, but I persevered. “You
did
see Inspector Yahata today!”

I’d trapped him into an admission, and I was flush with victory.

He held out his arm to steady my balance. “Of course I did. Who do you think gave me Clara Chen’s autopsy report?”

Oh.

***

“Jack, don’t you even try to tell me that you were going to tell me about having that report!” We were in the car, heading for Harry’s, and I was on a roll.

“Of course I was going to tell you. Although I should have known you’d read it before I got back—”

“And that’s another thing—how did you know I’d already read it?”

“Because I went to the office before I came upstairs to the bedroom, and I could tell someone had been there.” He glanced over at me. “Since I didn’t think a burglar would have been interested in an empty house, I assumed it had been you.”

“You’re not going to distract me with house decorating talk.”

“I’m not trying to. I’m just saying I could give you some pointers on rifling someone’s desk without leaving tracks.”

Which could come in handy someday, but I wasn’t going to be distracted by that, either.

“Never mind. Just tell me when you and Inspector Yahata got so cozy. It wasn’t so long ago he was warning me that you might be a murderer.”

Our first encounter with the unnervingly observant representative of San Francisco’s finest had been shortly after finding a body in our hotel room, so I really didn’t hold it against him that he’d been suspicious about Jack’s mysterious past. What I couldn’t forgive is that whatever Yahata had learned about my husband—which had been enough to make him suddenly bend police procedure to include Jack in an ongoing investigation—still remained a mystery to me.

“I hardly think ‘cozy’ is the word to describe anything about Inspector Yahata,” Jack said dryly.

True. The detective had the ability to send an electric shock through a room merely by glancing around it. Cozy he was not.

“Well, whatever. Why did he give you Clara Chen’s autopsy report?”

“Because I asked for it.” Jack took the Broadway exit off Highway 101, turning toward the rarified zip code of Hillsborough, where Harry lived in high style and near-seclusion.

“Seriously? He isn’t asking you to look into it?”

“Pumpkin, why would a homicide detective ask a private citizen to look into anything? And beyond that, didn’t you read the report? There’s nothing to look into.”

“That’s what they say,” I sniffed.

“‘They’ meaning the medical examiner’s office and the police force? The skilled professionals who concluded that Clara Chen’s death was accidental?”

“Well.” I shifted in my seat. “Yes. But did you tell Yahata about everything Morgan Stokes told us? About how she was an athlete and wouldn’t have fallen like that? About how she was in line to get a major chunk of power at Zakdan?”

“Charley.” Jack came to a stop at a red light on El Camino. He turned to face me. “Morgan Stokes is a grieving man. Of course he doesn’t want to believe these kinds of things can just happen. But they do. You know they do.”

He was right. I knew all about accidents. Like the one that had taken my parents and left me in the care of my lunatic uncle.

I blinked. “Jack, seriously. Do you believe it was an accident?”

He looked at the stoplight. “I believe there’s no proof it was anything else.”

We drove the rest of the way in silence.

***

Harry’s rambling pile of stucco and tile looked even bigger than usual in the cold January night. I’d been coming there for twenty years, but I could still swear I heard the guitar solo to “Hotel California” whenever I saw the place by moonlight.

Only a few of the windows were lit in the front of the house, and Harry hadn’t put a light on over the massive oak doors.

I shivered. “It’s spooky out tonight.” The surrounding eucalyptus trees were whipping in a suddenly strong wind.

“Don’t worry, this neighborhood is way too expensive for anything really scary.”

Jack rang the bell and I considered telling him about the time I’d accidentally walked in on Harry, three cheerleaders for the 49ers, and chimpanzee named Sam. Now that had been scary.

When there was no answer, I dug around in my bag for my keys. I unlocked the door calling my uncle’s name.

We entered the great room, which, without Harry in it, seemed even larger than usual. It stretched the length of the house, with comfortable clusters of Mission style furniture arranged in groups across the wide expanse of plank floor.

“Harry!” Jack called. He moved forward to turn on a light. The room was dim, amber-shaded lamps providing only occasional pools of glowing light. It reminded me of a deserted museum you’d see in a horror movie, all quiet right before the monster leaps out.

“Do you think he’s all right?” I suddenly felt guilty for not calling Harry more often. He was alone now in his giant house. His only daughter, pushing thirty and still acting out her teenage rebellion, had run off again months ago and hadn’t been heard from since. This time Harry—uncharacteristically—hadn’t hired private detectives to track her down.

I’d been so busy with the Rep during the season that I hardly ever spared him a thought. He’d been such a source of annoyance for most of my life that it was jarring to think of him all by himself and getting older. And even more jarring to find myself feeling a little sorry for him.

Poor Harry. He must be so lonely. He must be so—

“Well Goddamn! I didn’t hear you two come in!”

He crashed through the door from the dining room with a fat cigar in his mouth, wearing khaki cargo shorts and a loud tropical shirt. He held up two large bags of what looked like take-out Chinese food. “Great! Perfect timing! The dumplings are hot and I hope you’re hungry!”

“Hi, Harry,” I managed to say before he’d deposited the food on a coffee table and crushed me in lung-squeezing hug.

“Charley, you’ve lost weight!” Which is what he always says. “And Jack! Good to see you, boy!” He stopped short of hugging my husband. Instead they engaged in a vigorously male handshake.

“Harry, you’re looking—”

“The same,” he cut off whatever Jack had been planning to say. “I never change. Don’t tell me anything different or I’ll start to feel old. And what’s the percentage in that, right?” He winked broadly and moved to the bar, an enormous carved structure that had once been the altar of an earthquake-damaged church.

“What are we drinking? I’ve got duck with plum sauce, crab stir-fried in garlic and white wine, that shrimp with black bean sauce that I know you like—” Another wink was aimed in my general direction. “ —Two kinds of noodles and every appetizer on the menu.” He held up a bottle of rum. “What do you say we make a batch of mai tai’s?”

Okay, so much for feeling sorry for him.

Harry was right. He never changed.

Chapter Seven

Jack lit a fire in the oversized stone hearth while Harry mixed drinks and kept up a non-stop monologue. I went off in search of plates during his description of the very tasty shredded snake meat soup he’d had on his last trip to Shanghai, pausing at the door to tell him no, I didn’t think we should lobby to get it included on the menu at King Yuan.

I returned to find my husband and my uncle sitting in front of the fire, drinks in hand, chatting amiably. It was a tableau that never failed to amaze. I’d been completely prepared for these men to hate each other on sight when I’d brought Jack home after our wedding. The fact that they got along—even seemed to understand each other on some level—was a little unsettling. It implied I didn’t know one of them as well as I thought I did.

“Tell me we’re not still talking about snake soup.” I set the stack of dishes, napkins, and serving spoons on the low table between them, nudging aside the steaming cartons of food they’d taken out of the bags.

“No.” Jack handed me a mai tai—complete with little paper umbrella. “Harry was telling me why he didn’t hear us at the door.”

Harry smiled broadly and raised his glass. “I was working. And whenever I’m working I have the delivery guy come to the back door. So he doesn’t interrupt my work. Usually I keep working while I eat, but this is a special occasion.” He rattled his ice cubes.

From the number of times he’d used the word “working” in that explanation, I gathered I was required to inquire, “What are you working on?”

“I thought you’d never ask.” He set his glass down and put up his hands, palms out, in a “just visualize this” gesture.

“I’m writing a play.”

Oh, my God.

***

“…I mean, I saw all of your plays last season, and I just thought ‘Goddamn! I could do that! I have some stories to tell!’”

I realized Harry was still talking. I must have gone into some sort of dissociative fugue state for a moment.

He was giving Jack one of his trademark winks. “You’d better believe I have some stories to tell.”

“I have no doubt,” Jack said evenly. I looked at him. Only the slightest twinkle in his eye betrayed how very amusing he was finding this conversation. That twinkle would cost him later.

“…so I’ve got all that figured out.” Harry was looking at me, glowing with excitement.

“All what?” I asked, still dazed.

“The plot!” he exclaimed, reaching for a carton and digging in to the noodles it contained. He passed it to me. “Eat something—you’ve got no color in your face.”

I blinked several times, fast. “Harry, you can’t just write a play. I mean you can’t just pick up a pencil one day and decide—”

“I bought a laptop,” he announced, tearing the wrapper off a pair of wooden chopsticks. “I even got this program that takes care of the formatting and everything.”

I looked to Jack for backup. He shrugged. “Well, Pumpkin, if the man bought a laptop…”

I considered impaling them both with chopsticks, but decided the ones that had come with the takeout weren’t sharp enough. I turned back to my uncle.

“Harry, have you ever even read a play?”

“Well, sure.” He found the carton with the crab in it and inhaled deeply, a look of pure joy on his face. “Ah, crab season. My favorite time of year. Jack, you’ve got to try this.” Then he returned to my question. “I mean, they made us read all kinds of Shakespeare and shit when I was in school.”

Shakespeare and shit. Lovely. I was about to launch into a minor rant when the next thing he said stopped me short.

“Of course, I understand there’s probably lots of technical stuff I don’t know. So I think the best thing to do is get a collaborator.”

I froze. “A collaborator?”

“Yeah, you know, like Rogers and Hammerstein.”

“If there’s a God,” I said carefully, “you’ll tell me you’re not writing a musical.”

“No, no, no.” He waved with his chopsticks, sending bits of crab shell flying. “But you know what I mean. Lots of plays were written by more than one person.”

Sure. Comden and Green. Kaufman and Hart. But not Harry and anyone. And certainly not Harry and me.

He was still talking. “…just a little help with the language and things.”

“Oh,” I said acidly. “It will have language?”

He wouldn’t be deterred. “So what do you think, Charley? Will she want to?”

She? “She who?”

He sat back and spread his hands. “Brenda, of course.”

Oh, hell.

***

“Okay, Jack. You can cut it out now. I get it. You think this is hilarious.” We were halfway back to the city and he hadn’t stopped laughing for miles.

“Oh, come on—it’s cute,” he protested.

“Cute? Nothing Harry has ever done could be considered cute.”

“You don’t think it’s cute that he has a crush on Brenda?”

“Harry doesn’t have crushes. He has conquests. And Brenda isn’t going to be one of them.” It was a fate I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, let alone my best friend.

“Hey, Charley.” Jack’s tone softened. “You know there was a little something between them a while ago, and it wasn’t just on his side.”

I hated it, but he was right. Brenda had stayed at the Hills borough house with Harry and my cousin during a period of time when it would have been dangerous for her to go home. I’d known she’d gotten to be fond of him. But I’d told myself—rigorously and repeatedly—that’s all it was. Just fondness. Like you’d have for your eccentric uncle, assuming he was simply eccentric and not a paranoid delusional nutcase.

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter,” I said. “Because she’s taking a bunch of students to Europe. And by the time she gets back, Harry will probably have moved on to his next whacko idea.”

“Um, about that…”

His tone sent little drops of dread sliding down my spine. “What?”

“I mentioned Brenda’s trip to Harry. When you were putting the leftovers away.”

“Okay…” I braced myself. “And Harry said…”

“That maybe he should change the setting to Paris and tag along with the trip.”

This was not good.

***

“Brenda, I have to talk to you.”

I waited on my end of the line while I heard her make waking-up-and-looking-at-the-clock noises. I’d called her from the bedroom as soon as we’d gotten home. Jack was checking his email before coming up, but I didn’t have much time.

“Charley, it’s after midnight,” she informed me.

“Sorry, it’s just that…” It’s just that I’m completely freaked out by the thought of you and Harry? That probably wasn’t the best approach.

“Charley, what’s going on?”

I told her something guaranteed to get her interest.

“I found out the coroner has declared Clara’s death an accident.”

It became very still on the other end of the line for a moment. Then she spoke. “So what are we going to do about it?”

“What?” I thought I heard Jack on the stairs.

“Charley, we have to do something. What are we going to do?”

Excellent question. I thought fast.

“Are you busy tomorrow night?”

“I have a faculty meeting until six. What’s the plan?”

“I think we should go for a late-night workout.”

I heard a sharp intake of breath. “Can we do that?”

“Why not? Jack’s a member of WorkSpace, and it shouldn’t be a crime for us to go check out a gym.”

“Oh, but Charley—”

I did hear Jack. “Brenda, I have to go. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

I hung up the phone and managed to grab a random manuscript from the floor before Jack appeared in the doorway. I flipped the pages nonchalantly.

“Any interesting messages?” I was innocence personified.

He looked at me with a certain wariness. Or maybe that was only my imagination. “Not much. Anything interesting going on up here?”

I widened my eyes. “Here? In the bedroom? Without you? Never.”

I think he bought it.

***

The next morning I found myself leaning out the third-floor window and shouting to the figure below.

“What are you doing here?”

Simon looked up. “Ringing your doorbell, darling. Do you think you might answer it?”

I looked up and down the street. Shouting out windows was probably frowned upon in Pacific Heights, but the last thing I’d expected at nine-thirty on a Tuesday morning was an energetic Englishman on my doorstep. Particularly since this Englishman hadn’t shown signs of energy in weeks. I closed the window and hurried down the stairs.

“Good lord, darling, I thought you’d be up and about by now.” He pecked me absently on the cheek and pushed past me into the entrance hall. “I mean, if experience is any judge, by the time I’m up the world’s up.” This was spoken with the certainty of a man at the center of his universe.

“I had a bad night.” I wrapped my robe a little more tightly around myself and tried to put the images that had haunted me all night out of my mind. Visions of my uncle pursuing Brenda across Europe, nightmarishly mixed in with visions of women bleeding to death on steam room floors.

Simon snorted. “Don’t get me started on the subject of bad nights. Not unless you want to hear about the very charming piano player I met at the Redwood Room last night.”

I didn’t, which didn’t seem to matter.

“Gorgeous, talented, and quite surprisingly athletic,” he went on. “But also the victim of some congenital sinus abnormality resulting in snores that could peel the paint off the walls.”

“Simon, as interesting as this is…why are you here?” I yawned.

“My God,” he said, circling the entrance hall and looking into rooms. To the left of the door was an arched entryway into a large, lovely room. Hardwood floors and a perfectly proportioned fireplace. A series of windows looking into the front yard. “Not a stick of furniture,” he marveled. “Brenda was right.”

“Brenda!” Now he had my interest. “When did you talk to her? What did she say?” Anything about Harry making a nuisance of himself? Or about our planned expedition to the scene of Clara Chen’s death?

“Only that you were either paralyzed by indecision…” He crossed the hallway and looked into the den and dining rooms, much as Brenda had done the day before. “…or exhibiting some sort of denial on a scale hitherto—”

“Oh, come on!” I slammed the dining room door, my relief at Brenda’s apparent discretion overpowered by my irritation with her fixation on interior design. “I have no dark psychological issues. I just haven’t been shopping yet.”

“Exactly.” Simon arranged himself on the stairs. “Which is why I’m giving you ten minutes to go put on some clothes—” He squinted at my face. “—and some makeup. Then we’re going shopping.”

I stared at him. “I can’t go shopping!”

“Why not?” He raised his eyebrows eloquently.

“I have things to do!”

“Such as?”

Damn him. The last thing I wanted was Simon insisting he could accompany us to the women’s steam room at WorkSpace.

“Such as reading all those plays,” I said triumphantly.

“Don’t bother. They’re all rubbish. I read them yesterday.”

“All of them?” That was fast work.

He sighed. “Have you forgotten that my life is as empty as your pathetic parlor? I had all day stretching in front of me.” His expression sharpened. “And it’s not as though you invited me along on your girls-only detective day at Eileen’s office.”

Oh. That stopped me. “Brenda told you about that, too?” I sat on the step next to him. Hardwood floors are cold on winter mornings. “I guess you heard we didn’t come up with much.”

“That’s not the point! Charley, I told you if there was going to be any detective stuff I wanted to be in on it.”

“It wasn’t detective stuff. It was internet research.”

“Nevertheless—”

“Simon, I promise you that at the first sign of donning trench coats and skulking down back alleys, I’ll call you.” Which carried no commitment to tell him about donning towels and skulking around locker rooms. “In the meanwhile…”

“Yes,” he said briskly. “In the meanwhile we’re going shopping. And you now have exactly eight minutes.”

Fine. I wasn’t going to meet Brenda until nightfall anyway. If Simon wanted to perform a one-man decorating intervention, I could deal with it—on one condition.

We were going shopping south of Market.

Right near Zakdan, Inc.