Not A Girl Detective (6 page)

That was like leaving your baby at a 7-Eleven. Well, not exactly, but you wouldn’t do it unless you were in the middle of a nervous breakdown or something.

I picked it up and immediately felt squeamish, as if I were violating this person-I-didn’t-even-know’s entire being. Which is worse, sins of commission or sins of

omission? All those years of catechism and I couldn’t remember. Squeezing one eye shut so it didn’t really

count, I flipped through the pages.

On paper, at least, Nancy Olsen was having an un-

eventful week. Something with Jeff at nine in the morning on Monday. Something at three-twenty that

afternoon. Hip-hop last night, Wednesday. An appoint-

ment at Lola’s in Silver Lake, also on Wednesday. I’d been to Lola’s for a consultation once. I’d wanted to straighten my hair. But the prices were outrageous, and I’d decided against such drastic measures anyway.

What about Nancy? Had she been booked in for

highlights? A trim? A mullet cut to spite her mother?

Looked like it’d been something. Tucked into a side

pocket of the Filofax, along with some receipts and

scraps of paper that I’d inadvertently sent flying all over the place, was a parking ticket issued yesterday on Hillhurst Avenue, just around the corner from the salon.

Thirty-five bucks for a meter violation. Well, at least that meant she was alive and well and breaking the law.

All good things. I could tell Clarissa her daughter was okay. But first I had to stick everything back where it belonged.

I reached between the two front seats to retrieve the 42

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stuff that had fallen in there, then bent down to pick up some tiny pieces of cardboard that had gotten stuck inside the movie section.

But they weren’t tiny pieces of cardboard. They were

slides. I stepped out of the car and held them up to the busted fluorescent light so I could see them more

clearly.

Odd.

One was an image of a little girl sitting on a river-

bank, lost in thought. It reminded me of Alice before her visit to Wonderland. Another was a photograph of a female nude, curled up into herself, like a seashell. The next was a Japanese print of a geisha girl holding a

handful of cherry blossoms. Then a photograph of a

headless mannequin draped in fur.

There was one more slide. I leaned my head back and

peered at the tiny piece of film. The image was hard to see. It was black-and-white and very grainy. A painting.

I looked at it more closely. A painting of a naked

woman. A naked woman with pale skin, light eyes,

wavy hair, and a knowing look.

And a killer smile.

It was the painting of Grace Horton I had just seen in Edgar Edwards’s blue bedroom.

So where was Edgar Edwards?

And where was Nancy Olsen?

And what was Nancy Olsen doing with Edgar Ed-

wards’s dirty picture of Nancy Drew?

5

Things can go from bad to worse faster than you

might think.

It started when I pulled into my driveway and almost

flattened Buster.

Luckily I saw him in time. I slammed on the brakes,

tore out of the Caddy, and threw myself upon my en-

tirely unfazed poodle, who endured my ministrations,

then squirmed away to perform the life-affirming act of peeing on the grass. I was so discombobulated that I

neglected to ask myself why Buster wasn’t inside the

house where I’d left him. He wasn’t the vagabond sort.

It was then that I noticed my front door was wide

open.

Now you might think a person would proceed with

caution. Especially a person whose father was a cop,

whose two brothers are cops, a person who is dating a cop. But you know what they say. Doctors make the

worst patients. Trust me, it relates. In any case, Lois, my neighbor from three doors down, carrying a can of

cat food, stopped me before I could barrel inside.

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“Poor Buster. I saw the whole thing. And good after-

noon to you, birthday girl!”

Lois and her twin sister, Marlene, known profession-

ally as Jasmine and Hibiscus, had been showgirls way

back around the dawn of time. They amused them-

selves these days by tottering up and down the block in their scuffed pumps, tending to the neighborhood

strays.

“Buster is fine, but what do you mean, ‘birthday

girl’? It’s not my birthday.”

“Oh, Cece.” She tittered. “Getting old is a blessing.”

“Lois,” I said, “my birthday is in October. What’s going on around here?”

“Your friends came by at one.”

“Lael and Bridget?”

“No, no, your gentleman friends,” she said excitedly.

“They were trying the back gate. They said they wanted to leave the lady of the house a surprise for her birthday. My hands were full”—she wagged a can of

Friskies at me—“so I showed them the key you hide in

the flowerpot.”

“You
what
?”

“Then Marlene called on my cell phone and I had to

go. They promised they’d lock up.”

I didn’t wait for the rest. I scrambled up the steps and straight into the living room. Then I heard Lois hyper-ventilating behind me.

“Oh, dear. They looked like such nice fellows.”

Bad was Buster. This was worse.

The green velvet couch was overturned. The chairs

were pushed up against the wall. Tapes and CDs littered the floor. My flokati rug was bunched up in a heap, like N O T

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a dead polar bear. The dining room was a disaster, too.

The armoire had been ransacked and my faded Indian

tablecloths from Pioneer Boulevard in Artesia (you

take the 10 to the 5 to the 91, and in forty-five minutes you’d swear you were in New Delhi) had been tossed

unceremoniously to the ground. At least they’d spared my wedding china—not the pattern I would’ve chosen,

but my ex-mother-in-law was not to be swayed.

The kitchen looked pretty much like I’d left it, which was a total mess, except that the dishwasher door was open. I noted some eggy crust clinging to the frying pan I’d wedged onto the top rack. Damn. That thing still

wasn’t working. Ilya the repairman had been over three times in the last three weeks.

“This is awful!” Lois wailed.

Then I remembered my computer. I was terrible

about backing things up. Things like my nearly com-

pleted book on Carolyn Keene. My ex, an English pro-

fessor and master neurotic, was always after me about that. Heart pounding, I raced out the kitchen door with Lois right behind me, and toward my office. It was still locked, thank god, which made sense since it couldn’t be opened with the front-door key. I peered through

the French doors and my Bondi Blue iMac peered

back at me.

“The research is secure,” Lois declared solemnly.

We went back inside and into my bedroom, where

things were not as sanguine. My bed had been pulled

out into the middle of the room and stripped of the

sheets and pillows. My comforter had been tossed on

top of the TV. My books had been tossed off the night-stand. But I really didn’t care about any of that stuff.

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Only my computer—and my clothes. I felt my stomach

contract into a knot. My precious clothes that I’d been collecting for two decades. They were everywhere, like wrapping paper after you open your presents.
But it
wasn’t my birthday
.

“Do you have household insurance?” Lois was trying

to be helpful, but I wanted to kill her. I knelt down to pick up my metallic knit cocktail dress; 1978 had been a good year for Missoni. And there was my silk chiffon skirt with the scalloped sunburst, one of my first purchases. I had so wanted to be Stevie Nicks when I was fifteen. I plucked my Pucci for Formfit Rogers dressing gown out of the heating vent and clutched it to my

chest. You just can’t get those anymore, much less for seventeen bucks. Oh, and my Halston silver sequined

beret.

“This stuff must be worth a pretty penny,” Lois said, fingering a faux leopard bolero.

“Not really. Only to me,” I said. But her inane com-

ment got me thinking. I leapt up and yanked open the

top drawer of my bureau. My black velvet Lanvin cape

from the twenties, with its wide fur collar. At one thousand smackeroos, the single most expensive piece of

clothing I’d ever purchased. It was there, safe and sound in its pink tissue paper nest. And that confirmed it.

I’d been robbed and nothing was missing.

My Lanvin cape, inviolate; my TV, still there; my

CD player, the microwave in the kitchen, my computer, the god-awful china, all untouched. What was going on here? Had the robbers found religion halfway through

the job? I probably needed better stuff. Or maybe my

new best friend Mitchell Honey was behind this.

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Maybe he wanted to make sure I hadn’t tied Edgar Ed-

wards up and hidden him in my closet.

“Are you going to call the police, Cece?” Lois was

looking up at me with those hazel eyes, which were still beautiful and clear, unlike her mind.

“Well, I think I have to,” I said, exasperated now.

“Two strange men broke into my house and are out

there wandering around with my key.”

“But if nothing is gone, what’s the point?”

“What’s the point? Lois, a crime has been commit-

ted. This is what people do when a crime is committed.

They contact the authorities.” I started looking for the cordless phone. Hadn’t she ever read number 33,
The
Witch Tree Symbol
? Never, under any circumstances, let a stranger lock up after you.

Lois sat down on my bare mattress and burst into

tears.

I sat down next to her and patted her hand. “Are you

worried I’m going to be angry at you? It wasn’t entirely your fault.”

“I know that. It was your fault for leaving the key in such an obvious place. No, it’s the police. They don’t like me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What part do you not understand? The police don’t

like me. They don’t like my sister, they don’t like our dogs, they hate our landscaping—oh, I could go on

and on.”

And you will, I thought to myself.

“They’ve been over here four or five times now,” she

continued, “trying to get us to chop down that beautiful old tree in our front yard, but I have discovered they 48

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can’t make us because we simply don’t have the money

to pay for it. We’re penniless. Let them pay for it, I say.”

“Lois. You do realize that tree is a hazard to the community.” After a particularly windy day, the sidewalk in front of Lois and Marlene’s house would be littered

with its enormous black pineapplelike pods. Once,

when I was walking back from the market, I watched

one smash into the roof of an inauspiciously parked

sports car with the force of a missile.

“Like I was saying, between the tree and the visits

from animal control”—now she was crying again—

“they don’t need to hear I was involved in something

like this. They’ll target me for brutality, I just know it.

Or they’ll take away our parking spot.” Lois and her sister had somehow bamboozled the city into giving them

their own handicapped spot, though neither seemed to

have any problem visible to the naked eye.

“Please, Cece, I don’t want to talk to them. Just let me help you get the locks changed, and that’ll be the end of it. Marlene’s ex-brother-in-law is a locksmith.

He can be here in a twinkling.”

As it turned out, Marlene’s ex-brother-in-law was the best I could do. My unburglary excited little to no emo-tion in the guy manning the phones at the West Holly-

wood Sheriff’s station. He suggested I come in at my

earliest convenience to fill out a report, which I inter-preted as a polite way of saying, “You must be kidding, lady.” I tried not to take it personally. After Lois left, I gave Lael a quick call and talked her into spending the night. Her kids were already gone, so she agreed. But I should have known the first thing out of her mouth

would be something sensible.

“Cece,” she said, not even halfway in the door, “I

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don’t care what that guy on the phone said, you have to call Gambino. He would want to know about something

like this.”

“She didn’t mean to step on you,” I said to the lock-

smith, who had arrived a few minutes earlier, and was crouching in front of the doorway. “Listen, can you do something about that knob while you’re at it? It comes off in people’s hands. And this is for you, Lael.” I

handed her a huge pile of laundry. We were washing

those sheets before we were sleeping on them.

“Cece, I said you had to call Gambino. Why didn’t

you answer me? Are you ill? You look pale.”

“Peter and I aren’t actually speaking right now,” I

said. “What should we order for dinner? Do you like

mee krob?”

“Stop it. Why aren’t you and Peter speaking?

Again?”

“He told me he loved me.”

“And . . .”

“And I don’t believe him.” I grabbed the laundry out

of her hands and headed for the washing machine. She

followed me into the kitchen.

“You are one sick cookie.”

“Is that an offer?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I have this recurrent fantasy. I’m listening to

Mozart. I’m eating your chocolate chip cookies—”