One of Those Malibu Nights (23 page)

Sunny noticed Mac held his own hand out somewhat reluctantly, and she wondered why. That is until their host took her own hand and crunched it in his. She batted her eyelashes in an effort to keep the tears of pain from falling.

“Sam Demarco,” he said, apparently unaware of his bone crusher. His smile was jovial, but his eyes were absorbing too much of her. Sunny hitched up her slipping peasant blouse. She felt maybe their roles should be reversed, with him as the vampire and her holding the cross while Mac hammered a silver stake through his heart. But this was just gut reaction and he was her host, so she smiled back and said, “Good to meet you.”

“I thought it was supposed to be a costume party,” she said.

“Well, of course it is,” Demarco said. “It’s just that my guests are a little too old to be dressing up. To tell you the truth, it’s all some of them can do to get into their normal
clothes.” He surveyed his guests dispiritedly. “Let me get you a drink and introduce you to some people,” he said.

They followed him, shaking various rather limp beringed hands. Sunny sipped a very strong martini and choked down a bite of very good caviar on very hard pumpernickel with a blob of crème fraîche, and unsuccessfully tried to merge with the St. John crowd.

“They’re eyeing us like we’re the hired entertainment,” she whispered to Mac. “I think they’re waiting for us to spin into a Fred and Ginger routine or a wild Apache tango.”

They slipped out onto the terrace, pretending to be moon gazing, then decided in a quick consultation that Sunny would suddenly feel unwell. They went back inside and Mac told Demarco, who said he hoped it wasn’t anything she had eaten there.

“Oh no,” Sunny said, attempting to look pale and weak. “The caviar was divine. Thank you so much for a lovely evening and I’m sorry but I really must go.”

She avoided Demarco’s bone crusher, but to her astonishment, he bent his patrician lion head and kissed her on the cheek. Not an air kiss either, but a real buss that hovered somewhere near her mouth. She smelled his cologne, cit-rusy, sharp. It suited him.

Leaning pathetically on Mac, she tottered from the house, leaving behind a discreet murmur of conversation, the sound of Andy Williams singing “Moon River” and the scent of Joy hanging like a pall over the room.

“I feel stupid in this outfit,” she fumed, waiting impatiently on the white marble steps for the parking valet to bring the Prius. “It wasn’t worth holding my stomach in for. Why did we do this anyway?”

“Demarco invited us. I wanted to see how he lived.”

“And?”

“RP’s assistant lives in maybe even greater splendor than RP himself. This man is earning some serious money simply for being ‘the right-hand man.’”

“Maybe RP gives him insider tips.” She grinned at Mac. “Y’know like buy Yahoo! for ten dollars a share.”

Tires screamed on the blacktop and the Prius stopped on a dime right in front of them. “Thanks a lot,” Mac said scathingly to the maybe eighteen-year-old who had gotten off on driving the car with his foot to the metal, just to see how it felt. He tipped the kid, who ran to hold the door for Sunny, grinning down into her peasant blouse. Sunny wanted to trap his fingers in the door but she contented herself with a haughty glare.

“Anyhow, where are we going now?” she asked.

They were heading down a darkened road with nothing but desert rubble on either side. The headlights picked out an animal. Its eyes gleamed like gold mirrors at them for a second before it disappeared.

“Coyote,” Mac told her, and in the distance she heard the baying of the pack. “We’re going to Ron Perrin’s place,” he added.

“Great,” Sunny muttered, annoyed with her silly costume and the fact that she had made a fool of herself in Desert Society. “Another fun location. Can’t I just go and change first? Anyhow, you didn’t tell me you had found Perrin. When did he get back?”

“I didn’t and he hasn’t.” Mac swung the car toward a pair of lofty iron gates topped with spikes. The big stucco wall all around the property was studded with shards of glass and a foreboding shiver tickled Sunny’s spine.

“What a way to live,” she said. “Behind big walls and broken glass and iron spikes.”

Mac took the electronic opener he’d filched from RP’s Hummer and pressed the code into it. The gates swung open and they drove through.

“We’re trespassing,” Sunny said nervously. “There must be dogs, killer Dobermans or something.”

“No dogs,” Mac said calmly as the gates clanged shut behind them. He parked in front of the pink stucco house that had been built in another era, when glamorous movie stars of the thirties and forties fled L.A. to avoid the media and find solace and sex behind the hidden gates of Palm Springs.

And now it was Ron Perrin’s home. Or at least, one of them.

The moon gazed serenely down. Beyond the walls they could see the distant shimmer of lights in the houses built into the foothills, and above them stars twinkled in an un-smoggy desert sky. Mac had a key in his hand, and in a second they were inside and he had disabled the alarm.

Sunny stood nervously just inside the doorway. She had stepped into a wall of blackness. It pressed against her eyes. The shiver up her spine was no longer a tickle; it was a definite tremor.

“I don’t think I like this,” she whispered, groping in the darkness for Mac’s hand. She couldn’t find it. “Mac,” she hissed, frantic.

“Keep quiet, Sunny,” he said in her ear, making her jump.

She turned blindly to him. “Don’t do that to me,” she said, shaken. “I don’t think I’m the big strong girl I thought I was.”

“Oh yes you are, and for God’s sakes, honey, shut up.”

Sunny seethed inwardly, wondering why she had agreed to come on this fool’s expedition, and looking like a fool in her Vampira outfit. Besides, the pointy-toe boots were killing her.

After a while the darkness seemed to melt a little. Now they could make out the shapes of furniture, heavy-looking carved Spanish pieces. An antler chandelier with crystal drops swung in the tiny breeze they had made closing the front door. Other massive doors led off the hallway and there was a lot of art on the walls.

Sunny squinted interestedly at them. This was not modern stuff like in Malibu, nor the reputedly priceless Impressionist collection of Bel Air, but simple amateur-looking desert landscapes. She wondered whether RP had painted them himself, whenever he took time off from making money, that is. And then there was the wonderful miniature railway track, more elaborate than the one in Malibu, complete with stations and pretty little trains.

Mac walked through a door to the right and she scurried to keep up, heels clattering on the tiled floor. She heard Mac groan again.

“Jesus, Sunny.” She caught the glitter of his eyes. “We might as well just turn on all the lights and say, Well, folks, here we are, burglarizing your desert compound.”

“Why don’t we just do that?” she said wistfully. A little light seemed like a great idea.

She shadowed him, glancing nervously over her shoulder, as he went quickly from room to room. It was not a small house. Sunny counted seven bedrooms, each with bath; plus several main rooms. And through them all ran the metal tracks of the fantastic mini-railway. Kneeling to inspect it, she was so delighted she could have played with it all night.

In the office, Mac switched on the bank of computers, blinking in the green glow from the screens. He looked up puzzled by a sudden roaring noise. It sounded like an approaching express train.

Sunny stared, surprised, at the mini-rolling stock, half-expecting to see a train shoot by. There was a sudden hard jolt. The floor rolled beneath her feet and the whole world was shaking. Things flew off shelves and plaster crashed from the ceiling and she fell backward beneath a heap of tumbled masonry.

“Sunny,” she heard Mac yell. Lifting her head, she stared foggily around. The ground began to shake again. She clung despairingly to a heavy table leg.

“Mac, it’s an earthquake,”
she screamed, choking on the dust.
“Mac.”

The scream of rock plate against rock plate as the earth slipped and heaved suddenly stopped. In the eerie silence, the only sounds Sunny could hear were those of her own
breathing and of dust trickling in little streams onto the rubble. Then with a sudden rumble and a toot a miniature train scooted tipsily past on its twisted metal track.

“Jesus, Sunny.” Mac’s arms were around her. “Are you all right, baby? Oh, God, tell me you’re all right.”

She leaned tearfully against his chest. It was almost worth getting half-killed to hear the tremor in his voice that meant he loved her.

An aftershock rolled through and arms around each other, they staggered through the broken glass and fallen artworks out into the night.

Moonlight dazzled down onto the fabulous cactus garden. Whoever had built the house in the thirties had been a collector and there were many wonderful old species, each with a metal tag, recording where it was native to and its age.

They stood in front of a tall cruciform saguaro cactus planted on top of a small sandy hillock, clinging together, waiting for the earth to stop shaking. The cactus speared upward into the night like a gigantic thorny branch. It looked green and healthy and very well nourished.

The ground shivered again. It was like standing on Jell-O. The sand piled around the base of the cactus began to slide in a miniature torrent. Faster, faster.

As they watched, a second cactus seemed to be growing. It emerged, slowly at first. Then suddenly, it snapped stiffly upright.

It was an arm. No flesh. Just bones. The radius, the ulna
,
and the hand. A diamond watch clasped around the wrist bone glittered in the moonlight
.

“My God, oh my God,” Sunny screamed. “Oh my God, there’s a body under there. Oh God, Mac, tell me I’m dreaming, tell me this is not really the house of horrors.”

Mac was already checking the watch. It was still ticking.

Palm Springs is a cute little town, a leftover from the twenties and thirties with modern-day accents, and its own brand of charm. Sitting in an interview room at the Palm Springs Police Department, Sunny was sure nothing ever happened there, and even though she had removed her fangs she knew that she and Mac still looked highly suspect—she as Vampira and Mac like Johnny Depp playing a psychopath, and both of them battered and bruised and filthy. To say nothing of terrified. At least she was.

A short while later, Mac went back to Perrin’s house with the detectives while Sunny sat drinking coffee under the skeptical eye of a young policewoman. They traded stories
nervously about their jobs. Eventually Sunny ran out of conversation and coffee, then Mac came back to “rescue” her and tell her they were going back to Demarco’s. The cops wanted to ask him some questions too.

Demarco’s new house seemed to have withstood the earthquake well, mostly just broken martini glasses and a couple of heart-quakes amongst his more senior citizen guests that had needed defibrillation.

Demarco himself was remarkably cool, unfazed by the questions, polite and enigmatic. He had no idea whose the body was, or where his friend Perrin was. He told the detectives that Mac could testify to that because he’d already hired him to try to find Perrin.

“Feel free to search my house,” Demarco said. “Of course you’ll not find him.”

“But,” as Mac said later to Sunny, “this is the Mojave Desert. Perrin could be almost anywhere. Once you are out of the man-made oasis that constitutes the Palm cities, you can drive for miles and all there is, is rocks and rubble, sand and more sand, foothills and gigantic mountains, with occasional small homes and cabins tucked away. It would be like looking for a rat in the desert.”

But he knew there was no holding back the police now. A body was buried in Perrin’s backyard and Ron Perrin was “a person of interest” to the Palm Springs Police. And everybody knew what that meant.

“He has to be somewhere close by,” Mac said. “Remember OJ’s friend sheltering him after the murder of his wife? Demarco has a lot to gain from remaining loyal to Perrin. He could be hiding him somewhere.”

Allie was deep into life at the Manoir and the Bistro. Every morning early, with Dearie ambling at her heels, she walked through green-lit birch groves and alongside fields bright with sunflowers. Pale buff-colored bunnies skipped in the hedgerows and the dog chased them, though he’d never caught one. She had avoided reading the newspapers, and the first hue and cry on TV about her disappearance had stopped.

With a tug at her heartstrings, she wondered why Ron had not tried to find her. She guessed he must still be with Marisa. Their affair must have been “love” after all.

Soon she found herself walking along a sandy lane where rows of leafy vines dangled enormous bunches of hard green grapes. A rosebush in full bloom stood at the
end of each immaculately groomed row. The roses were so lush and overblown they reminded Allie of Petra and she took out her little Swiss Army knife, bought for use on spur-of-the-moment picnics, thinking she would cut a few to take back to her landlady.

“Hey, what do you think you are doing? This isn’t a flower garden open to the public.” Robert Montfort’s angry blue eyes stared at her. “Don’t you know, madame, that the roses are there to protect the vines?”

“Ohh, hmmmmm … actually, no I did not.” He’d spoken in French and automatically so did Allie, somehow better at it when she was agitated and not thinking too hard about conjugating the verbs. “I’m so sorry,” she added, “I didn’t think.”

“Then next time perhaps you will. Those roses serve a purpose. The bugs are attracted to them, and it keeps them off the vines. It also allows us to know what pests might be infesting them.”

She nodded, doing her best to look apologetic. He was giving her a long look and she glanced away, but not before noticing that he wore old jeans and a blue open-necked shirt and he looked, to quote Petra, “very dishy.”

“The hair looks better,” he said, walking toward her.