The Sunset Motor Hotel didn’t have any connecting suites, so Pandora and I were given a room a few doors down from Delia’s. This was all to the good. With Delia into the suicide/blame thing, I was happy to keep contact to a minimum. I wasn’t even annoyed when she rang to tell me she and Sam and Guido had been invited to dine at the mayor’s home—“safe from the media vultures”—leaving Pandora and me once again incarcerated in a hotel room.
As soon as we were settled in, I called the front desk to order burgers and fries from the coffee shop—a treat for Pandora, since Delia didn’t approve of American fast food. The service was surprisingly quick, and instead of the usual sullen bellboy, a big, friendly girl named Vernelle delivered our meals. She proceeded to make a fuss over Pandora and told her she had “the cutest little accent” and sounded “just like a Beatle.”
Pandora basked in the attention of somebody—anybody—who wasn’t her boring old nanny, and ran to get her xylophone so she could play her repertoire of Beatles tunes.
Vernelle claimed to be delighted by Pandora’s rendition of “Rocky Raccoon,” and asked for another song, making herself at home in one of two overstuffed chairs.
Normally I’d have been annoyed by this presumption, but I was as eager for company as Pandora. Vernelle said she was a sophomore at Taft Junior College and her father owned the hotel. She was helping out during the chaos caused by “all this movie-star stuff,” but at the moment she didn’t have anything to do because everybody had “stampeded off to the mayor’s house.”
A stampede. Again I was happy to be excluded from the mayor’s dinner party.
“So how do you like Taft?” Vernelle asked.
I tried to think of something nice to say. I felt a little sorry for her. She was probably younger than me, but wore the bullet-proof hairdo and polyester clothing of a woman twice her age.
“It has an interesting name.”
Vernelle gave a snort. “Interesting? Taft? Not hardly. But we used to have a name you could call interesting. Has anybody told you about the old name?”
I shook my head.
Vernelle looked around as if she feared eavesdroppers.
“Moron,” she whispered. “The town used to be called Moron.”
She said this with such deadpan seriousness, I had to stifle my laugh with a mouthful of burger.
“For real.” Her expression was still disconcertingly earnest. “It started out as Moro, after Señor Moro, who sold all this land to Standard Oil way back. But it kept getting mixed up with Morro Bay, so some railroad guy just painted an “n” on the sign.” Vernelle let out an unexpected belly laugh.
Pandora, who was still plunking away, said, “You’re not supposed to laugh. Rocky Raccoon got sent to his room, all alone with Gideon’s Bible.”
I tried to entice her to take a break and eat her dinner, but when I handed her a ketchupy french fry, she threw it back at me. I felt tears of exasperation sting as I pulled grease and ketchup from my hair. I needed to put us both to bed.
But Vernelle surprised us by squatting on the floor with Pandora. “I’ll bet you know some other Beatles songs. How about “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer?”
Pandora perked up and went back to noise-making that could probably be heard all the way over at the mayor’s house. I tried to hurry Vernelle along to a quick resolution of her story.
“So the citizens rebelled and renamed the town Taft?”
“Yeah. The name of the president at the time.” Vernelle re-ensconced herself in the easy chair. “Some of us like to joke about the old name, but…” She lowered her voice to a dark whisper. “You gotta be careful. With most folks in this town, you do not want to say the ‘m’ word—not for any reason—or you’ll be sorry.”
“I am not sorry!” Pandora pounded her hamburger with her mallet, sending pickle and tomato squirting. I confiscated the mallet, but Pandora wailed until Vernelle picked up four French fries, named them John, Paul, George and Ringo and somehow got the child to eat them—as well as most of the rest of her meal.
After that, I figured it was my duty to listen to Vernelle relate her town history as long as she wanted.
But she wasn’t there to talk history. As soon as we finished eating, she launched into her real agenda:
“So, you were this guy’s girlfriend, right? Alistair Milbourne, the dead guy? Are you totally ready to kill Sam Calhoun?”
“Why on earth would I want to kill Mr. Calhoun?” I used my most arch Bryn Mawr tone.
Vernelle gave me a hard look, then burst into a sunny smile.
“Jeepers! So you think he’s innocent? Who do you think did it? The English chick? Everybody I know thinks Sam’s the murderer, and I don’t want to believe it. But he was so evil in that show Last Stage to Tucson, wasn’t he?”
So the public thought Sam Calhoun was a murderer. Because he played one on TV. That explained the media frenzy. I sank back into my chair, shaking my head.
Vernelle looked surprised.
“That snotty English girl didn’t do it either? Oh, wow. So the dead guy did kill himself!” She leaned forward. “But I’ve heard he only took, like, one or two pills. Maybe if he was drunk enough…” She peered into my eyes. “You know things you’re not telling, don’t you?
I looked away, feeling invaded. One or two pills? Did she have any idea what she was talking about? It didn’t make sense. Even if he’d been faking a suicide he’d have taken more.
“That stuff he wrote in the Bible!” Vernelle said. “It was a suicide note! I thought so all along. I knew Sam wasn’t a murderer. The Gideon’s Bible. That’s the clue.”
“A Gideon Bible? Alistair wasn’t exactly the Bible-reading type.”
Pandora unfortunately took this as a cue to do a reprise of the saga of Mr. Raccoon and his Gideon Bible. She grabbed the mallet from the table where I’d put it and I tried to keep it from her, but she kept hold and swung the mallet with full force against my shin. I screamed. I did not know such a little mallet could inflict so much pain.
“Oh, my Lord,” Vernelle ran to her service cart, handed me a bucket of ice and a towel and told me to “ice that thing right away, and keep it elevated. You do not want it to swell.” She moved the chair she’d been sitting on so I could rest my foot on it.
She turned to Pandora. “Do you like to sleep in a nightie or PJs? Why don’t you show me your favorite outfit to sleep in?” While Pandora ran off to find her blue nightie with the musical notes on it, Vernelle handed me a couple of rumpled newspapers from the bottom shelf of her cart. “Here, hon. Read those. Somewhere you’ll find the story about the suicide note in the Bible. I think the little girl needs some sleep.”
While Vernelle did her amazing Mary Poppins thing, I held ice against my shin with one hand and a week-old issue of the Midway Driller with the other. The headline story was “HOLLYWOOD CORPSE MAY HAVE BEEN SUICIDE.”
Alistair seemed to have been designated “the Hollywood Corpse,” since for some reason his body had not been officially identified. This big headline news story involved one Sharene Delgado, a maid at the Knight’s Rest Motel, who had discovered something in the deceased’s room the Taft police had not: a page torn out of the Gideon Bible in the nightstand. The page had scribbling on it, which Sharene said was “totally the same as Mr. Milbourne’s handwriting on his room service receipts.”
Being a good citizen, Sharene had taken the Bible to the Taft police, but not before going to the library and making a Xerox copy of the crumpled page, which she showed to the press— “since the police seem to be having so much trouble getting around to these things.”
After a couple of digs at the foot-dragging of local law enforcement, the Driller delved into the contents of the Bible page. A passage from one of the psalms (psalm 146:3 had been circled which began, “Put not your trust in princes.” The word “princes” had been scratched out and an impolite word the reporter said “rhymes with witches” had been scribbled above. There was another circle around the phrase, “There is no help.” This—both Sharene and the reporter were quite sure—indicated a suicidal mind at work.
Beyond silly. Anybody could have vandalized the Bible. Anybody who read Bibles—which Alistair didn’t. I couldn’t figure out why such twaddle had been put forth as news and told Vernelle so when she emerged from Pandora’s room.
“How could they print this? Did the police check it out?”
Vernelle shook her head. “Oh, no. They couldn’t do a darn thing until last Monday because nobody could find the man’s next of kin. They can’t have an investigation until they know officially who’s dead.” She lifted the dripping towel from my leg and took it to the bathroom to wring it out.
I remembered Delia telling me about Alistair listing her as his next of kin. His whimsical—or passive-aggressive—gesture seemed to have backfired.
“You OK, hon?” Vernelle said. “I can watch the little girl and get somebody to take you to the doctor, if you want.” She examined my leg more closely, where a red welt was beginning to rise. “She sure has some strength in that arm.”
I shook my head. I felt guilty letting this sweet girl do my job, and the pain was subsiding. No need to generate more drama when there were reporters around who’d make a story out of anything.
“Alistair spent his life strangling in his mother’s apron strings. How could the police not find her?”
Vernelle got defensive. “They did. But they had to call every single name in that man’s address book to find her. Hank Odom said he never knew anybody could have that many friends who didn’t know squat about him. He started with the A’s and didn’t find anybody who knew the family until he got to the V’s.”
Officer Odom would have saved himself a lot of trouble if he’d just asked me. I could have told him Alistair’s mother was listed under G for “Gorgon.”
“So the friend called Alistair’s mother?”
Vernelle put some fresh ice in the towel. “After, like, forever. The Vanderbilt girl had another friend who had to call somebody else. You would not believe what a time poor Hank has been having.”
“Vanderbilt?” No. It couldn’t be. “Polly Vanderbilt Conway?” Wogs. Of course. I could picture Alistair getting off on listing her under her posh middle name in his damned book. He treated it like a trophy case.
“You know her?” Vernelle’s eyes got wide.
I wasn’t going to tell her Wogs was my cousin or we’d be there all night. But I needed to find out how much Wogs and—oh, please god, no—the rest of my family had been sucked into this. My dad could deal with the scandal, since he’d had plenty of his own, but my Aunt Livy—Wogs’ mom—might already be dead of mortification.
After evading a few questions about Vanderbilts, I persuaded Vernelle to get on with the story. Apparently Wogs and her friend Punch Albright, who dated Alistair for about a half a minute a few summers ago, agreed to get their Nancy Drew on for Officer Odom and managed to locate Alistair’s elusive dam in Missoula, Montana, where she was married, for the moment, to a rancher named Calvin McTigh.
So, over a week after Alistair met his demise, Glenda Milbourne et al. McTigh was finally summoned to identify the “Hollywood corpse” lying in the Heavenly Home Funeral Parlor, an establishment owned by Mr. Aram Krikorian, the coroner-cum-mortician—a member of the local Moose’s Lodge along with Vernelle’s dad.
Vernelle claimed Mrs. McTigh arrived two days later via Greyhound bus, which seemed unlikely for such a grande dame, but I didn’t want to interrupt. She said the grieving mother then roused Mr. Krikorian from his bed at eleven PM and demanded to see her son’s body. And, Mr. Krikorian told his fellow Moose the next day, the woman did not collapse in tears or look away, as normal, god-fearing folks do when confronted with a loved one’s earthly remains.
Instead she proceeded to examine her son’s “buck nekkid” corpse, especially a mysterious round bruise on the back of his head.
When she found the bruise, Vernelle said, “the old lady had a cow.” Since Alistair’s other wounds were on his face, indicating he’d fallen forward, a back-of-the-head wound made the whole thing look a lot like murder.
At least to Mrs. McTigh, who demanded a public coroner’s inquest, complete with jury, be held immediately to determine the real cause of her son’s death.
If there was such a wound, I had to grant the Gorgon had a point. Plus there were those pills on Alistair’s sleeve that nobody had been able to explain. I felt an icky chill. What if it had been murder after all? What if a murderer had been in that room right next to me, on the other side of an unlocked door that night?
Could that murderer have been Sam? Delia? Some random killer?
I guess that hadn’t seemed like a big possibility to Mr. Krikorian, because he told Mrs. McTigh—and later the Moose—that in California, the only person who could call for an inquest—juried or not—was the coroner. And if she wanted the coroner on her side, she should find a motel where she could “deal with her grief,” and call him in the morning.
That, Vernelle declared, was when “the you-know-what hit the fan.” Mrs. McTigh called Mr. Krikorian a whole lot of names Vernelle could not say in polite company, but what was worse, she called him the former name of the city of Taft.
“In this town, you do not call anybody a moron,” Vernelle said. “You just don’t.”