Chapter 16

“Didn’t I tell you?” Trixie looked confused. “I know I lose track of things sometimes, but I thought I told you about that.”

“I think I would have remembered.” I sat on the couch next to her, forcing my voice to remain calm. The last thing I needed was to startle her into going poof again. “Tell me now. Please.”

“Oh. Sure.” She sat up straight, as if she were about to recite her lessons in some strict Depression-era classroom. “Well, it was…” She blinked a few times, then shook her head. “I think it wasn’t too long ago, but I can’t really remember. I think I’d been away.” She thought about it and I tried not to scream in impatience. “Yes, I’m certain I was. I was away, and then I was down in the basement.” She smiled but it was shaky, as if she were still a little uncertain.

“And then what?” I urged.

“Well, gee, it’s hard to explain, but I just sort of knew something was happening.” She thought about it, a tiny line appearing between her perfectly plucked eyebrows. “It was just…electric or something.” She glanced at me.

I nodded. “Electric,” I encouraged.

“And then, I don’t know why, but I knew I had to look in the ice machine. I was just sort of drawn to it, as if that’s where the electric feeling was coming from. So I looked. I couldn’t open it, you understand, so I just flitted inside.”

“You can do that?”

“Well, naturally,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

“Okay, sorry.” I told myself we’d circle back to her ghostly superpowers later. “What happened next?”

“Well, when I first saw him in there, I thought ‘How silly. He better not stay in here or he’ll catch his death.’” She grimaced. “So I tried to wake him up. He was asleep or unconscious or something. I tried to move him but I couldn’t.” A pained look flashed across her face. “You just don’t know how awful it is not to be able to talk to people, or move things, or help somebody when he really needs help and there’s no one else around.”

“I can’t imagine,” I said, truthfully.

“So I flitted out again, and I was trying to figure out how I could get Kate or Albert or someone to come down and help the poor fella out, and that’s when it happened.” Her face took on an expression of wonder. “All of a sudden he was just standing there, in front of the ice machine.”

I held my breath.

“So he looks at me, and I can tell he’s confused, but he looks at me.” She paused to make sure I understood the significance of this. “He can see me. And I just about go out of my mind I’m so happy—finally! And he starts to say something, and then…” Her expression clouded. “Then the lady came.”

“What lady?” I was ready to jump out of my skin.

“She was so pretty in this sweet yellow dress that was all summery. She looked over at me, and it was a sad sort of look, but then she went right to him. There were tears in her eyes, and he backed up when he first saw her, but then she said something and he stopped, and he seemed more confused at first, but she kept talking and then he seemed to understand, and he was…happy. He hugged her and he started crying too.” She looked at me, her own eyes full.

“What did she say?” I asked, breathless.

Trixie shook her head. “I don’t know. It was in Spanish, I think. One word I know she kept saying was ‘me-ho.’ Do you know what that means? Is it Spanish?”

“Mijo,” I told her. “It means ‘my son.’ I swallowed. “‘My dear son.’”

Her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh. She was his mother. I thought it was something like that.”

“What happened next?” I asked.

“She took his hand,” Trixie said. “And then this line of light just appeared behind them, and it got longer, all the way from the floor to the ceiling, and it got brighter, and wider, and I had to close my eyes because it was too bright, and I couldn’t look anymore.”

The look of loss on her face, the devastation, was almost more than I could take. I didn’t press her for anything more. I thought I knew what had happened next.

“When I opened my eyes they were gone.”

  

Trixie needed a break after that, and I didn’t blame her. She didn’t go poof, but she said she needed to rest. She walked out of the room, already fading as she left.

I paced in the confines of the office, trying to process everything I’d learned that eventful morning. Albert knew about Trixie. Trixie had met Raul Acosta’s ghost. Raul Acosta’s mother had led him to…somewhere. Which meant there was a somewhere. Somewhere after.

It was a lot to process.

But revelations about an afterlife aside, if I understood what Trixie had just told me it meant that Raul had been alive when he was put in the ice machine. Alive, but probably unconscious from his head wound. Had whoever killed him intended to come back for him? Had that person been Kate? And had she been prevented from coming back because she herself had been killed? Or met with an accident? It still didn’t make any sense.

Feeling stir crazy, I grabbed my backpack and was about to go out for a walk, or possibly a drink, when Callie appeared at the door.

“Ummmm, Nora? There’s somebody here who wants to talk to you.”

The way she gazed at the man who entered the room with her made it clear that poor Brandon might have some serious competition for Callie’s affections. But I can’t say I blamed her. The man, fortyish and wearing a rumpled suit, was easily the most chiseled manifestation of male good looks I’d seen since I last visited my gym in Hollywood. But that wasn’t what I found interesting about him. What was interesting was that he bore an uncanny resemblance to the icy Raul Acosta.

“Ms. Paige?” He advanced into the room, holding out a hand. “My name is Hector Acosta. I believe you…the police told me you…”

I shook his hand, finishing his introduction for him. “You’re Raul Acosta’s brother.”

  

We went across the street to Café Madeline. Not only because I was getting claustrophobic in Kate’s office, but because Callie had shown no sign of voluntarily leaving Hector’s presence.

So now I sat sipping a latte with Raul Acosta’s brother.

“Please excuse me for coming to see you like this,” he began. “But when the police told me how my brother was found…” He fixed me with a look. “I have many questions.”

He spoke with a barely noticeable Spanish accent, and everything about him, aside from his obvious emotional pain, gave the impression of a cultured, moneyed man. His suit, although rumpled, was cut to perfection. His hair was groomed to within an inch of its life. His white shirt was open at the collar, no tie. If I’d met him in Hollywood I would have pegged him as a mid-level agent or, more likely, a real-estate developer.

“I’ve come to take my brother’s body home,” he said. “To Bogota. My family has an estate in the hills above El Poblado. We have a small chapel and a family crypt. It is where Raul belongs.”

Bogota. As in Columbia. Raul Acosta had been Columbian. Warning bells, fueled by everything from Green Fire (1954, Stewart Granger and Grace Kelly) to Romancing the Stone (1984, Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner) went off in my head. In the movies, Columbia is a land of emeralds and drugs, and the people who are ready to kill for them.

“I see a question in your eyes and I will spare you the embarrassment of asking it,” Hector said. “There is a certain stereotype about wealthy Columbian families. In this case that stereotype has truth. My family,” he continued, speaking carefully, “has been very successful in some very lucrative enterprises. Not all of which were entirely legal.”

“Oh.” I wasn’t sure if I thought it or said it out loud. Was he telling me he was part of some Columbian mafia? Was Raul?

I realized Hector was looking at me, clearly expecting a further reaction. I tried not to look as freaked out as I felt, and I focused on the only question that really mattered. “What do your family’s enterprises have to do with my movie theater?”

I startled myself with that proprietary “my.” But it was how I’d already started to feel about the Palace.

Hector sat forward in his chair, keeping his voice low in the café. There was nobody at the table next to us, but the rest of the long narrow room was filled with people. His body language was saying you couldn’t be too careful. “That is what I would very much like to find out.”

I leaned toward him. “You do know that the manager of the Palace, Kate Winslow, also died recently?”

“On the same day as my brother,” he nodded.

I blinked. I hadn’t been sure about the timing. “Did the police tell you that?”

“Yes. They’re investigating the deaths as related crimes.”

Ah ha! It sure would have been nice if Detective Jackson had mentioned that to me.

“But the police,” Hector’s mouth twisted, showing frustration. “They hear the name Acosta and they think, of course, this must involve criminal activities. This must involve drugs, or gambling, or worse.”

I didn’t think I wanted to know what “worse” was. I also didn’t want to think about the fact that I was apparently having coffee with a criminal overlord.

“What they don’t know, or won’t believe, is that my brother and I have entirely dismantled that part of the family business. That is our history, not our future.”

“Okay.” So, I was having coffee with a retired criminal overlord?

“And you don’t believe me either,” he observed. “But it’s true. My mother died four years ago, and after her death my father could no longer go on. He went to live out his days in Santa Marta, looking at the sea and contemplating his many sins.” Hector stared into his coffee. “When he left, Raul and I vowed we would end everything that was illegal. We would take what remained and build a legal business.”

“You wanted to go legit,” I said. “Like Michael Corleone.” I couldn’t stop myself from referencing The Godfather (1972, Al Pacino and Marlon Brando).

He winced slightly. I was probably not the first to make the comparison. “Raul has been here,” he continued, “in San Francisco, for the past three months, looking into opportunities opened up by the legalization of recreational marijuana.”

“Oh,” I said again, things beginning to fall into place.

“No,” he said. “We have nothing to do with the product. Not cultivation or production or distribution. That isn’t what interested us.”

I blinked. “What else is there?”

He took a deep breath. “There is another enormous piece of the business which no one has yet been able to figure out.” He gave me a shrewd look. “There is banking.”

  

Here’s the thing: Pot may be legal at the state level, in several states, but it’s still very much illegal at the federal level. So those people involved in the aforementioned cultivation, production, and distribution may very well make a bundle, but no federally-insured bank will touch it.

This is the problem, Hector informed me, that he and his brother had planned to solve.

Again I asked the obvious question. “How?”

“Starting here, in California, with a state-only bank,” he said. “One that is rock-solid and as trustworthy as any federally-insured financial institution in the country.”

That raised a thousand other questions, but only one concerned the Palace. Only one concerned Kate. “Right,” I said. “I’ll ask you again: What does any of this have to do with my movie theater?”

  

I spoke to Hector until our coffee went cold, but neither of us could come up with a reasonable answer to my question. There was no obvious reason why Raul Acosta had been killed at the Palace. And no obvious connection between Raul and Kate.

The screenwriter part of my brain immediately began concocting theories about the excess income on the Palace books and possible ties to Columbian crime families, but Kate had been overspending for at least a year and Raul had only been in town for three months, so I didn’t want to get carried away. Still, there had to be a connection.

“Could they have been involved?” I asked at one point. “I mean, romantically?”

“I very much doubt that,” Hector said drily.

I bristled on behalf of all women who didn’t look like international movie stars. “Well, I mean, Kate was a bit older than Raul, but…”

“My brother was gay,” Hector explained. “He was in a relationship with a professor of economics who lives in Berkeley. Who has a very good alibi,” he added, guessing I was about to ask that very question.

“Okay, so he probably wasn’t dating Kate,” I relented.

“No.”

I gave up on logical connections. “What if it was just a horrible coincidence?” I asked. “Suppose he was just there to see a movie? And suppose someone followed him in to kill him? And suppose Kate saw something, and they chased her out of the theater and killed her in the park?”

“That’s a lot of supposing,” Hector said, making me think of the “suppose” scene from Double Indemnity (1944, Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray) because that’s how my brain works even when I’m discussing a real murder with a real person.

“But I suppose it’s possible,” Hector continued. “What movie was playing?”

“Random Harvest,” I told him. Which I believed any gay man over a certain age would be contractually obligated to love. But. “Oh, wait. Never mind. Raul didn’t go into the auditorium anyway. He met Kate in the lobby and they went upstairs.”

Hector stared at me. “What? How do you know that?”

Whoops. I couldn’t exactly tell him that my one eyewitness was a ghost. “Someone saw them,” I said.

“Who? I need to talk to them.” He pushed away from the table, as if he planned to hunt the witness down right that minute.

“No!” I put my hand on his arm.

He looked at me, frustration written on his face. “Nora, what you’ve just told me confirms that my brother and Kate Winslow knew each other. I have to know what else this person saw.”

“That was all,” I told him. “And she didn’t even get a good look at the man Kate met. I’m just assuming it was your brother.” That actually hadn’t occurred to me before. I had just been assuming the stranger Trixie had seen from behind was Raul. Probably because it would have been too confusing to assume anything else. “But besides,” I said quickly, hoping to divert his attention from this mystery witness. “The real question is who would have followed him into the theater to kill him? What enemies had he made here in San Francisco, or who could have followed him from Columbia?”

Hector ran a hand across the dark stubble on his face. “That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to figure out.”

I let out a breath. Trixie was safe from discovery for the moment.

I mean, she was probably safer than any of us, what with a murderer still running around.

  

Double Indemnity

1944

 

This is a movie about trust. Yes, it’s also about murder and scheming and sex and insurance, but it’s mainly about trust. Dissatisfied wife Barbara Stanwyck has to trust insurance salesman Fred MacMurray, right from the time she asks him if she can get an accident policy on her husband without him knowing about it. This is not the kind of question anyone trustworthy would ask, but Stanwyck is the definition of a femme fatale, and we wouldn’t have a movie if MacMurray chose to walk the straight and narrow.

 

They pretty much spell out their future relationship right at the beginning.

 

Him: “What a dope you must think I am.”

Her: “I think you’re rotten.”

Him: “I think you’re swell, as long as I’m not your husband.”

 

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Everything begins at night, of course, with something very wrong with MacMurray. How wrong, and how it got so wrong, is the totally noir tale he’ll tell his Dictaphone.

 

In flashback, MacMurray meets Stanwyck on a sales call at her gorgeous Spanish-style LA home. She’s wrapped in a towel, looking at him appraisingly from the top of the stairs. The spark between them is immediate. This is classic noir stuff. She’s bad and he knows it, but he can’t look away. And BTW, he’s no prince himself.

They’re sniffing each other out from the first. Does he handle accident insurance? You bet he does. And that’s not all he’d like to handle. MacMurray is full-on sleazy in his role, which was a departure for him. I wonder if his heavy-handed come-ons and his leering obsession with her ankle bracelet seemed quite as gross in 1944. Or would the sexually-provocative Stanwyck have been “asking for it”? I mean, there is that ankle bracelet…

 

In any case, innuendo gets poured all over everything, and then MacMurray heads back to his office, where we meet his boss, played by Edward G. Robinson looking so much like my Grandpa John that it’s eerie. Robinson is our only moral actor in this piece, and he has a sixth sense about insurance fraud. This will be significant.

 

MacMurray knows full well what Stanwyck wants of him. He put it to her in unvarnished tough-guy terms: “Look, baby, you can’t get away with it. You want to knock him off, don’t ya?” She does.

 

Later, MacMurray confesses to the Dictaphone. “I knew I had hold of a red-hot poker and the time to drop it was before it burned my hand off.” But knowing and doing are different things. The next time he sees her it gets steamy quick, and then it’s all “I’m crazy about you, baby” and tales of accident policies and widows winding up in jail. The good news is, he’s seen it all so he knows what mistakes to avoid. He has a plan. Right.

 

Back at the office, Robinson sums up the difficulty in trusting a partner in crime. “It’s not like taking a trolley ride together where they can get off at different stops. They’re stuck with each other and they’ve got to ride all the way to the end of the line, and the last stop is the cemetery.” This is eerily similar to the promise Stanwyck repeatedly makes to MacMurray. “It’s straight down the line for both of us.”

 

And where will that line lead? I’ll just say that in these matters you should always listen to Edward G. Robinson.

 

Killer lines:

This movie is so full of killer lines! MacMurray’s voiceover defines the tough-guy 40’s image, everything tossed off with nonchalant swagger. And Stanwyck gives us fast-talking dame for the ages.

 

“Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money. For a woman. I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman. Pretty, isn’t it?”

 

“We were talking about automobile insurance, only you were thinking about murder. I was thinking about that anklet.”

 

And this has to be the best sexually charged exchange ever between two people who’ve known each other less than five minutes:

 

Her, knowingly: “There’s a speed limit in this state Mr. Neff. Forty-five miles an hour.”

Him, with a sly grin: “How fast was I going, officer?”

Her: “I’d say around ninety.”

Him: “Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket?”

Her: “Suppose I let you off with a warning this time?”

Him: “Suppose it doesn’t take?”

Her: “Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles?”

Him: “Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder?”

Her, steely: “Suppose you try putting it on my husband’s shoulder?”

Him, smiling: “That tears it.”

  

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