Still feeling like a worm for having worried Mrs. Pinkerton so much, I walked down the hallway to the kitchen, hoping to find Sam and Harold there.
They were. Hallelujah!
“You through with my dear mother?” Harold asked as I pushed through the swing doors.
“Yes. I’m afraid I wasn’t awfully nice to her. I think I frightened her.”
“Good,” said Harold. “Maybe she’ll stay at the resort longer.”
Sam chuckled.
“Harold!” I cried. Then I started chuckling, too. Wicked, wicked Daisy. “Have you talked to the staff here, Sam?”
“Yes,” said Sam.
“Could anyone tell you anything? Edie, maybe? Featherstone?”
“Not really. No one liked O’Hara much, but that doesn’t mean a whole lot.”
“Why didn’t they like him?” I asked, curious.
“They got tired of him spouting the ‘free Ireland from Britain’s hateful grasp’ rhetoric all the time,” Harold answered for Sam.
“Yeah,” said Sam. “The department might have a lead on Costello.”
“Costello?” I said, puzzled. I thought we were looking for O’Haras. Then I remembered. “Oh! The officer who headed the work crew!”
“Got it in one,” said Harold.
“And Harold and I checked where the thieves got into the yard. They didn’t have an easy job of it, especially when they had to carry out all of O’Hara’s belongings. Looks as if they broke the antenna off his fancy radio. We found it in the ivy.”
“Goodness. Can you use the antenna for something? Fingerprints, maybe?”
With a shrug Sam said, “Not sure yet. The antenna doesn’t have much surface to it, if you know what I mean.”
“But you’re going to test it, right?”
“Of course, we will.” Sam frowned at me.
“I’m sorry, Sam. I know you’ll do everything you can.”
“Yes. And you need to get to the telephone company and have them set up a private line for you.”
“I aim to do so right this instant,” I told him. Then I remembered the family Chevrolet resided in our driveway on Marengo Avenue. “Um…Harold, are you still aiming to take me?”
“I’ll go with you,” said Sam. “Harold has other things to do.”
“He does?” I said, baffled.
“I do,” said Harold.
I said to Sam, “But don’t you have duties with the police department?”
“This will be one of the duties I’m performing for the police department. I’m in charge of the Viola Gumm case. Her case now appears to include my brainless nephew and a former officer of the Pasadena Police Department.”
“Oh,” I said. Then I thought about Mrs. Bissel, and I cast a frantic glance at Harold.
Sam, who seemed to have developed supernatural powers of his own when it came to my frantic glances, caught this one and said—entirely too sarcastically, if you ask me—“After we finish at the telephone company, we’ll drive up to Mrs. Bissel’s home. I’ve already spoken to her over the ’phone, and she’s expecting us.”
“It’s all right, Daisy,” said Harold, grinning. “Your personal detective will strive with all his might to protect you. And serve the community at the same time, of course.”
“Of course,” said Sam, rolling his eyes.
“I appreciate you both more than you’ll ever know,” I told those two wonderful men in my life. I think they feared I might break down because they each took a step away from me.
“For God’s sake, don’t start crying!” said Sam.
“Daisy!” barked Harold. “Shape up, will you? This is no time to fall apart!”
“I am not falling apart,” I said in a cranky voice. “I’m fine. Let’s go, Sam. Thank you, Harold.”
“Cripes,” muttered Harold.
“Come on,” said Sam. “My Hudson’s right outside the kitchen door.”
“Very well.” I said no more. Stupid men.
Dealing with the telephone company didn't take long. Sam paid them a deposit for a private line at the Gumm-Majesty bungalow on South Marengo Avenue in Pasadena, California. I considered protesting and saying I should be the one paying the deposit fee, but I didn’t want to cause a fuss at the telephone company. Some of my friends worked there, after all. I wouldn’t win the argument, anyway, so why bother?
The telephone company set up an appointment for installing a separate wire on Thursday. Two days away. Now that the private line seemed imminent, I wanted it now. But I didn’t complain.
As we walked from the ’phone company to Sam’s auto, I said, “Thank you, Sam. You’re awfully good to my family and me.”
“They’re my family, too,” said he, opening the passenger-side door for me. “Or they will be soon. Besides, I like most of your relations better than I like most of mine. Well, Renata’s not bad, but her son sure is a stinker.”
“I wish they liked me,” I said softly, settling myself into the seat.
Sam didn’t reply until he got in behind the steering wheel. Then, with a shrug, he said, “Doesn’t matter. I like you, and I’m the one going to marry you.”
“True,” I said with an only partly satisfied sigh. Until Vi got found, nothing seemed satisfactory to me.
Then something not-quite-vital, but important, occurred to me. “Oh, shoot, Sam, I forgot to telephone Regina.”
He squinted at me as he pressed the self-starter on the dashboard. “Who’s Regina?”
“Sam Rotondo, what do you mean, ‘Who’s Regina’? Regina Petrie, of course! The one who’s shortly going to marry Robert Browning.”
“Oh, yeah. I know who she is now. We can stop by the library if you want.”
I thought about this possibility for a second or two, then said, “Thank you, but no. I don’t think I want to go there. I’m afraid Regina might be able to tell something’s wrong if we see each other in person.”
“You’d better make sure you don’t walk around looking like a thunderstorm, or everyone will know something’s wrong.”
“You’re right. And I’m a good actress, but we don’t need to take the time to go to the library.”
“Why do you need to talk to her at all?”
“She’s interested in the exercise class Lucy Zollinger and I are going to conduct at church.” I thought of something else. “And I have to look in the basement and see if I can find my old exercise bloomers. Nertz!”
“It’ll be good for you,” said Sam, evidently deciding unrelenting-ness would be a good way to treat me.
“Bother,” I said. “Why don’t you come? You could use some exercises, too.”
“Maybe I will.”
“Good Lord! I didn’t mean it!”
“I did. I want to talk to some of those church ladies. Call it a hunch.” He grinned mysteriously.
Darn and heck if my Voodoo juju didn’t smite me with a heatwave at that precise moment. What was wrong with the pesky thing, anyway? I didn’t need any more craziness in my life. I thought about taking the darned thing off, but then I recalled Mr. Jackson and his mother’s worry about Vi and me and decided I’d better not. I’d just have to put up with its whims and fancies.
“What’s the matter?” asked Sam, peering at me out of the corner of his eye. Guess he’d seen me slap my chest. I opened my handbag to make sure Vi’s juju still resided there. It did.
Feeling foolish, I admitted, “My silly Voodoo juju just sent a burning pain through me. Well, maybe not exactly burning, but it was hot and it hurt.”
“Yeah?”
This time I squinted at Sam. He sounded honestly curious and not at all disparaging. I wasn’t sure I trusted this complacent mood.
“What do you mean, ‘yeah’? Just ‘yeah’?”
“Yeah. You know I don’t believe in any of that mystical mumbo-jumbo, but my own personal juju started heating up every time I was in the presence of a murderer, don’t forget.” He scowled at the street in front of him (Lake Avenue, if anyone cares) and said, “But that’s ridiculous. A dolly on a string can’t do anything.”
“I suppose you’re right,” I said, not believing myself. His juju had heated up every time he’d been in the presence of a murderer a year or two back. As much as I didn’t want to believe any of my spiritualist mumbo-jumbo, as Sam called it, I couldn’t help but do so. Sometimes. I mean, a ghost actually had turned up at one of my séances once. Scared me so badly, I almost quit the spiritualist racket, but my family needed the money I made, so I didn’t.
“So don’t try to convince me,” Sam said in a voice I didn’t deserve.
“I’m not trying to convince you of anything, Sam Rotondo. Did I say you should believe in any mystical mumbo-jumbo?”
“Well, you did at the time.”
“Huh.” Shoot, I was beginning to sound like him. “That’s because your own personal juju did work that time!”
“Huh,” he said.
“But let’s not argue. I practice spiritualism as a profession. You know I don’t believe in it. Much. Well, not all the time, anyway. Not often, in fact.” We sat in silence for a moment or two, and then I said, “Spiritualism is bunk, but every now and then the inexplicable will happen.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” said Sam grudgingly.
“Mrs. Jackson made a special Voodoo juju for Aunt Vi,” I said.
“Nice of her.”
We left the discussion there. Sam turned right on Foothill Boulevard, and we tootled the long block to Maiden Lane and turned left. Then Sam made another left, taking us onto a little bridge over a deep ditch leading into Mrs. Bissel’s back yard. The driveway circled around a huge monkey puzzle tree.
If you’ve never seen a monkey puzzle tree, they’re worth looking up. They have spiky leaves that don’t look like leaves. In truth, they look as if they were invented by someone during the Spanish Inquisition to torture people. And the bark comes off in little pieces, like jigsaw-puzzle pieces. Luckily for us, the wind wasn’t blowing, so we didn’t have to dodge any monkey-puzzle spikes as we walked to the back door, where Keiji Saito, Mrs. Bissel’s houseboy, awaited our arrival.
“Mrs. Bissel said you’d be here about now,” said a smiling Keiji as he opened the back door leading onto the sun porch. “Come on in. She’s in her sitting room upstairs with Dennis and another fellow who works for Dennis.”
“Mr. O’Hara?” asked Sam, handing his hat to Keiji and shrugging out of his coat. Keiji took the coat, too, and hung both items on the coat tree.
“I think O’Hara’s the fellow’s name,” said Keiji. “Would you like me to see you to Mrs. Bissel’s sitting room?”
“No, thanks,” I told him. “I know where it is.”
“Very good. Mrs. Cummings has a tray ready, so I’ll bring up some tea and refreshments in a few minutes.”
“Thank you, Keiji. And please thank Mrs. Cummings, too. This is very kind of all of you.”
“Not a problem,” said Keiji with a smile. He knew as well as I did that the kindness, if any, came from Mrs. Bissel. Keiji and Mrs. Cummings were her employees, and if they didn’t do what she asked of them, they’d be looking for new jobs. From Mr. Barrow, evidently. Still and all, I liked both Keiji and Mrs. Cummings, so I thanked them anyway. After all, the two of them might have been grumpy about having to do their jobs, and they weren’t.
As Keiji left us to go through the breakfast room to the kitchen, Sam asked, “So where’s this sitting room?”
“Directly upstairs. Come with me.”
So he did. I led him through the massive living room—Mrs. Bissel, not being as high-minded as Mrs. Pinkerton, I guess, didn’t call her living room a drawing room—into the huge front hall, and to the lovely staircase. The staircase had sort of a platform at its foot where Mrs. Bissel kept a fancy statue. She’d told me the woman who built the house in 1905 had been a dress designer, and when she held fashion shows, the models would mince daintily down the stairs, pause on that platform and turn gracefully to give observers the full benefit of whatever frock or ensemble they were wearing. I didn’t bother telling Sam any of the house’s history, because I sensed he wouldn’t care. While he was on a case, he didn’t like his attention deflected therefrom.
When we reached the top of the staircase, I noticed I was kind of out of breath. Maybe I did need the crummy exercise class. Phooey. Because my juju had recently whapped me, I waited, but didn’t feel a thing.
Doggone it! If the juju was going to work, I wished it would work consistently. If it wanted to react to mention of the exercise class, why didn’t it do so every time I thought about it?
Don’t even try to answer. As Sam said, spiritualism is nonsense. Or maybe I said it. Whoever said it, it’s the truth.
As soon as I tapped on the door jamb, Mrs. Bissel called, “Daisy? Is that you and Detective Rotondo?”
Unlike Mrs. Pinkerton, Mrs. Bissel, who had a habit of calling Sam “Mr. Rotund,” never had any trouble remembering Sam’s last name. I appreciated her for it.
“Yes. We’re here, Mrs. Bissel.”
“Wonderful! Come right on in.”
So we did.