Chapter 14
“What do you think Sophie’s story is?” I asked Jack over my eggs ranchero at Maxwell’s.
“Hmm, good question. Let me think for a minute.” Which translated meant, I’m going to enjoy my banana walnut pancakes, eggs, and sausage a while longer before I talk.
If we ran out of things to talk about, which was seldom, Jack and I loved to play a game that I call “scenario, please?” The way it worked is that you picked a person or couple wherever you are and challenged each other to come up with their story. Once one of us was done, the other could agree, elaborate, or change the story entirely. It was great for getting through airport flight delays and just fun in general.
“I’d say that Sophie is an old soul, and I don’t mean because her skin is like leather,” Jack finally began. “She’s like a ‘house mother’ to the Venice boardwalk sellers and performers, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she carries a deck of Tarot cards on her at all times.”
Damn, he’s good.
“I’d say that she’s been married two or three times, but the last ended over ten years ago even though they never bothered to get a divorce.” With that Jack began the thorough process of wiping his carefully cropped beard. He was a bit of a fanatic about having a clean, soft beard, which I greatly appreciated.
“Your turn,” he challenged me.
“I’m impressed, but you had to look past the loose dress to recognize that she had once been a crowd-gathering contortionist on the very same sidewalk where she now sells souvenirs. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s got a postcard or two with a photo of her in a pretzel-shaped pose from back in the day.”
“I should never go first, you can always add a zinger that I could never think of,” he said, applauding.
My cell phone rang and I saw that it was Augie.
“If it isn’t my favorite public servant,” I said into my phone.
“And hello to my most persistent suspect,” he answered back. “I wanted to bring you up to date; I’ve got good news and bad news.”
“Great,” I said as Jack paid our bill, and we stepped outside so I could put the call on speaker.
“We gave Howard the developer a thorough questioning and in the end let him go.”
“Is that the good news or the bad news?” I asked.
“Well, it’s good for him and bad for you.”
“Come on Augie, we’ve been all through this and you know I had nothing to do with that poor guy’s demise. What did you find out about him anyway?”
“His name was Carlos, Howard was about to fire him, the guy’s an angry drunk who also had a drug problem. It seems his wife left him and he never got over it.”
“Maybe if he’d cleaned up his little problems . . .”
“Yeah, well, he’s had a string of arrests, DUI. He was driving with a suspended license.”
“And how do you know that Howard didn’t kill him, maybe the firing didn’t go so well?”
“Because Howard was at a hockey game, courtesy of the lumberyard he does a lot of business with. It all checked out.”
“So who killed Carlos and what was he doing at the site so late at night?”
“I was about to ask you that, Halsey.”
“Very funny.”
“We’ll need the autopsy report to determine cause of death and that should help tell us where to go next. Also we need CSI’s report. Rumor has it that they found a couple gallon tanks of gasoline on the premises.”
“So maybe Carlos was about to carry out a grudge,” Jack said, and I nodded.
“But what or who stopped him?” I added.
“One other thing, has Aunt Marisol talked to you about the DNA test?”
“Is she pregnant again?” I asked, and Jack laughed. Augie did not.
“We got some interesting results on the test from the cigarette butt that this Bobby Snyder dropped. You know, the lawyer that’s trying to sell you all brokered mineral rights packages?”
“I know,” I said, thinking about what Sophie had just told me about “legal stuff.”
“It seems that his real name is Robert W. Snopes.”
“That’s why we couldn’t find any record of his law license,” I said aloud.
“He had one, if passing the bar in South Dakota the easiest test state counts. Records since he started practicing show that he’s basically a low-life ambulance chaser.”
“You said ‘had one,’ has he been disbarred?”
“Yes,” Augie told me. “He went down in style, having been caught stealing prescription pads from several doctors in a medical group. It seems that he was falsifying diagnoses for his clients in order to up claims on their accident and injury suits.”
“So why isn’t he serving time and providing legal advice to the fine citizens of federal prison?”
“You’ve met him, he’s a slimy one. He managed to worm his way into a significantly reduced sentence and parole, thanks to hefty bribes no doubt. But as far as the ABA was concerned, ‘stick a fork in him, he’s done.’ ”
“You’ve got to stop him, Augie, before he fools some nice old lady into giving him her life savings.”
“Believe me I stressed that to Auntie Marisol.”
“I said ‘nice old lady,’ Augie.”
“We’ll need something concrete in order to bring him in for questioning,” he said, ignoring my comment once again.
“We’re working on it,” I told him.
“Oh no you don’t, you and your band of winos need to stick to what you do best.”
“Which is what, Augie?”
“I haven’t figured that out yet.”
* * *
I spent the next couple of days hunkered down to the work that actually paid the bills. I got a web upgrade proposal off to my Coast Guard client, filled out a questionnaire for a possible new gig with the Santa Monica airport, and did things I’d been neglecting for good reason. Like getting my teeth cleaned, getting Bardot’s teeth cleaned, pulling out the patio furniture now that summer was on its way, and paring down Bardot’s pool toys from last year that were ratty and ready for retirement. I had to sneak out one night to toss “ducky,” a well-worn favorite, while she was asleep. She didn’t need to experience the trauma.
I was at my computer early the next morning, enjoying that fresh, clean, and light feeling you get after having completed a necessary evil when Sally walked into the office.
“Nine hundred ninety-nine, one thousand,” she declared, confirming the count on her fitness monitor.
“If you’ve come in here to prod me to exercise more, I will have you know that I’ve accomplished a great deal this week and am reveling in the glow of progress.”
“Actually, I was coming by to see if you wanted to go up to the gardens this afternoon to help Paula harvest her crops. Peggy’s bringing a nice chilled King Estate Oregon Pinot Gris.”
“Are we driving up there and back?”
“Yes.”
“I’m in, and I’ll throw something together in the cheese/fat/carb food group to accompany the wine.”
“Perfect.”
* * *
I was relieved to see that the gardens were fairly quiet and that there was no sign of Malcolm. Paula had led the way to her plots, or should I say her “horticultural fiefdom”? They clearly stood out as the Emerald City among the more organic and free-range gardens that were haphazardly doing their thing.
We’d toted along stacks of small crates to transport Paula’s bounty and settled ourselves along the perimeter of her first plot that was producing asparagus, carrots, and fava beans. While Peggy worked the corkscrew and Sally readied the wineglasses, I watched Paula whisper something to each carrot before she pulled it up from the ground. She stopped after the second one and seemed to be going through some mental anguish. I’d hoped that this wasn’t some sort of Sophie’s Choice situation, but she did leave one in its place to grow another day.
“Have you lived here all your life, Paula?” I asked, hoping to interrupt her malaise and worm my way into finding out more about her and her husband.
She nodded, which got me exactly nothing.
“Is this where you and Max met?” I asked, nodding to the gardens.
This time she shook her head.
“Paula’s story about finding Max is a good one,” Peggy said, urging her on.
Sally passed around filled glasses, and I took the wrapping off a tray of bacon-wrapped figs stuffed with bleu cheese and panko.
Oh, I can deliver.
“Well.” She seemed a little flustered having the spotlight swung her way. She took a good sip of wine and settled in to tell her story.
“It was 1968, right around here at the Venice Beach Rock Festival. I was braless, spirited, and twenty-one,” she said dreamily. “I remember how excited I was because Janis Joplin was going to appear. It was a psychedelic time, we were hippies, had gurus, soul, and believed in free love.”
Who are you and what have you done with Paula?
“Wow,” I said, trying to recover from this revelation. “And Max was there?” I was hoping to move her as quickly as possible off of the “free love” part of the story. This was an amazing about-face from the Paula I knew, but we were bordering on TMI.
“The beach was wall to wall people. I was there with my housemates,” she continued. Looking to the sky to help her recollect, she listed them: “Begonia, Nico, Tranquilla, Honey, Kyle, Dylan, and Buzz.”
“There were eight of you? Must have been a huge house,” Sally said.
“Not at all, just three rooms and a small kitchen with a hot plate. We laid out mattresses and futons on almost every bit of floor space. We shared everything and everyone.”
“Tell me about the rock festival,” I implored. I needed to quash any brewing mental images of Paula during her “experimental” period.
“Well, you couldn’t see much of the beach as hundreds of people had lain down to form a giant peace sign. While most of the country was digging out of snow, we were smoking the wacky tabacky and grooving to reggae.”
For about a minute she stopped talking, and from the way her upper body was swaying, I knew she was listening to Bob Marley in her head.
“Just outside Muscle Beach, where Schwarzenegger was pumping iron in hopes of becoming Mr. Universe, was a three-guy combo playing Thelonious Monk. A drummer, a keyboardist, and this tall drink of water on the sax.”
“Enter Max,” I said, pouring her more wine. We were getting to the good part.
“He had on a straw porkpie hat and such a peaceful, eyes-closed expression on his face as he made that saxophone purr. I sat down cross-legged to listen, after a while my friends got bored and moved on.”
“Wait, what were you wearing?” I needed to paint the whole scenario in my head.
“Umm, let’s see. It was an unseasonably warm day, so next to nothing. A sheer knee-length spaghetti strap white dress. I remember I was the last to get up that morning so no one was there to help me zip up the back. I just left it open.”
I suddenly looked at Paula in a totally different way. It may well be that we become caricatures of ourselves in our golden years, but I was seeing a young, hip, beautiful woman falling in love.
“After a long time of staring at him play while his eyes remained closed, I sadly got up to leave. I figured this was a lost cause.”
“Oh, Paula,” Peggy said, emotional even though she knew that a happy ending was nigh.
“‘Where’re you goin’?’ he asked me in a silky voice. That’s how I met Max. I never did get to see Janis Joplin.”
I took a deep breath and smiled. Nothing that romantic has ever happened to me, unless you count a college boyfriend who searched high and low for me at a party just so he could throw up in my hands.
“What are we harvesting next?” Sally asked after we’d all thought about her story for a while. “These look ready,” she said, yanking on a handful of onion stalks.
“NO! You can’t just pull them out of their beds like that! How would you feel?” Paula asked. She had tears in her eyes and she was starting to hyperventilate.
“I’m sorry, I was just trying to help,” Sally said clearly startled by Paula’s response. We looked at each other and then at Peggy, all three of us not sure if Paula was having some kind of episode.
“You are such a natural at gardening, Paula,” I said, watching her gently replant each onion. “I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind taking a look at my plot, maybe give me some pointers?”
Sally smiled and nodded, thinking that I’d provided a good distraction for Paula.
“What? No. In fact I have to go, right now,” she said, grabbing the few crates she’d filled with vegetables. She quickly stormed off, and we watched her disappear down the hill.
“I got nothing,” Peggy said.
“She really needs to start wearing a hat when she’s out here working in the hot sun,” Sally said. “Or she’s going to end up planting imaginary seeds in a garden with rubber walls.”