It was close to seven A.M. when we got back to Lael’s. She needed to get everyone up and ready for camp, so I went out to breakfast alone. At that hour, there weren’t many choices. I picked Norm’s on La Cienega, where it’s Day of the Dead every day. Somehow, it seemed appropriate. Norm’s was the sort of place where the vinyl seats were never wiped down between customers, and chances were good you’d sit in someone else’s syrup, or worse. I attracted a bit of attention in my cat burglar ensemble, and I suppose it didn’t help that I ordered bacon, sausage, and a Denver omelet. I was hungry. The slack-jawed patrons were electrified, the waitress was impressed, and the cook, well, he was bowled over and threw in a complimentary side of home fries, with lots of fresh onions and peppers. I would have liked to have reported that it was delicious, but I couldn’t taste a thing. By the time I’d finished my third cup of coffee, it was the respectable hour of nine A.M. I went home and pulled Detective Lewis’s card out of my desk drawer.
Unfortunately, he was out sick, so they connected me to his partner, Detective Moriarty, the smug one with the drawl. Actually, they were both kind of smug. I asked him how Mrs. Flynn’s case was progressing.
“Nothing’s changed. We’re still looking for the boys.”
“I thought you were keeping tabs on them.”
“We were, but they’re smart for a pair of dummies. They knew we’d come looking so they flew the coop, both of ’em.”
“How is that possible?”
“Damon’s stuff is still at his apartment. He left in such a hurry he didn’t even bother to take his favorite cowboy boots. That’s what the building manager said. And Gil, well, that son of a bitch—excuse my French—ripped off his girlfriend to the tune of five hundred dollars and hasn’t been seen or heard from since early Saturday morning.”
I wasn’t sure how to broach it. I was scared of getting sucked in deeper than I was. But I had to try.
“Do you think, Detective, that there’s a possibility someone else could have been responsible? I mean, isn’t it kind of strange that the boys would have trashed the house like that? Wouldn’t they have known where their mother kept her money?”
“I told you they were dummies.”
“But it doesn’t exactly make sense.”
“How’s that, Ms. Caruso?”
“Well, for heaven’s sake, why would they have left their mother’s ruby ring behind?”
“What ruby ring?” he asked sharply.
Me and my big mouth.
“Didn’t you see it, Detective? It was on Mrs. Flynn’s dresser, in plain view. You must have missed it in all the hubbub.”
“Suppose so.”
“Check again.”
“Thanks for the advice.”
I ignored the sarcasm. “Listen, could there have been some other motive, some other person you might consider? Like maybe Lisette Johnson—have you come across that name?” She was the person Meredith Allan had mentioned. “I think she might’ve been an old enemy of Mrs. Flynn’s or something—”
He cut me off. “Lisette Johnson?”
“You know her?” I asked, surprised.
“Of course I do. This is a small town, lady.”
“Well, excuse me.”
“Lisette Johnson is a Christian Coalition type running for the school board. She of all people isn’t running around with a gun in her handbag. And besides, it’s not your job to think about the murder of a woman you met only once. That’s my job. And I know what I’m doing. You just go about your business, and Lewis and I will call you when you’re needed. I appreciate your concern, but let the professionals handle it.”
He hung up abruptly. I was annoyed. I remembered what Joseph Albacco had said about the police investigating his wife’s murder. He had said they decided right from the beginning that he was guilty and never considered anyone else. And now it was happening all over again.
I lay on the floor and sulked a little, not sure what to do next. I wanted to talk to Annie. I dialed her number but hung up before it started ringing. I could wait until our date later this afternoon to drive the poor girl crazy. I ate some Moroccan olives and some dry roasted peanuts and watched Mimi play jump rope with Buster’s tail. They were pretty good buddies, those two, except for Mimi’s eating disorder. She was always sneaking Buster’s diet kibble. She preferred it to tuna. He took his revenge by raiding her litter box, which I found most unappetizing. My train of thought was interrupted by the man of the house, who sprinted to the front door, tail wagging. He always beat the bell by a couple of seconds.
It was the cute UPS guy, struggling with a package. I signed that queer computery thing you sign and told him to dump it in the entry hall. It slid off the dolly and hit the floor with impunity.
It was my order from the Mystery Manor. I had to hand it to them. The bozo over there had found something incredible—a complete set of Gardner’s “Speed Dash” adventures, which had appeared in one of the big-time pulps, Top Notch, in the twenties and thirties. I loved Speed Dash. Perry Mason was invincible, sure, but Sidney “Speed” Dash was a superhero. He could climb anything, plus he had a photographic memory, plus he didn’t smoke or drink or harbor at any time or under any circumstances an impure thought. His virtue gave him that little something extra a person needed to vanquish evil.
Gardner had been inspired by something he came across one day in Ventura. It was 1927, and he was walking from the county courthouse back to work when he saw a crowd gathered outside his office building. They were watching Mr. “Babe” White, a human fly, scale the building’s four stories without a net. One false move, and good-bye Babe. Luckily, he made it. The crowd went wild. Gardner jogged upstairs full of ideas. Some wonderful stories came out of that experience.
One of the best things about this project was getting to look through old issues of Top Notch, Black Mask, and Best Detective. They were called “pulps” because they were printed on cheap wood-pulp paper, unlike the higher-toned and more expensive “slicks.” I loved the gaudy illustrations, full of blood and cleavage, the advertisements for things like mustache wax, and the sheer pleasure of stumbling across a story by somebody like Raymond Chandler, who’d claimed, somewhat improbably in my opinion, that he’d learned to write by dissecting one of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Ed Jenkins novelettes.
There were sports pulps, Western pulps, adventure pulps, fantasy pulps, science-fiction pulps, and sexy pulps (the Spicy series is one of my favorites). At their height, the two hundred pulps that were published once or twice a month needed hundreds of millions of words’ worth of stories a year. Eager to get in on it, Gardner had tried his hand. The first story he submitted to Black Mask was “The Shrieking Skeleton.” It was a dog. One of the big muckety-mucks at the magazine read the story and sent a note around the office saying the characters talked like dictionaries and the plot had whiskers on it like Spanish moss hanging from a live oak in a Louisiana bayou—obviously a frustrated writer himself. They sent the story back, but someone had inadvertently left the note between the second and third pages of the story, and Gardner read it. Instead of falling into a depression, as I would have, he stayed up for three nights rewriting the story. He typed with two fingers, and when he pounded his skin off, he just kept hammering away on the blood-spattered keys. He was that kind of tough guy. Finally, he sent the story back and it was accepted, mostly, he suspected, because the editors at Black Mask were so disconcerted by the whole incident.
My book was going to be good. This guy was great material. I was going to figure everything out. And I couldn’t wait to get my hands on my newest acquisition. Only I couldn’t lift the box. I got a knife from the kitchen and sliced through the tape right there in the entry hall. The box was full of those styrofoam peanuts, which I tossed on the ground to Buster’s and Mimi’s delight. But what I found underneath was not a collection of Top Notch magazines. It was Jean Albacco’s lockbox, and it seemed to be made of solid steel.