Thirteen

How many different ways did that fail to add up?” Todd said once we were back in the Jeep and driving away.

“All the ways,” I said. “Starting with her blunder about knowing the name of the body.” I was on the Voyager app, scrolling through the adverts to get to the news. “Bugger,” I said. “They have ID’d him. About forty minutes ago. She could have read it.”

“She didn’t just find it out. She would have said so,” Todd decreed. “We’ve got ourselves another suspect, Lexy. Also-Mo definitely knows something.”

“No way,” I said. “Witness. Not suspect. Hippies don’t do homophobia.”

“Maybe John Worth will shed some light on it all,” was all Todd said, which was quite restrained of him. Then his restraints burst. “John Worth! I can see him, can’t you?”

“I can’t see him as the best bud of the only gay in the village,” I said. “Any more than I can buy Also-Mo being a bigot. She had a bong on the coffee table, Todd. She had prayer flags in her roof space. She thinks Cuento’s gone suburban. You’re right. Nothing about this adds up.”

“But she told us at least one outright lie,” said Todd. “Did you ever look at the press pics of the reunion at all?” I shook my head. “Look now. They’re bookmarked.”

I took his phone and clicked through. “Wow,” I said. “It’s still 1968 for these guys, isn’t it? Also-Mo isn’t the last hippie standing.”

“She might be,” said Todd. “They’re not stuck in the summer of love. Those are costumes, Lexy.”

I zoomed in on a couple of men standing posing for the camera and whistled. He was right. These weren’t real hippies like Also-Mo. These were middle managers wearing Freak Brothers wigs and tie-dyed t-shirts. One of them had a pair of pink flares on, but the other hadn’t gone that far and was still wearing his crisp chinos.

“Why would she lie about the reunion dress code?” I said. “It’s so easy to check.”

“No idea,” said Todd. “Moving on. Call Noleen while you’ve got my phone, and ask her if she knows where the old Worth place is.”

“Where are we going in the meantime?” I said.

“Historic downtown Cuento,” said Todd. “As long as it’s not a farm, any place with ‘old’ in its name is going to be downtown somewhere.”

Historic downtown Cuento is an area three by two blocks with brick-fronted buildings that used to be family department stores and drugstores with soda fountains, and are now bicycle repair shops and yoga studios. It’s zoned so’s you never have to cross the road to get a cup of coffee, and you never have to cross two to get some Korean barbecue. It is, in other words, California. Oh how California historic downtown Cuento is! And I love it. There are dog bowls and shade trees and outdoor pianos. There are pocket parks with chess tables and Little Free Libraries. There’s a book shop. There’s an art cinema. There’s a Jamaican barber just to stop it feeling too precious altogether.

And there’s Mama Cuento. She’s an eight-foot-tall statue on the corner of First and Main, where she stands with her hands on her hips and her head thrown back saying hmp-hmp-hm to everyone who passes by. Her bronze head is wrapped in a cloth and her bronze feet, just peeking out from the hem of her dress, are bare. Her collar is open as if she’s been working in the heat of a long day and her face has seen it all. I assumed she was African American at first, because of the colour of the bronze (which was pretty stupid of me) and the headwrap, I suppose. Todd reckons she’s Latina because of her name, but she’s pretty goddamn tall for a Latina lady and she’s got a long lean-muscled back that doesn’t exactly scream Mexico. Most of Cuento thinks she’s “regular American,” and if you take that to mean Native they roll their eyes and mutter at you. Noleen told me once there was a move to change her name to Town Mother back in the fifties, but it went nowhere.

Anyway, we hooked round Mama Cuento and into the residential bit of the historic district, with me on the phone to Noleen to mine her city memories for directions. She didn’t know the street address, but she told us it was the one with the wraparound porch and the two turrets “painted the color God regrets” and it didn’t take long to track it down. It was purple, with a bit of orange and black in the trim, a house made for Halloween. And yet this was the place where the residents had got their act together to de-pumpkin-ise in good time. As we went up the walk, a large woman in grey sweats was cramming an armload of black crêpe paper into the wheeliebin.

“Let me help,” Todd said, sweeping her aside and applying his considerable muscles to a bale of paper, straw, tattered ribbons, fake cobweb, and tangled lantern-lights, compacting it enough to close the bin lid.

“Thank you,” the woman said. “Thank you so much.” She seemed upset; fluttery and with a lot of looking over her shoulder as if someone might be watching.

“Is this bin bag going in too?” I said, holding one up. “Trash—can—bag—garbage—sack?”

“If there’s room,” the woman said. She was wringing her hands now like the heroine of a Victorian romance and her breath was coming quick and light. I’d never had to catch someone as they fainted and I didn’t fancy my chances with this little fireplug.

“Are you Miss Worth?” Todd said, when the bin bag was squished in and the lid was down again. “John Worth’s sister?”

“Becky,” she said. “Yes. Why? Are you reporters?”

Which was an extremely peculiar conclusion to jump to. Todd sent a side glance at me, but I had no more clue than he did how to answer.

“No,” I said after a long pause. “You can relax. We’re not reporters and we’re not police.”

Becky’s shoulders dropped. “Thank God,” she said. “So … who are you?”

“We found Tam’s body,” I said.

“What? When? Where?” Becky said. “Was it you that put it in the creek?”

Which was an extremely peculiar question to ask.

“No,” I said. “I live in the houseboat at the back of the motel on Last Ditch slough and we hauled it up with our beer box at a Halloween party.”

“Oh,” said Becky. “You’re that therapist!”

“I’m that therapist. And we feel involved now. So we want to find out what we can about Tam Shatner.”

“Right,” said Becky. “Right. Well, that was Johnny’s year, not mine. I didn’t ever get to know all the details, but you know … small towns … we heard rumors and rumbles. And now this!”

“Mm,” said Todd. “You understand why we’re so concerned, don’t you? If this was a hate crime … ”

Becky frowned. “A hate crime?” she said. “What d’you mean? Aren’t hate crimes like the Klan?”

She would have said more but the screen door at the back of the deep porch opened and a man came thundering over the boards to lean on the porch rail and bellow at us.

Bellow at her, I realised once I started paying attention to what he was saying.

“What are you doing?” he said. “Who the hell are they? What have you said? Did you—” But he bit that off. “I told you to come back inside.” Eventually he managed to make himself stop talking and stood there, gripping the rail with two meaty fists. I saw a class ring winking on one finger. He was breathing like a bull, and—added to his strong forehead, broken button nose, and underbite—it was a pretty comprehensive impersonation.

“John Worth?” I said. If I looked closely, I could just about trace the boy I’d seen in the yearbook. He had been burly with a fair complexion, a twinkling blond crew-cut, and dimples. This man had doubled in weight, lost his hair, and turned the deep brick red of a golf bum. He had pale blue tattoos on his forearms and ropes of gold chains tangled in his grey chest hair. He would definitely have worn a Hawaiian shirt to his high school reunion. He was wearing one now. And cargo shorts and flip flops.

“Who wants to know?” he said.

“Lexy Campbell,” I told him. “And this is Todd Kroger. We want to talk to you about your friend, Tam Shatner.”

“No friend of mine,” Worth said.

“Oh now, Johnny,” said his sister.

“I wouldn’t have pissed on him if he was on fire,” he added. “What do you want to know about him?”

“Who killed him, ideally,” I said. “But we’d settle for who saw him at the reunion, who spoke to him last, when he left, and where he went.”

“I spoke to him last.” Worth was still gripping the porch rail to look down at us, and as he said these words he flexed his fingers and took a tighter hold. His class ring made a dull clunk against the painted wood. “I saw him arrive, I went straight over, and I threw him out of there. Told him he wasn’t welcome and he should haul his sorry ass back to f—”

“Back to …?” I said.

“Excuse my language,” Worth said. “I shouldn’t cuss in front of a lady.”

“And he left, did he?” I said. “He took off like a good boy?”

“He walked away on his own two feet,” Worth said. “He ate nothing. He drank nothing. He spoke to no one. He arrived, I told him to fuck off, and he fucked off.”

“Excused,” I said. Worth blinked at me, uncomprehending.

“And how many people were there in total?” said Todd. His voice was worryingly calm.

“Hunnert fifty?” Worth said. “All of us and some spouses. Coupla dozen kids too.”

“You really think Tam Shatner was the only one at that party?” Todd said. “Out of a hundred and fifty people? You’re kidding yourself. Or did you send anyone else away, like you sent Tam?”

“Maybe Tam was the only one who was stubborn enough to attend,” I said. “Maybe all the others in the class of sixty-eight wouldn’t stoop to it.”

“What?” said Becky.

John Worth said nothing. He just looked at Todd out of his little bullish eyes, all squinted up from the pads of fat on his cheeks. He munched his jaws a bit too. Perhaps he’d found a morsel between his molars and wasn’t literally ruminating. But it didn’t help him look any less bovine. “Only one what?” he said, eventually.

“Oh right!” scoffed Todd. “You didn’t know what he was.”

“What he was?” said Worth.

“So why’d you run him out?” I said.

Worth let go of the porch rail and his arms fell heavily at his sides. “I didn’t,” he said. “He wasn’t there. I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t understand what’s happening.”

Join the club, I thought. What I said was, “So you didn’t see him, didn’t run him out of the reunion, didn’t follow him?”

“Follow him?” said Worth, raising his massive head. His breathing sounded laboured.

“Well, he could hardly get shot in the middle of a party,” said Todd. “Not without someone noticing. Even with a silencer.”

“Shot?” Worth’s voiced was ragged and his colour was changing.

“Yes,” I said. “Shot. It was in the paper.” But even as I said it, I wondered if my memory was betraying me. Dead four days and foul play had been in the paper. I would need to check.

“I thought he drowned,” Worth was saying. His face wasn’t even red now. It had darkened to a colour I’d be hard-pressed to name.

“He drowned?” said Becky.

“Aren’t you supposed to be at work?” said her brother. Becky looked at her phone and started. She trotted over to a car parked on the driveway at the side of the house and hopped in, peeling out on two tyres into the quiet street. I watched her go and then blinked, focussing on the other car, presumably John Worth’s car, still parked there. It was that same cat groomer’s decal again, 02-15-11 COCO, but this time I knew it was on a different vehicle from the one that had been in front of me in the coffee queue and parked at the Thrift. This one was red and low-slung. A … Cala … Cama … A red car.

“Is that yours?” I said, pointing. “With the phone number on the back?”

Worth stared at me. His face wasn’t red now. It had gone white behind his tan, a truly awful shade to behold. Todd was looking down at his phone.

“Let’s go, Lexy,” he said.

“Yeah, get off my property,” said John Worth. “And don’t come back.”

“Not even to piss if it catches fire,” I agreed.

“Lexy!” Todd hissed. “Let’s go.”