FIVE

Not very pleasant, is it? the voice of William Powell said inside my head. No, Bill, it isn’t. And I’d be perfectly happy if you would just take the case over from here, with or without Myrna Loy.

Nora Frost was in the dry bathtub, fully clothed, but as dead as the Black Dahlia. Her eyes were open, staring in blind shock, and there were two holes in her blood-soaked blouse. Why she was lying in the tub was anyone’s guess. Maybe her murderer had come upon her in the bathroom, shot her, and she’d fallen there. Maybe whoever it was forced her into the tub and then shot her there so the blood wouldn’t get on the floor. A neat-freak murderer. Possibly the medical examiner could tell.

As I stared at the body part of me…oh, let’s be honest…all of me, every fiber of my being, wanted to turn around and run as fast as I could, get out of here, and try and forget the scene I was viewing and smelling. But I knew I couldn’t. Running wouldn’t solve anything. Besides, my car was outside. If I were to turn tail and run, I figured I had about a fifty-fifty chance that there was at this very moment someone out there walking their dog, and they would happen to see me fleeing the house and wonder what was up, and then later, once they learned Nora had been murdered, would be only too happy to tell the police what they had witnessed.

Kind of a tough spot, kid, Bogie told me.

There was no real way around reporting the murder and then waiting for the cops to show up, but before I did that I steeled myself to go through the house, room by room, praying with each step that I would not also find the bodies of two twelve-year-olds. It only took about five minutes to canvas every room in the house, all of them empty. In what was clearly the twins’ bedroom—there were matching beds on opposite sides of the room and a shelf containing enough video games to support a retail store—I took a peek inside the large, walk-in closet, and felt relieved that it contained only clothing. A lot of clothing. Some of it qualified as costume pieces: trench coats, police uniforms, even spacesuits. If I looked long enough, I would probably find superhero outfits complete with capes, but I was not interested in pursuing it.

I was satisfied the Alphas were not in the house, which hopefully meant they had not witnessed their mother’s murder. But where were they?

Confident that this was somehow going to come back to haunt me, since like good deeds, no act of concerned citizenship goes unpunished, I pulled out my cell phone, held it in one unsteady hand, and with a shaking finger dialed 911. When the dispatcher answered I gave my name, Nora’s address, and then reported the murder. “I’m a private investigator,” I said, wanting to get as many facts as possible down onto the recording that I knew was being made, “and I came over to meet with my client, Nora Frost.”

“That is the decedent?” the woman’s voice at the other end asked.

“That’s right. I found her house open and discovered Nora’s body in the bathtub.”

“In the bathtub. Did she drown?”

“No, the tub is dry. She was shot.”

“Why was she shot in a dry bathtub?”

“If I knew that, I’d have to be the murderer, and since I’m not, I don’t know.”

After double checking the address, the dispatcher said the police would be on their way momentarily. “Are you going to stay there?”

“Yes, in case the victim’s children show up.”

“How old are the children, sir?”

“Twelve. Twin boys.”

“Where are they now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are they in danger?”

“I don’t know.”

“All right, the police will be there soon.”

I’m sure there are less fun things in the world than wandering around a large, dark house with a dead body in one of the rooms, but I hope I don’t experience one any time soon. If this were a movie, I’d go back into the bathroom and discover that Nora was no longer in the tub, that maybe she was still alive, though hopelessly insane, and after having staged her own death for some bizarre reason, would begin to chase me around with a butcher knife.

“Stop it,” I told myself.

Oh, but why? Vincent Price’s voice replied in my head. We’re having so much fun!

“She’s still going to be there, Vinnie,” I said aloud, and then forced myself to go back and poke my head into the bathroom. I was right, she was still there. Still silent. Still dead.

It was nearly fifteen minutes before I heard the approaching siren, a period of time in which I began to get the feeling back in my body somewhat. That one was followed by several other sirens and before much longer the first black-and-white, all guns a-blazin’, screeched to a stop out in front of the house. I casually strolled through the front door, holding my ID, in front of me. A phalanx of LAPD officers piled out and marched toward the porch, though once there they waited for an officer in plain clothes to take the lead. He was tall, lean, with salt-and-pepper hair, and the prominent, sharp features of a French New Wave movie star. He wore a dark suit with no tie. “Your name Beauchamp?” he asked me.

“Yes sir. I made the 911 call.”

“I’m Detective Colfax out of Northeast station,” he said. “Show me the body, then we need to talk.” I nodded. Re-entering the house, I led Colfax and three uniforms to the bathroom. “You didn’t touch or move anything, did you, Mr. Beauchamp?”

“I touched only doors and knobs,” I said. “I searched the house to see if Nora’s sons are here, and they aren’t.”

“All right, wait out there somewhere.” I went back into the Brothers Alpha shrine room and stood around while the various police officers covered the house with strips of yellow tape and started searching every surface and corner like bloodhounds. Eventually Colfax came back out, though on his way to me he was stopped by a young Hispanic officer also in plain clothes. “The M.E. can’t make it here for at least an hour,” he said.

Colfax jabbed a thumb toward the bathroom behind him. “I don’t think she’s going anywhere. Mr. Beauchamp, come outside with me.” I followed the detective back out onto the front lawn. Colfax pulled a battered notepad from his hip pocket and took a pen from his jacket. “Okay, sir, so you’re a rent-a-cop that the decedent hired.”

“Um, I’m a private investigator, detective,” I said, fishing out a business card and handing it to him. “Rent-a-cops are usually security guards.”

“What were you supposed to be investigating?”

I filled him in on the case, so far as I knew it. There was no reason for me to hold anything back, since my client was lying dead in the other room.

“You saw her just last night,” Colfax said.

“I left around six-ish, maybe.”

“And the boys were here then?”

“Yes.”

“Where are they now?”

“That’s what’s worrying me. I don’t know where they are. Nora’s car is out front, and they can’t drive on their own.”

“You think someone has them?”

“I don’t know. It’s not impossible.”

“It’s also not impossible that they ran to a neighbor’s house when they saw someone coming in to kill their mother. Hey, Hector,” he called, and the young plain clothes officer I had noticed earlier came trotting up. “Mr. Beauchamp, this is my partner, Detective Mendoza.” The younger man nodded in my direction. “Mr. Beauchamp is a private investigator,” Colfax added, and instantly Mendoza’s eyes widened and I got the distinct feeling that he was trying to will me to turn into stone. “Hector, take a couple men and check each house up and down the street. See if you can find two twelve-year-old boys.” Turning back to me, Colfax asked: “What are their names again?”

“Taylor and Burton Frost. They’re twins, but not identical. Dark blonde hair…why am I describing them? Just look anywhere. This place is practically wallpapered with their pictures.”

“Okay, pick your men and get going,” Colfax ordered, and Mendoza sprinted away. “A detective already,” Colfax mused, watching him go. “They make ’em younger every year.”

“Are you sure you shouldn’t put out an Amber Alert?” I asked.

“Those come from the Highway Patrol, and you can only put one out once an abduction has officially been reported. Are you officially reporting an abduction?”

“No. I mean, I just don’t know.”

“Then let’s see what the house checks turn up before getting the CHP involved.”

Behind Colfax and the hubbub of activity at the house I could see Mendoza and two uniformed officers going up and down the street, knocking on the doors of neighboring houses. Colfax was saying something but I didn’t get it. “I’m sorry, what was that?” I asked.

“You never told me why you came over here this afternoon,” he said.

“I wanted to talk to Nora. Confront her, I guess you could say.”

“Oh, confront her.”

“Yes, confront her, detective, but not murder her. If I was the one responsible for this, do you really think I’d call 911 and then stay here until the police showed up?”

“Do you know how often I hear that excuse? What were you planning to confront her over?”

I took the threatening letter out of my pocket and handed it to him. “This.”

Colfax read it, then turned it over and scanned the back. “This is the threat you mentioned? The reason she hired you?”

“Yes, and I followed some of the leads she gave me, but after a while I started to get a little suspicious.”

“Of what?”

“That this letter might be nothing more than a hoax, one that Nora herself fabricated. That’s what I wanted to confront her about.”

“What would lead you to suspect that?” Colfax asked.

I told him how none of the “suspects” seemed to know the first names of the twins, and how adamant Nora was that her sons not find out about this letter. “She claimed she was protecting them from the knowledge of the threat, but I think she might have been protected them from the knowledge that she was pulling a cynical hoax.”

“But why would she do such a thing? It doesn’t make sense.”

“It does if the driving force of life is turning your children into celebrities. Once word got out that the boys were being threatened, particularly if she could point the finger at another stage mother, the press would eat it up like starving wolves. The boys would go from obscurity to the lead story on Access Hollywood overnight. Within a week, everyone in the country would know the Brothers Alpha. At the same time, all the women named on this list, her competition, as it were, would all be put on the defensive, forced to protest their innocence.”

Colfax checked his notepad. “Alpha?” he said. “I thought their name was Frost.”

“It is, but their billing is the Brothers Alpha. It’s a stage name.”

“I take it you never found out if this letter was legit or not.”

“No, I can’t prove anything either way. At this point, the only way to prove or disprove its legitimacy is to wait and see it the boys’ bodies turn up someplace dismembered.”

“No, we can do better than that,” Colfax said, flagging down another uniformed officer and handing him the letter. “Take this and see if you can find matching paper and a black sharpie somewhere in the house. Better yet, see if there are any handwriting samples that look like they’re from the victim, and not the kids.” When the officer was gone, he turned back to me. “Okay, let’s say that you’re right, and the woman did send this to herself to generate publicity. How does that square with the fact that she’s dead in there and her two sons are missing?”

“I have no idea.”

“I…have…no…idea,” he repeated as he wrote on his pad, a move I strongly suspected was a sarcastic comment. He pounded the period onto the paper, then folded up the pad and replaced it in his pocket. “All right, Mr. Beauchamp, thank you for your help. Now, here’s the way it is going to play from here. I have to wait for the M.E., which might take awhile. You, on the other hand, are free to go do whatever it is that you do. But I will need you to go down to the station to fill out and sign an official statement. Sooner, rather than later. In fact, as soon as you leave here would be good.”

“Is that an order, detective?”

“A suggestion. You know where the Northwest division stationhouse is located?”

“Of course,” I lied. The truth was, I hadn’t a clue where it was, but having been unable to figure out that I could compare the writing on the letter to a sample of Nora’s penmanship, I did not want to compound my incompetence in front of him.

“Good, be there within the hour. And I hope I don’t really have to give you the usual rap about not leaving town and all that, do I?”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Detective Colfax smiled…sort of. “Let me offer you some professional advice, then,” he said. “If I need anything further from you, I will come to you. I have your card, I know where to find you. But from here on out, that’s the only time I want to see you. I don’t want you interfering with our investigation. Got it?”

“I can’t even contact you if I have new information?”

“Are you holding anything back from me?”

“No.”

“Then there’s no reason you would have new information, right?”

“Um, well—”

“Case closed, Beauchamp. We’ll take it from here.”

“I guess I don’t have a client anymore, anyway,” I shrugged.

“Exactly,” he said, cheerfully. “Now get out of here and go file your report at the station.”

I got out of there, grateful that Detective Colfax had not noticed that I hadn’t actually agreed in so many words to stay out of the investigation. All I had said was I didn’t have a client anymore, which I didn’t. But I felt that I still had at least a few more thousand dollars worth of work to do before I could let the matter drop. If nothing else, I had to find out what had happened to the twins.

I walked over to my car, only to discover that it had been parked in by one of the black-and-whites. I strode back to find Colfax, to get the cruiser moved, but Mendez and the two uniforms that had been canvassing the block, looking for the boys, beat me to him. “Nobody on this side of the street has seen the kids,” said one of the officers, a young African-American whose muscular arms could probably tear an iPad in half.

“No one on the other side, either,” declared the other uniform, a fifty-ish guy with a graying moustache and the beginnings of a paunch. “But I’ll tell you one thing. Nora Frost was not very popular with her neighbors.”

“Swell. More suspects.” Colfax then noticed me. “Mr. Beauchamp, why are you still here?”

“I’d like to leave, but I’m parked in,” I said. “Can you get someone to move one of your cruisers?”

“Let him out,” he instructed the two officers, then turned and walked away. It took a few minutes, but they finally cleared a path for me out of the driveway. I waved pleasantly at the officers as I pulled onto the street. Halfway down the block, though, I was nearly hit by an oncoming car that seemed to have suddenly lost control. I slammed on the brakes and the other driver did the same, screeching the rust-colored Taurus to a halt so violently the car turned sideways. A young, pretty woman jumped out of the driver’s seat with a horrified look on her face. I likewise got out. “Excuse me, ma’am, but I need to—”

“My god, what are all these police cars doing here?” she demanded, ignoring the fact that she had nearly caused an accident. “Has something happened to Nora?”

I rushed over to her. “Are you a friend of Nora Frost’s?” I asked.

“I’m Elena Cates, I work for her. Who are you?”

“I work for her too, sort of. My name is Dave Beauchamp, I’m a private investigator.”

“What’s happened?”

“You may have to brace yourself.”

“Tell me what’s happened!”

“Nora is dead,” I said, quietly. “She’s been murdered.”

Immediately the woman became still. “Oh my god,” she muttered, barely audibly. Another car was coming up behind her and tooting the horn. “What am I going to do now?” she asked.

“How about getting back into the car and pulling over so the street isn’t blocked?” I offered. Of course, by now there was a car coming up behind me as well.

“I mean about them? What am I going to do with them?” She pointed into the back seat where, sitting perfectly placidly and oblivious to the armada of police cars just up ahead of them, sat the Brothers Alpha, both totally enrapt in their hand-held gaming consoles.