The first thing I did Thursday morning was to call my father again. He wasn’t as quick to pick up the phone this time and when he answered, his voice was raspy with sleep.
“It’s not even five o’clock, Teddy. What’s the matter with you?”
“Ask your contacts if they can find out the name of Victor’s cell mate.”
“Will do, but never call me this early again.”
He hung up.
Once at the zoo, I had enough work that I didn’t think about Victor, Bambi, or Mr. Rat until I made my way to Monkey Mania, where Central American squirrel monkeys ran free and intermingled with zoo visitors. James Dean, one of the juvenile monkeys, was playing Hide and Seek with Marlon, the alpha. Instead of getting irritated, as the feisty Marlon was prone to do, he was enjoying the game. Both monkeys took turns being “it,” hiding in the underbrush or behind trees. When discovered, the hider would make a mad dash for the rock designated as “home.”
This back and forth hiding game reminded me of something, but it wasn’t until I arrived at Africa Trail that I figured it out.
Marlon was like Victor Emerson—mature, cagy, a better hider than James Dean. But James Dean had his triumphs, too, and at one point had been cheeky enough to reach out from his hiding place and pull Marlon’s tail.
Two monkeys hiding from one another.
I realized what had been troubling me about the entire Victor blackmail scenario. Regardless of the man’s lack of funds, he was much more suited to be someone else’s blackmail victim, not the other way around. During the convenience store holdup, he committed murder, and before his escape, was serving twenty-five to life. If law enforcement had learned of his present whereabouts, he would have been sent back to Nevada to serve the remainder of his sentence.
The fact that Victor had been the blackmailer, not the blackmailee, could mean his victims knew nothing about his past. If they had, one of them would have turned him in.
Unless the intended victim had more to lose than Victor.
I thought about Victor bleeding out at Alejandro’s feet from a mortal crossbow wound. I thought about Bambi’s swollen face, the stocking wrapped around her neck.
I thought about Mr. Rat.
For the first time I truly understood how foolish it was for me to remain on board the Merilee, where a vicious killer knew where I lived.
My hands began to shake.
***
Somehow I finished out my day at the zoo, but as soon as I made it home to the Merilee I packed a suitcase. An hour later, Bonz, Feroz, Miss Priss, and I were ensconced in my old bedroom at Caro’s house.
Dinner was a strange affair. Soledad Rodriguez, who occupied the bedroom next to mine, sat at the long table across from me. Next to her sat Bucky, Eunice Snow’s ex-con husband, enlisted by Caro to guard us from Viking Vengeance and other assorted killers. The couple’s twins were upstairs asleep, leaving us adults to entertain each other. As Eunice served up heaping portions of lasagna, we tried talking about the weather but that lasted about three minutes. Once you’ve described coastal fog, there’s nowhere else to go.
“I love fog,” Eunice said, sitting down next to her husband. “I just wish it wasn’t so damp.”
“Fog’s damp, no two ways about it,” Bucky observed.
“At least it burns off by ten,” Soledad threw in.
“Fog isn’t so bad inland,” was my contribution.
“Nope.”
“No.”
“Nah.”
Having nothing else in common but fog and lasagna, we stared silently at our plates.
“How’s the lasagna?” Eunice finally said.
We all agreed that the lasagna was really, really delicious and fell silent again.
About five minutes later, Bucky said, “I saw a good movie the other day.”
“Tell us about it,” I asked, desperately.
“It was this Italian thing, subtitles and all. The Bicycle Thief. Anyone ever hear of it?”
Eunice and Soledad shook their heads, but I raised my hand. “Saw it a few years ago.” In Rome, with Caro.
Bucky grinned, revealing a missing front tooth. “I found it depressing but somehow uplifting. It revealed man’s inhumanity to man, and the difficulty of rising above one’s given station in life. But at the end the shared tragedy drew father and son closer together.”
This surprising speech made me study Bucky more closely. Thin, pink-skinned with white-blond hair and pale blue eyes, he resembled a poorly nourished Angora rabbit, not a pundit.
“You got all that from the movie, Bucky?”
He shrugged. “When the guy from San Sebastian Cinema called and offered me the job as an usher, I thought it might be a good idea to read up on film, so I went to the library and got a book.”
“That’s where they keep them,” Soledad muttered.
“They’ve just begun a series of old classics, so they’re showing Wings next week. The book I checked out, History of Cinema, describes it as a1927 silent movie about these World War I fighter pilots. Clara Bow, Gary Cooper, and even that old Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, were in it. Wings won the very first Oscar for Best Picture. Is that cool, or what?”
Eunice beamed at him. “Bucky’s real smart.”
“He can read, too,” Soledad muttered again.
I shot her a dirty look. She caught it and threw it back. With her black lip liner and thin black eyebrows she looked pretty scary so I let it pass.
“I really, really like this lasagna, Eunice,” I said.
The others agreed again that they really, really liked the lasagna, too.
***
In my room later, I opened my laptop and renewed my acquaintance with the Google gods.
I started with stunt man Yancy Haas, and what I found raised the hair on my arms. Stunt man Yancy Haas had so violent a history I had no trouble believing he could easily kill a dozen people.
Ten years earlier, while living in a Hollywood apartment, he had been booked for assaulting his roommate, a fellow stuntman. When the victim, one Dave Mason, didn’t show up in court to testify, nothing happened with the case. Yancy’s trouble didn’t end there. Not long afterward, he was popped for two DUIs less than three months apart. He had been sentenced to six months in jail and his driver’s license had been suspended for two years. A year after his release from jail, and while still living in the Los Angeles area, he had been found guilty of attempted homicide when he attacked his girlfriend with a knife. A man in the neighboring apartment heard the commotion and broke in and saved her. Once the woman had been transported to the hospital, it took ninety-three stiches to close her wounds. That crime, ostensibly Yancy’s last to date, earned him a five-year stretch in California State Prison in Centinela. He was paroled twenty-eight months later for good behavior.
Curious, I looked up Centinela on GoogleMaps. It was in the far southeast corner of the state, nowhere near Nevada’s Ely State Prison. Not that it would matter, Victor having escaped from Ely years earlier. Still…
I moved on to Willis Pierce. At first glance I found no newspaper articles linking the drama professor to old crimes or questionable relationships with students, but having already learned that the nicest people sometimes had the dirtiest pasts, I kept looking. Eventually I discovered that before moving to San Sebastian County more than a decade ago, he had taught acting for a few semesters at Atlantic Cape Community College in Mays Landing, New Jersey. When I looked up Mays Landing on GoogleMaps I saw it was just a hop, skip, and jump inland from Atlantic City. Mob ties? Gambling debts? There was no way of knowing. I found no mention of the marriage I’d heard him make a disparaging remark about. Maybe that had happened later. After Atlantic Cape, he left to direct a community theater group in South Africa. Two years later, his wanderlust apparently slaked, he returned. After a brief vacation, took the job in San Sebastian.
What was his ex-wife’s name? Ah, yes. Serena Sue.
When I typed in “Serena Sue+Pierce+New Jersey” nothing came up, but when I dropped the Pierce part, photographs of two Serena Sue Tagilossis popped up. One was a wizened Serena Sue celebrating her one-hundredth birthday at the Egg Harbor Retirement Home. The other Serena Sue Tagilossi, possibly the centenarian’s great-granddaughter, turned up in a blurry wedding snapshot taken in front of the Egg Harbor United Methodist Church. It showed a newly minted Mrs. Serena Sue Tagliossi Moss standing next to her beaming, clean-shaven groom, one Anthony James Moss. The accompanying article described him as an employee of the Lucky Lady Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Although the quality of the photograph was poor, Moss resembled Willis enough to be his cousin. Reading further I found Willis listed as Best Man. The two men didn’t have last names in common, since they were probably related through their mother’s side of the family.
Willis must have married his cousin’s cast-off. The idea seemed a bit creepy to me, but it certainly wasn’t creepy enough to be blackmailed over. One of my cousins had married his own former sister-in-law, for Pete’s sake.
Letting the quasi-incest slide, I continued searching but never found a story announcing Serena Sue’s remarriage, which meant little. Second, third, and fourth marriages rarely made the papers unless the beautiful bride was Gunn Landing socialite Caroline Piper Bentley Hufgraff O’Brien Petersen. Every time Caro married it made headlines on the society page of the San Sebastian Gazette. Her divorces always made the papers, too.
Next up on my suspect list came Walt McAdams. Walt and I were such good friends I felt guilty checking up on him, guiltier still when I found a short newspaper article about a barroom brawl he had once been involved in. He’d broken a man’s jaw when the man slapped his drinking partner, a woman. Walt had a short temper, but he was no killer. Especially not a killer of women.
Or was I in denial?
***
The puzzle being impossible to solve given my limited computer skills, I gave up on Serena Sue for the time being. I was getting tired, anyway, and needed to get some sleep for my next grueling day at the zoo. Then I remembered that Zorah told me that since I would be staying late playing the star of the Great Escape, I didn’t have to come in until noon. Good. That would give me more time. Now that I knew what information I was missing, I could concentrate with a fresh mind after breakfast.
A glance at the clock showed it was after eleven. I had been up since five, so no wonder I’d begun to droop.
“Just a few more,” I said to Bonz, who watched me from the foot of the bed. “The easy ones.”
He wagged his tail. It hit Miss Priss across the snout, but after a perfunctory hiss, she fell back to sleep. Feroz never stirred.
A renewed search came up with little on my harbor neighbor Linda Cushing, just a mention that she’d once been questioned in the suspicious death of another Gunn Landing Harbor liveaboarder. Since the real killer had been caught and sentenced to life without parole, Linda was off the hook. Other minimal finds included a society column announcement of Jane Olson marrying her Gold King, and a photograph of family law attorney Frank Turnbull receiving a plaque for his volunteer work with the San Sebastian Food Bank. That last being the only clear photograph I had found so far, I breathed a sigh of relief that Frank was wearing clothes, not his Speedo.
Before turning in for the night, I went down the hall to Caro’s bedroom and took a quick inventory. Her jewels still there, so were her furs. Next I walked downstairs and checked off the more valuable pieces of furniture. Louis XV ormolu-mounted bibliotheque basse, still there. George III painted satinwood secretaire, still there. Seventeenth-century Flemish open armchair, ditto. Sixteenth-century Portuguese side table, ditto. Eighteenth-century Russian ormolu-mounted bergère, ditto.
Even the nineteenth-century settee that once belonged to Czar Nicholas II was still there, although it did look less elegant now that the scrawny form of Bucky lay snoring on it, a baseball bat clutched in one hand, a book on classic films in the other. He hadn’t bothered to take off his shoes.
When I nudged him, he continued to snore.
I nudged him again, this time more strenuously. More snores.
Some bodyguard he was.
I leaned over his prone body and yelled in his ear. “Yo, Bucky!”
He sat up so fast I had to jump out of the way of his flailing arms. “Whazzat!”
“Aren’t you supposed to be keeping watch?”
He rubbed his eyes. “That’s what I was doing until you startled me.”
“You were…Oh, never mind. But could you at least please take your shoes off if you’re going to sleep on my mother’s settee? It’s…” I almost told him its provenance, then changed my mind. “If you get it dirty it’ll take Eunice forever to clean it.”
“Right, right. Sorry. Don’t want to put the poor woman to more trouble than I already have.” He untied his sneakers, tucked them under the settee, and sat up straight, facing the door: the very picture of an alert bodyguard.
“Thanks, Bucky.”
“Anything you need, lady, just ask. I sure appreciate everything you’ve done for me and Eunice, what with the job at San Sebastian Cinema and all.”
“And I appreciate your standing guard. It’s very thoughtful.”
Minutes later, when I left to go back upstairs, he was snoring again.