Ten

Sorry!” I said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“That was quick,” Visalia said. “Did I get the number wro— Oh my God!” She stared at me and her face paled.

“What?” I said, darting a look behind me.

“If I’ve forgotten the number to the safe, what am I going to do?”

“I haven’t—” I said, but she was up and away.

“I should never have changed it,” she wailed. “The policeman told me I had to and he told me not to write the number down anywhere. He was very definite. But it’s all right for him. He’s not a poor old widow woman all alone in the world. Oh, Lexy, what am I going to do without him? What will I do?”

“I hadn’t got to the bedroom yet,” I said very loud and low. “I turned back. To ask you something.”

Mizz Vi sat back and passed a hand over her forehead. “What?” she said. “What did you want to ask me?”

“Why were you and Clovis coming to see me separately on the Fourth? Why were you alone when your tyre blew out and when he … ?”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, you might think this is silly. But we were … As far as we were concerned, we were starting again, you see. We wanted to come and meet. Like the first time we met. And really properly start again.”

“Hmph,” I said. “Right. Well, that makes sense.” Except that the first time they met was at a family party when two sisters let their kids play together as cousins do. (Yes, it still bothered me, even if the state of California didn’t mind.) “And whose idea was it?” I said, hoping the question wasn’t too transparent.

“To drive separately?” said Mizz Vi. She screwed her face up trying to remember. “Mine, I think,” she came back with at last. She smiled sadly. “But it wasn’t hard to persuade him. He was always a romantic, my poor Clovis.”

“Maybe,” I began, “if the detective asks, you could say it was his idea. Beat yourself up a bit for agreeing. That kind of thing.”

She regarded me for quite a while before she spoke again. Her eyes weren’t quite the lumps of coal in the puddle, but they weren’t pools of warmth either. “You really do think I did it, don’t you?”

“What? No! Of course not,” I said. “But it wouldn’t do you any harm at all to help. Remember what’s at stake? Starts with an h?”

“Hang?” said Visalia. “Is that what you mean? Hang, my fanny. I’d get life without parole in a country club. It would pretty much be free nursing care. And it’s lethal injection these days, anyway.”

“What makes you so sure?” I said. “And don’t say ‘fanny,’ for God’s sake.”

“Sparky looked it up. And why not?”

“Never mind.” I dropped to all fours to get her phone back, fishing it out from where it had gone skiting away under the table on the polished floor. I didn’t hit any buttons or anything; nothing was further from my mind. Only, when I moved it, it came back to life. And so I glanced down. Of course I did. Because when something lights up in your hand, you look.

“I’ll let you finish your text,” I said. I didn’t mean anything by it. It was two sets of speech bubbles on a phone. I never thought a thing.

“Text?” said Visalia. “Lemme see that. What text? I’m not sending any ‘text’!”

“Sorry,” I said, returning the phone to her and then putting my hands behind my back (never touched it, Mum, don’t spank me). “It must have gone to an old one when you dropped it.”

“I was looking at photographs of Cousin Clovis,” Visalia said. She bowed her head and started muttering and fluttering over her phone as though it was a little square rosary. “What will I do if you’ve deleted them? How will I get them back? How many times did I tell myself to print them out and paste them in an album? Oh! Oh!”

“Vi!” I said. “Visalia! None of your photos will have gone. Don’t upset yourself. Give it here and I’ll find them for you.”

“No!” she squawked, clutching it to her.

“I promise I won’t—” I got out before she plopped the phone down the neck of her sundress and sat back.

“I’ll check it later,” she said.

I counted to ten in my head. Yes, dear reader, I counted to ten. After five years of college study, four hundred hours of accreditation and six years of clinical practice, nothing better had ever occurred to me. Count to ten, don’t go to bed angry, and if you can’t say something kind, write a memoir and hit the talk shows.

I only needed six anyway. I had liked Visalia from the very first time I saw her, borderline-incest notwithstanding, and given her current plight, I could forgive a lot more than a bit of intemperate random blaming.

“Vi,” I said, gentle as a kitten whisperer, “I really do think you should try to speak to your doctor today. I’m sure your hairdresser helped a lot and of course I’m always here for you, but you’re not yourself—How could you be?—and your doctor can help.”

“Not myself?” she said. “What does that mean?”

“Upset,” I told her. “Keyed up, strung out, done in.”

“It’s shock and grief,” she said. “It’s nothing medical. It’s just sadness. Of course I’m sad.”

“Of course you are.”

“Who wouldn’t be?” she asked. “And scared. The Poggios could be after me too.”

“Who indeed.” I ignored the bit about the Poggios.

“It would be stranger if I were myself. When the Poggios have broken my heart.”

“Much stranger.” I ignored the bit about the Poggios again.

And, as she talked of her sadness some more and shut up about the Poggios at last, she seemed to settle into it. Her shoulders slumped and her eyes grew strained. She took a huge struggle of a breath and, as it left her, she sank back into the plushy, floral cushion of her rattan chair and seemed to slightly disappear among its buttoned bulges and splots of colour.

I gave her a small smile. Then I crept out, crossed the foyer, and took the sweep of stairs up to the bedroom landing.

It was obvious which door—real doors!—led to the master bedroom. It was pillared and there were urns of ivy and ficus set on either side. But behind it, at last, some of the splendour relented. Here in their bedroom the Bombaros had left off impressing and reverted to their roots. The furniture looked like family heirlooms; cheap veneer but well cared for and everything matching, even to the valet stand still with a pair of Clovis’s suit trousers hanging on it. There were battered paperbacks ranged on both bedside tables: The Godfather, surprisingly, and Eat, Pray, Love as well as well-thumbed prayer books and Bibles. And, untouched—as pristine as the day they left the Amazon warehouse—the two copies of Love for a Lifetime: the Journey of Marriage that I had given Clovis and Vi in the early days of their therapy, that they had assured me they were working through, a chapter a night together.

I gave the books a rueful smile and started looking for the wall safe. It was so badly disguised, behind a generic reproduction of a poppy field that went with nothing else in the room and stuck out a good four inches from the wall, that it might as well have been sitting under a red sign that said safe. The picture swung forward and I opened the little door in front of the keypad and punched 1,2,3,4.

Irrcorrect, it read in blocky LCD. Two atterrrpts rerrrairrirrg.

“1,” I said as I typed, “2, 3,” I went on, “4.”

Irrcorrect, it told me. Orre atterrrpt rerrrairrirrg.

“1234,” I offered, rippling over the keypad like a concert pianist in case that was the problem.

Irrcorrect, said the display. Further atterrrpts will trisser alarrrrr.

Softly, I shut the little door and swung the picture back. This, I thought, would send her right over the edge. Knowing she’d forgotten the combination would hammer it home for keeps that Clovis was gone and she was alone now.

She opened her eyes as I got back to the sunroom but she didn’t lift her head.

“Well?”

“No luck,” I said. “All the receipt says is ‘plane tickets, house deeds, personal papers.’”

She closed her eyes again and was so still for so long that I thought she was sleeping. I jumped when she spoke at last.

“How about the stocks and shares?” she said. “Did they list them or lump them together?” I hesitated. “Or did they leave them behind? Why would they need to take away bonds and share certificates?”

“Um,” I said. “For photocopying? To get a rounded picture?” I seemed to have dodged the question of whether they’d actually been taken, and before she could circle back to it the doorbell rang.

Kind of. It was the whistle of a rocket and the bang and shatter as it burst open, of course. I winced and went to answer.

On the doorstep stood a very young, very California priest, in cargo shorts, flip-flops, and pedicured toenails, all below a t-shirt depicting a black waistcoat, with a rosary peeking out of one fake pocket and a white dog-collar. His lean brown arms bristled with rubbery concern—Everytown for Gun Safety; No Planet B; even a slightly perished and faded Yes, We Can!

“Father … ” I said.

“Adam,” he offered, along with a warm and nicely judged handshake. “Are you Sparky?”

“I’m Lexy,” I said. “I’m the—”

“Oh, yes,” he said, waggling his sculpted eyebrows. “I don’t officially approve of you, you know. Smoothing their way to dissolving a sacred union.” I had no answer but thankfully he winked and went on, “But I’m glad you’re here for her now.”

“Ditto,” I said. “I was trying to get her to see her doctor, but you’re even better.”

“I don’t know about that,” he said. “She was pretty insistent that she only wanted to talk about the funeral. She didn’t want the sacrament. Well, actually, I can’t offer it without her confession so—”

“Confession?” I said. “You think—?”

“Her weekly confession,” he said. “Saying ‘shit’ in the shower when she dropped the soap.”

I couldn’t help laughing. “Have you got your kit with you, though?” I said.

“My kit?”

“Travel pack? A miniature of wine and a snack-pack of crackers?”

Now he was laughing too. “You’re not a child of the church, are you, Lexy?”

“I’m making a better job of God’s work than he is here today. In my humble opinion.” I jerked my head at the garage where the shreds of crime scene tape were fluttering in the thermals as the day drew breath to wipe us all out completely.

“It is hard to see His purpose in Clovis’s passing,” said Adam, suddenly sounding like any other purple-surpliced bishop.

I snorted. “That old chestnut!” I said. “Tell me this: if it’s God’s purpose, why do we punish the instrument? When we catch him?”

Give the man his due, he didn’t roll his eyes. He took a deep breath and looked for all the world as if he was going to try to answer.

“Or,” I said, “maybe now’s not the time for debates. Come and see Vi. She needs you.”

∞

“Another night?” Noleen was back behind the reception desk at the Last Ditch.

“Do you do weekly rates?” I asked her.

“We do monthly rates too, if you’re serious,” she said. “And there’s a Todd discount.” I frowned. “When you’re not using any of our furnishings or linens, I can knock off a Jackson.”

“But then do I have to wash all my own sheets and towels?” I said. “Although, I suppose, why not—with the launderette right there.”

Noleen’s face had clouded, though. “There’s ahhhh … There’s ahhhh … It costs extra if you don’t take laundry and cleaning from the motel.”

“You’ve got that the wrong way round, haven’t you?” I asked.

But Noleen didn’t answer. She hopped down from her stool and went to tidy the leaflet rack. Today’s t-shirt had a splayed hand decal on the back. It looked like a friendly wave until you read the slogan: Pick a finger.

“Well, let’s start with a week,” I said to the hand. “See how we go, eh?”

I started out at a normal walking speed, but I was slowing before I even got to the stairs and then every step I took upwards brought me closer to where the window units were belching stale bedroom air out into the dead dog afternoon. I had enjoyed the spring here. Mornings warm enough to jump straight out of bed into the pool and afternoons never getting above thirty. Then I missed a bit. When I was family-packing and box-setting my way through the paperwork weeks I went straight from the hotel a/c to the car to the store to the a/c again and the short blasts of car park hell, I put down to disordered perception or maybe a stress-related virus. So I wasn’t ready for this … this … furnace raging around me.

As a door in the bottom row opened, I looked down and slumped. I wasn’t ready for this either. Della had emerged with Diego and he was holding a little banner made out of coloured paper and sticky letters: Welcome NEMO! He waved it madly.

“Where is he, where is he?” he said, bouncing up and down in his mother’s arms. But she knew. She gave me a dead-eyed stare.

“Ahhhhh, he’s still in the pet shop, Diego,” I said, going back down. “I forgot to go and get him. It’s just so hot. It’s sapping my energy.”

“Hot?” said Della. “It’s nowhere near hot yet. What are you talking about?”

“I’ll go and get him tomorrow,” I said.

“You can go tomorrow and get him and his little friend,” said Della.

“Tomorrow?” Diego said, looking up at me, with his big eyes caught exactly halfway between trust and tears.

“Tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll bring Nemo and his little friend … ”

“Gill,” said Diego.

“Exactly.” As I walked away from them I scrabbled in my bag for a Sharpie to write fish! on my hand with, until the sight of my half-open door distracted me. Senses thrumming and adrenalin giving me a heat-surge I truly did not need, I edged towards the gap and peered in. Todd had all of my drawers open and every stitch of my underwear was sitting in a pile on the carpet behind him.

“Oh good,” he said, looking at me over his hipster glasses. “I’ve put a couple in the bathroom to check for sizing.”

“I’m a 36C,” I said.

“Yeah, no, you’re not,” Todd told me. “I got a 34E in the Passionata and a 34FF in the Heidi Klum because they run small. Typical supermodel. Go on.”

“In return for information,” I said.

“Deal,” said Todd. He picked up a once-white Triumph boulder-holder that had been a good friend to me over the years and, holding it between thumb and forefinger, dropped it into the wastepaper basket. “Cough it up then.”

I supposed it made some kind of sense that way round: he did my shopping and I paid him in gossip. But come on! He was determined to dress both my motel room and me for his own pleasure and in return for my compliance he was going to help me.

I went into the bathroom where two sets of lingerie, one grey and coral, one red and peach, hung on their satin hangers from the shower rail.

“So, Kathi,” I said, starting to wriggle out of my skirt. “She said you—”

“What are you doing?” said Todd, appearing round the door.

“Uh, trying on underwear in comparative privacy?” I said.

“Okay, one,” said Todd. “Don’t up-talk. It sounds stupid in your accent. And, two: Bra first. Obviously.”

“Why,” I said flatly.

“Well, go up on questions!” he said. “Why? Because if the bra doesn’t fit there’s no point in the panties. I got strings and boy shorts because I couldn’t tell from that collection of granny cast-offs what you like.” He gave me a curt nod and went back to the other room.

“So how is it you help Kathi?” I called, once I was sure he had gone.

“What are you doing?” he said. He was back. “Don’t tell me you’re a hook and swivel? You’ll stretch them all to hell. Turn around and let me, if you truly can’t reach. You need yoga if you can’t reach around your own back to fasten a bra.”

He tugged the band and snapped it closed, low across my back.

“Ow!” I said. “It hurts.”

“It fits!” said Todd, giving it an unnecessary twang that echoed off the tiled walls. “Now scoop and jiggle.”

“What?”

“Bend over,” said Todd, demonstrating with locked knees and a back as flat as a table. “Then scoop. And jiggle.”

I hunched over, feeling my stomach roll over my waistband, grabbed the tops of the cups and shook my northern shimmy.

“It does not fit,” I said. “It’s far too bloody tigh— Wow.” I had straightened up and seen myself in the mirror. “Knockerama.”

“Try the boy shorts,” said Todd.

“And you trust me to put my knickers on properly all by myself?” I said. “You won’t barge in and take over?”

“You couldn’t bribe me with Brad,” said Todd. “I see that nasty disposable razor in your soap dish, Miss Thing. I’ve made an appointment for you with my waxing lady. We can go together and then have brunch, but until then … I would rather go blind.” He swept out.

Boundaries.

But I still wanted info.

“How is it you help Kathi?” I asked again. “Is it the décor thing? Do you attract business?” But, even while I asked, I thought to myself that that would help Noleen too. And why would it make Noleen um and er like she’d just been um-ing and er-ing downstairs?

“Not exactly décor,” Todd said. “If I tell you this, it’s in the secret vault under the invisible cone, okay?”

I felt sure I could rise to Todd’s standards of discretion and went out to show him the ensemble and tell him so.

“Ew,” he said, pointing at my crotch. “Don’t let me see the thong.” I went back to the bathroom. I may have flounced. “I rent two rooms, you see,” Todd called through to me. I let go of a big disappointed breath. The Passionata straps didn’t so much as tremble. “Yeah, I rent two rooms, and Noleen thinks one of them is to run to in code-red bug situations.”

“Why didn’t you go there yesterday?” I asked, thinking of the tiny spider with the big build-up.

“I certainly could have,” Todd said. “And then I’d have told Kathi she needed to move rooms. But I needed comfort and you were closer.”

“Kathi ‘moves rooms’?” I said. “Do Noleen and Kathi actually live in the motel like ordinary guests then?”

“They do,” said Todd. “I’ve got your word of honor, don’t I? About the vault under the cone?”

“Cross my heart and spit in my cocoa.”

“They’ve got an apartment,” said Todd. “Sure they do. Owners’ quarters. But Kathi … Well, she likes things nice.” He stopped talking. Stopped dead.

“I’m not with you,” I said.

“She likes to keep the apartment clean,” said Todd. Again he shut his mouth as if he planned never to open it again.

“So she moves out to a guest room if she needs to give it a good going over?” I said.

“She did,” said Todd. Then turned Trappist Monk.

“She did once?” I said. “What does that have to do with your two rooms now, though?”

“Oh, for the Lord’s sake!” said Todd. He said the next bit faster than a runaway train. “She cleans the apartment and lives in a guest room. Obviously.”

“And how long has this been going on?” I asked.

I had my own failings in the area. I’d stayed in my rented hovel through three promotions and pay rises and so I’d missed my chance to be part of Dundee’s property price boom. I just didn’t care enough; couldn’t commit. I looked at big Victorian tenement flats and 1930s maisonettes, ex-council semis in nice areas and refurbed farm-workers’ cottages on the outskirts. Then I thought about the faff of moving and shredded the brochures. I could do up the flat instead. So I bought DIY magazines and recorded make-over shows. Then I shredded them too and cleared the DVR. But halfhearted as I was about the Tay Street flat, at least I lived there.

“A year. But she needs another guest room to clean while she sleeps in the first one, and Noleen said it was too much lost revenue. It nearly split them. That’s where I come in. I rent a second room as a bolt hole but I promise to tell her if I use it so she can switch again. Now everyone’s happy.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “What do you get out of switching rooms?”

“A happy friend,” said Todd. “This is exactly why I have no time for shrinks. What you call codependence I call being a good person. I get a happy friend and that gives me a happy glow.”

“And?”

“Boy, I’d hate to be that cynical,” said Todd. “But okay, okay, if you insist. She has a contact in Costa Rica who sends up insecticide that’s banned in California. She sprays my room, the rooms on either side of my room, the walkway between my room and reception, reception itself, and the parking lot around my car. Okay?”

“I’d really like to—”

“We don’t need help,” said Todd. “We don’t need counseling, therapy, SSRIs, hospitalization, electric shock treatment, or a lobotomy.”

“Aw!” I said. “It’s been months since I got to lobotomise a client. Spoilsport.”

“What we need,” said Todd, “is a clean room, a spare clean room, and some fly spray worth the name. And we have it. But that is classified information and it’s In. The. Vault.”

“Under the cone,” I said. “Has Kathi ever explored the origins—”

“Oh my God!” said Todd. “What did I just say? Kathi is fine. I am fine. Have Roger and Noleen ever explored the origins of why they’re such unsupportive rat bastards to Kathi and me? Why no, I believe they have not. So go and shrink their heads and leave us alone.” He glared at me. “That bra and panties is super cute,” he said. “Try the Klum.”

∞

No one goes into psychology for the money and not even psychologists go into family therapy for two nice cars and skiing every spring. We do it because we want to help, and when we come across people in such dire need as Todd and Kathi it sets us off. Like a beaver when a tap’s running.

Banned from trying to help a cleptoparasitosis case and a germaphobe who had clearly let her coping mechanism run completely out of control (with her backup room for her backup room, for God’s sake), I redoubled my determination to help someone, if it killed me. I marched back under the railway bridge fixed on Clovis, Barb, and Vi like a death ray. And the contents of the safe, which might explain everything.

“Is Detective Mike in?” I asked the dispatcher.

“Detective Mike?” she said. “What is this, Mayberry?”

I couldn’t answer. People talked a lot about Mayberry. And June Beaver. And some people called Brady, a whole bunch of them. And also a guy by the name of Bob Ross who sounded way creepy. And Julia Child, and Johnny Carson, and Bert and his friend Ernie. Then everyone smiled and stopped arguing.

“So?” Branston had said, the one time I mentioned it. “Just ask. What’s the problem?” He spoke from his vast experience of exactly one month in Scotland when everyone treated him like a guest and no one talked to him about Weatherfield, Margot Ledbetter, Delia, Parky, or Dangermouse.

“If the wind changes, you’ll be sorry,” Mike said. The dispatcher had buzzed her. “What is it now?”

“You know the plane tickets you took into evidence in the Bombaro case?” I said, smoothing my scowl.

“‘The Bombaro case’?” said Mike. “Are you really trying to help me pick out which murder you’re referring to? This is Cuento, Legacy. Not Miami.”

“Lexy,” I reminded her and, without showing a hint of it on my face, I filed away the news that she had been checking up on me, looking at the formal spelling of my name.

“Yeah, you’re right,” said Mike. “I looked up your residency just to dot the i’s. Good poker face, though.”

I made a mental note never to play it with her. She probably saw that on my face too.

“Okay then,” I went on. “So the plane tickets you took out of the safe? Where were they for? Mizz Visalia wants to know and she can’t check the receipt because she’s forgotten the combination of the safe. She changed it and the new number’s slipped her mind.”

Mike gave me a level stare. Her eyebrows looked like two stone mouldings above the darkened window of an abandoned building. Not a twitch in either or a flicker of light below. “Tell her to call us,” she said.

“Ah. Problem,” I said. “She doesn’t know she’s forgotten the combo. I didn’t want to upset her.”

“I see.” The intonation matched the flat brows and the dead eyes. “I thought your type went in for facing facts and living in the bombed-out wasteland of your authentic life.”

“Bombed-out waste … Mike, are you okay?”

“Peachy,” she said, spitting the word out like grape pips. “And even if I wasn’t, I still wouldn’t share confidential information about an ongoing investigation with someone so heavily involved with one of the susp—Or with anyone. The financial rec—Any items we removed—Anything we did or didn’t do at the Bombar—” She sighed and tried one last time. “Any activities associated in any way with the murder investigation are strictly confidential.”

“Well done,” I said. “You got there. Visalia didn’t cut the wire, by the way.”

“What wire?” said Mike.

“Really? No wire? Good to know.”

“Watch it,” Mike said. She turned away. Then she turned back. “And be careful. Clovis Bombaro pissed someone off, Lexy. Don’t do the same. In fact, stay away from The Oaks altogether.”

I gulped. “Thank you,” I said and scuttled out. I stopped off at Swiss Sisters for a latte, standing in the drive-in queue between a so-called minivan that looked pretty maxi from this angle and a Saturn that was indeed planet-sized, shuffling forward with my flip-flops sticking to the tarmac and the maxivan’s exhaust fumes baking me all down my front like a kebab on a burst spindle.

My mind was fizzing. If there was no wire left behind, then how did the cops know about the timer? Because if it was only the timer that put Visalia in the frame for any part of it, it mattered quite a lot that they were right.

But what I didn’t know about fireworks was pretty much everything. There might be some other tell-tale sign and I’d have to grill an expert to get a clue what it might be. But just the thought of a firework factory was enough to put an extra film of sweat on me.

And all the pyrotechnicians I knew well enough to speak to out of work hours were probably cold-blooded killers.