Again with feeling, p.3
Again with Feeling, page 3
part #6 of The Last Picks Series
“I told you it was pretty much the same,” I said with a grin. “Usually, the detective is trying to find something that was overlooked or concealed when the mystery was first investigated. They’re looking for new information, or lies, or a mistaken assumption—anything that will help establish means, motive, and opportunity.”
“That seems incredibly unrealistic. Wouldn’t people have forgotten the details after all those years? Or told the police in the first place?”
“Sure. But people also lie for all sorts of reasons, and sometimes, later on, the reasons for those lies become less important. Or they feel pressured to finally tell the truth. Or someone the police never talked to turns up. I mean, we’re talking about books, Bobby. Something convenient always happens. And if it’s not talking to people, the detective might do archival research or read someone’s journal. There’s even a whole branch of mystery novels about people who solve murders with genealogy.”
Bobby said something very un-Bobby-like under his breath.
I burst out laughing.
“If this involves you getting an Ancestry.com subscription,” Bobby said, “I’ll buy you dinner.”
“It’s a date.”
That did it again. The good humor that had been defrosting the ice between us vanished, and we drove the rest of the distance in an uncomfortable silence.
Fortunately, it wasn’t long before the GPS announced that our destination was on the left. The address belonging to Richard Lundgren—or, better said, where Richard had been living when he’d disappeared—was a little square house that could only by the loosest stretch of the imagination be called a bungalow. Like the rest of the neighborhood, it fell into the category of tract housing that had clearly been designed for working-class families. The Lundgren home looked clean and well-maintained, with that severe attention to detail that suggested high standards but without any sense of adornment. A couple of generations ago, when these houses had been going up, the men and women who lived here would have worked in Astoria’s timber and fishing industries. Those industries had shrunk over the years, though. Some of the people here might still work the line at a fishery, or they might crew a fishing boat, but for the rest, hard times had come to stay.
The address that belonged to Vivienne’s father, Arlen Lundgren, was next door. It looked like a twin to Richard’s, which made sense considering the tract-housing style of the neighborhood, and it appeared to be similarly well kept. The only difference was that someone had hung hideous curtains in Arlen’s windows—some sort of eye-wrenching print of mauve-colored roses—and a few bare, brittle rosebushes huddled next to the stoop. There was no sign that anyone was home at either residence; with the curtains closed, the houses looked still and lifeless.
I unlocked my phone and examined the photo that Vivienne’s lawyer had sent me. It had the saturated colors that I associated with quick, cheap photos from another era, and it showed a close-up of a young man. He had a kind of attractiveness that was a combination of strong features and youth that didn’t quite translate into handsomeness—a high brow, prominent nose, and heavy jaw that, combined with hair the color of wheat, gave him a distinctly Norse look. Even in the close-up, it was easy to tell that he was well built and vital. A thousand years ago, he would have made one heck of a Viking. He was pushing one hand through his hair, as though the photo were a candid one, and he’d been caught unaware, and on that wrist he wore a bracelet that consisted of a fine gold chain and what I guessed was a small saint medallion.
“He doesn’t look like he’d be easy to overpower,” Bobby said.
I shook my head.
“We can rule out a gun or a blow to the head,” Bobby continued. “The medical examiner would have seen some kind of evidence if that’s how it happened.”
“Which leaves some kind of drug to incapacitate him.” I sighed. “And in books, poison is a woman’s weapon.”
“Good thing this isn’t a book,” Bobby said with that slanting smile again.
I got out of the Jeep, but instead of heading to the front door of the house that had belonged, at one point, to Richard Lundgren, I headed toward the backyard. A few windows were set into the side of the house, and these were curtained as well. The back of the house had a few more, and finally I got a glimpse of bare, dark glass—no curtains, but I couldn’t make out anything inside the house without walking up and pressing my nose to the window, which I wasn’t quite ready to do. A rusting gas grill on wheels, plastic patio furniture that looked brittle and washed out from UV exposure, and a few planters that held nothing but weeds were the only suggestion that someone used this space. As with the front of the house, the landscaping—if you could call it that—was really nothing more than mercilessly short grass.
Bobby stood, hands on hips, and looked out at the slough. I followed his gaze. The water began maybe forty yards from the patio, with rushes and sedge bristling at the waterline. A thin scum of algae covered the water, which appeared to be stagnant—if the water was flowing or had a current, I couldn’t tell. It wasn’t a wide body of water, maybe another thirty or forty yards, and I doubted it was deep. I guess it had been deep enough, I thought with a sick feeling. But the slough was long. I couldn’t see the end of it in either direction. A broken length of barricade tape floated on the water, which I took to mean that the local police were no longer even pretending to try to preserve the scene.
“Maybe someone killed him somewhere else and brought him up here in a kayak,” I said, taking another, longer look up the slough.
Bobby shook his head. “Too complicated.” He swung his gaze back to the house.
I knew what he was thinking. “Forty yards isn’t nothing, but someone could have dragged him from the house to the slough. Even a much smaller woman.”
Bobby nodded, but he said, “But she would have been exposed the whole time. If anyone had looked out the window, they would have seen her.”
We both turned to consider the house next door. A man stood there, and he was holding a shotgun. My first, confused thought was: How long has he been there? I hadn’t heard him, and to judge by Bobby’s sudden stillness, neither had he. Then my brain began to take in the details of his appearance. He was old—not just older, but old, in his eighties, maybe even older. He had a surprising amount of white hair left, and the color of it made me think of Ivory soap. He wore a brown, waffle-weave bathrobe, and he had on some kind of rubber clogs that looked like knock-off Crocs. Gun, my brain told me again. I tried to make sense of how he’d gotten the drop on us—he couldn’t have come out of the house, or we would have heard the ancient storm door. But there was a detached garage next to the house, as well as a freestanding building that I took to be a workshop or a storage shed, and he could have come from either of those. It was hard to focus, though; my brain kept saying, Gun.
The man said, “Who the fudge are you?”
(He didn’t say fudge.)
And then he brought the gun up toward us.
Chapter 4
Staring at the shotgun pointed my direction, I made a snap decision: I was going to tackle Bobby.
It wasn’t a rational thought. It wasn’t a logical conclusion. It’s hard to even call it a plan, since it was something that seemed to happen at the cellular level. Someone was aiming a weapon at us, and my body tensed, seemingly of its own accord, as I readied myself. There wasn’t any sort of intermediate process.
“Sir—” Deputy Bobby said, in his best deputy voice.
“Daddy!”
The storm door clattered open, and a woman lowered herself down the steps in a flustered hustle that was impeded by the fact that she had to hold on to the rail with both hands and take each step one at a time. My first impression was of middle-aged dumpiness—the short, frizzy hair that had been fried blond; the extra weight; the varicose veins. But then I realized that wasn’t quite right, because even though middle age came to everyone, this woman had overlaid hers with a veneer of gas station chic. Instead of a dressing gown or a robe, she wore a plasticky kimono with a dragon on its back. Her nails were a fire-engine red, visible even at a distance. And when the breeze shifted, the fetor of the slough was replaced by something I could only imagine she called scent.
“Daddy,” she said again, as she lowered herself to the patio behind the house next door. “Put that down! You’re going to get someone killed!”
The old man didn’t even look at her.
“Put it away!” She pushed on the shotgun’s barrel until it lowered, and then she planted herself in front of him, balled up her fists, and set them on her hips. “What in the world’s gotten into you?” But she didn’t wait for a reply. She turned around. Apparently we didn’t deserve the fists-on-hips treatment, because one of her hands drifted up to clutch the kimono shut at the neck, while the other patted the air around her hair (not the hair itself, I was careful to note, which I was beginning to suspect was supposed to look that way). “I’m sorry. Daddy’s always been protective of his little girl.”
Then she giggled.
Bobby, bless his heart, was staring.
“She’s batting her eyelashes at you,” I whispered.
“You two must have had the fright of your lives.” The saccharine tone switched when she snapped, “Go back inside, Daddy!”
The old man gave us another long, lingering look before going inside. With the threat of imminent death removed, I was starting to think a little more clearly, and I did some mental math. It was possible—heck, it was likely—that this man was Vivienne’s father. It was difficult to imagine Vivienne having a father—or being a child, for that matter. But what was even more difficult was imagining that this woman was—what? Vivienne’s sister?
Whoever she was, she was all sugar again, swishing toward us in her kimono. “Are you all right? Honey, you look like you need to sit down.”
That last bit was directed toward Bobby, who was still staring. That surprised me a bit; Bobby was, under normal circumstances, unflappable. I’d once seen Mr. Cheek (owner of Fog Belt Ladies Wear, and a fervent admirer of Deputy Mai) lock himself in a dressing room so that Bobby would have to rescue him, only to jump into Bobby’s arms once Bobby got the door open. And Bobby had handled it like a champ (although he’d been less patient when Mr. Cheek had tried to unbutton his shirt). Right now, though, Bobby seemed to be having trouble processing what was going on, and it took me a moment to realize that he was trying to decide if he should act like a deputy.
I decided to take pity on him. “I’m sorry about coming back here unannounced. We should have knocked.”
“What? Oh, you mean Daddy. He’s always like that; it wouldn’t matter if you knocked.” She had gotten close enough now that she reached up and pressed the back of her hand to Bobby’s forehead. “You’re like ice! I think you’re going into shock.”
Bobby did not look like he was going into shock. Bobby looked like he might be going into deputy mode, and like he was about to begin dispatching all problems with extreme professionalism.
“We didn’t get a chance to introduce ourselves,” I said before the voice of the law could ruin everything. “I’m Dash Dane, and this is Bobby—”
“Oh my Gawd!” (You could hear the w.) “I thought I recognized you! Oh my Gawd! Oh my Gawd! I’m Candy Yamamoto. Candace, but I go by Candy. Candy Lundgren.” As though waiting for me to connect the dots, she rolled her eyes at Bobby and added, “Vivienne’s sister.”
I mean, okay. Technically anything was possible. And the longer I looked at her, the more I could detect a family resemblance—in the chin, more than anywhere else. If somebody bleached the dickens out of Vivienne’s hair and then plugged her into a light socket, maybe it would have been easier to match them up. But she certainly didn’t act like someone whose brother’s body had just been discovered. And even though I’d been expecting something like this—even though I’d already guessed, or half-guessed, that she was Vivienne’s sister—it was one thing to float a hypothesis, and another to have it confirmed.
Because I honestly couldn’t imagine someone more different from the Vivienne Carver I knew. Vivienne was all polish, all class. Vivienne was a razor-sharp mind. She was like Dr. Moriarty in Jackie O’s body. (Okay, that was definitely a book I was going to have to write.) And Candy Yamamoto, née Lundgren, was…not.
I felt bad as soon as I thought it. It was unkind, first of all. And it was grounded in nothing but a first impression. I didn’t know Candy. I didn’t know anything about her at all.
But as she pressed Bobby’s hands between her own (and, in the process, managed to bring his hand to her, uh, bosom), I had the feeling that, sometimes, first impressions were right on the money.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” she said. “I saw you on the news. You’re much cuter in person.”
“Um, thank you?”
“You’ve got to tell them to shoot you from your left, honey. Your left is your good side. No, wait, let me see. Well, maybe it’s your right. I don’t know!” This seemed to titillate her to no end—she burst out into fresh giggles.
“It’s definitely his right,” Bobby said.
Hands on her hips, she considered Bobby now. “And you,” she said, “don’t have a bad side.”
“Thank you,” Bobby said.
“Oh, you know what you need?” She patted herself down. “You need a tattoo! Give you a bit of an edge. I’ve got a butterfly—if you’re good, I’ll show you—and my friend owns the Skin Art Collective, that’s where we all hang out—dang it, I know I have one of his cards.” And if my head wasn’t about to explode already from a sixty-something woman spouting phrases like that’s where we all hang out, she went and topped it by giving Bobby a coquettish look and adding, “He’s not my boyfriend, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
And Bobby said, “How do you know I don’t have a tattoo already?”
That was it. The end. My head officially exploded.
Candy, who was now somehow holding Bobby’s hand again, gave him a playful swat. “Oh you!”
“Yes,” I somehow managed to say. “Oh you.”
I know nobody’s going to believe me. I know that I’m going to sound like I’m making things up. I know it’s flat-out crazy. But even though I can’t prove it, I swear to God, in that moment, staring back at me with his typical impassive expression, Bobby winked at me.
“But what are you doing here?” Candy asked.
“It’s a long story—” I began.
“We heard about your brother,” Bobby said.
Which, to be fair, could have been taken any number of ways.
Candy chose to take it one particular way. Her eyes widened, and her expression quickened with what I wanted to call restrained jubilation. She looked like someone trying not to smile at a funeral. “You’re sleuthing!”
“I’d call it investigating—” I tried.
But Candy spoke over me. “You’ve got to come inside so I can tell you everything.”
And without missing a beat, she looped her arm through Bobby’s and towed him toward the house. Bobby cast a backward glance at me, and I wanted to call his expression restrained you’re-going-to-pay-for-this.
Candy led us into the kitchen, which was, thankfully, free of any sign of her shotgun-toting father. It was a small, white space, and the only color came from the mauve-colored roses on the curtains and a Formica table that had to be at least fifty years old and was the same shade of green as a stick of chewing gum. Frilly tea towels hung from the oven door’s handle. A polyester mat on the table supported a vase of dusty plastic flowers. A cross-stitch sampler hung above the sink with the words TRUST IN THE LORD WITH ALL YOUR HEART. It might have been kitsch in the right hands, but instead, it felt like someone had died, and they hadn’t cleaned out the house yet. The dirty dishes in the sink, and their sour smell, were part of that.
“Sit down, sit down,” Candy said, waving at the Formica table and the matching chrome-legged chairs. “Let me get you something to drink.”
“We’re all right,” Bobby said.
“You have to have something to drink. I can make you coffee.”
She bent to inspect a lower cabinet, which made the kimono do problematic things.
“We’re really fine,” I said. “And we don’t want to take up too much of your time.”
Candy fixed her gaze on me. “I was being polite.”
“We’ll have coffee,” Bobby said.
She didn’t actually sniff or shake a finger at me, but her message of disapproval came through loud and clear.
It wasn’t until we were all seated around the table with cups of truly subpar Folger’s that Candy said, “You’re here to prove Vivienne killed him, aren’t you? Mind if I smoke?”
“Actually—” I began.
But instead of a cigarette, she took out a vape pen and drew hard on it. The resulting vapor, which smelled like, well, candy, immediately took up residence in my skull in the form of a newborn headache.
“Why do you think we’re here to prove Vivienne killed your brother?” Bobby asked.
“Because she killed him.” Candy’s gaze moved to me. “And because he already proved she killed all those other people.”
“Could you explain that?” I asked. “It’s still not clear to me why anyone thinks Vivienne had anything to do with this.”
Candy took another puff of the vape and said, “I told the police all this.”
“I know, but it’d be helpful to hear it again.”
“They thought it was great stuff. They wrote it all down.”
“Uh.” Genius struck, and I took out my phone. “I hope I have your permission to record this session.”
She rolled her eyes and nodded, and I got the sense that Candy Yamamoto was wondering how a bozo like me had managed to catch Vivienne in the first place.
After I’d started recording, I said, “Could you explain this to us the way you explained it to the police?”
Candy sprang into action. “The first thing you’ve got to understand is that nobody really knows Viv. I mean, everybody thinks they do. They see this big-name author lady, and they see her in her fancy dresses and with her hair done and those fake nails, and they figure that’s who she is. But they don’t know the real Viv. Everybody falls for the act, you know?”
