First on our list was Ted’s sister’s house. My idea of a really neat house is one that doesn’t have to be held up with a stick, and there are no burnt cans in a pile in the driveway or an old Dodge on blocks with chickens roosting under it.
This house was way past that. It was so cool and connected to the center of the universe it stopped raining when we got there. It was behind a fence and a barred gate. As we cruised up, through the gate, we could see there was enough green yard to play the Super Bowl. Even the colorful leaves that fell from the trees and blew across the grass seemed embarrassed by the intrusion.
We parked in front of the gate. I rolled down the window and pushed a button on a metal box inside a brick indentation. There was a buzz and a long silence. I was about to push it again when a snappy female voice with an accent south of the border asked if she could help us.
I explained who we were and what we were doing and that June’s mother had hired us to look into something for her. The voice went away. I turned and looked at Leonard. He was still wearing the deerstalker.
The voice came back, said we could come up, but the tone now was sharp and hard enough to clip paper dolls from cardboard. I guess she had hoped we would be rejected.
The gate slid back and we glided in. The driveway was a big loop of shiny wet concrete in front of a yellow adobe house with a Spanish tile roof. The house was big enough and tall enough to hold all of Noah’s animals and a spare woodchuck. You could have driven four horses running abreast through any of the windows, and the doorway was tall enough and wide enough to accommodate at least one war elephant if it bent its head slightly and went through politely.
No one rode out to meet us in a golf cart, so after I made Leonard take off his hat, we got out and stepped up the walk. When I looked back at my car, it looked unnatural in the driveway. That driveway knew and adored limousines and sports cars, not functional metal, plastic, and glass. I leaned down by the side of the walk and felt the grass. Damn if it wasn’t artificial.
Leonard wanted to ring the doorbell, so I let him. I wanted to ring it too, but sometimes you have to give in to the children. You could hear it chime throughout the house.
No one inside made a rush of things. Of course, a house that big, you might have to pack a sandwich before you went to answer the door.
When the door was finally opened it was the woman that went with the voice over the intercom. She was a petite Hispanic woman in her late twenties and she was actually wearing a maid outfit, just like in the movies. She had beautiful black hair and great skin and lips that looked like they would have been fun to suck on. Because of her stern voice, I had somehow expected her to look like the ass end of a mule and be built like a linebacker.
We were invited inside. I tried not to rubberneck. I had been in government buildings that size, but not a house, and the government buildings weren’t so well furnished.
The maid hustled us along a long wide hall with blue and white tile floors. The walls had paintings on them that looked like they had been painted by madmen and recently. I liked them.
We were led off the hall through another war-elephant-size door and into a library that made the one downtown look like a used-book store. The books smelled of leather and old paper and more knowledge than could be acquired in three lifetimes, plus a whiff of cigar smoke covered in a light overcoat of air freshener. The place had a masculine feel about it, with leather couches and chairs and sliding ladders to climb onto to look at books on the upper shelves. There was a large window at the back and looking through it we could see a shiny pond out there, recently swollen by the rain. Beyond that was a wall like out front.
The maid told us to make ourselves comfortable and went away.
We sat on the couch and Leonard said, “Can you believe this is in the center of town? Hidden up here in the trees?”
“I can’t believe a place like this is anywhere,” I said. “I thought they made this stuff up for the movies.”
“The movie screen wouldn’t be wide enough to hold this place,” Leonard said. “It might take a few theaters just to get that hallway in frame.”
A moment later a woman came into the room. She was some woman. She looked like she was dressed to go out on the town, and not our town. Someplace in Manhattan, perhaps Paris, London, or Rome. Her long blonde hair was waved and she wore a pantsuit of shimmering white and she had a small glass in her hand and it was half-filled with a golden liquid that I knew wasn’t fruit juice.
“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” she said. It was a nice voice full of pep and insincerity. “I’m June. I hope you don’t mind if I don’t offer you a drink. I thought we could race through this rather quickly.”
“That’s fine,” I said.
She came and sat in a leather chair across from us and put her drink down on the wooden coffee table between us, no coaster. It was a heavily stained table and it was the only thing in the room besides the books that looked old.
“So, you’re private detectives,” June said, smiling. She had nice teeth and just the slightest bit of an overbite.
“We’re not exactly private detectives,” I said.
“Oh,” she said.
“We’ve still got the training wheels on,” Leonard said.
“So should you be on the job?” she asked.
“We’ve had a lot of experience,” I said. “We’re just not what you’d call official. We’re operatives. We work for a private detective.”
“So someday you may get a little badge, a whistle, and a canteen,” she said.
“Our boss,” Leonard said, “he started with Where’s Waldo books to sharpen us up, but now we’ve moved on to interviews. We mostly ask short questions.”
“I see,” she said. She grinned and leaned back and sipped her drink and studied Leonard, then me. Her eyes were very green and very penetrating.
“You boys look a little rough,” she said. “Like you’ve been around the block a few times.”
“Maybe more than a few,” I said.
“Oh, I didn’t mean anything by it. I like the way you look. Most of the men I know use skin cream and have straight noses and the most violent thing they do is grunt playing table tennis. Sometimes, in their sleep, they fart dramatically. Oh, I’m telling, aren’t I?”
She moved her head slowly, so we could have a look at her profile, and then she moved it back and sipped her drink.
“It’s just that I don’t know why my mother is bothering with all this, or why she would send you to talk to me. There’s nothing I can add. Ted and his girlfriend were murdered for sex and money. Though they didn’t get the sex, and my guess is they didn’t get much money.”
“Do you know what was actually stolen besides his ring?” I asked.
“Well, he may have had money in the wallet,” June said. “But I don’t know.”
“Credit cards?”
“Most likely. Several. Mostly filled to the brim and leaking over, would be my guess.”
“Did the police say anything about anyone trying to use them after his death?”
“No. I know you’re thinking that might mean the robbery was a sham. But I think whoever did it panicked and took what was in the wallet and was afraid to use the cards. Afraid they’d be tracked. Or maybe the cards got canceled before the killer could use them, and they just disposed of them.”
She leaned back in her chair and crossed her long panted legs and dropped her head slightly. I was sure she knew the effect this had; the way her hair fell across one eye, and the way she looked when she lifted her head and smiled that sexy beaver-toothed grin.
“Look,” she said, “my brother, he and I weren’t close. I’m sorry about what happened to him, but it was an unfortunate accident. Wrong place. Wrong time. I suppose it could have been someone who knew him, knew he was going to be there, thought he had money, and jumped him, but I think he was a victim of opportunity.”
“What about the girl?” I asked.
“She was a tramp. And in case you’re vague on that, let me translate. She was Miss Insert Slot B.”
“That covers a lot of ground,” I said.
“And a lot of ground was covered,” June said.
“Only thing that surprised me about her was that she got killed in the daytime.”
“Beg your pardon?” Leonard said.
“She didn’t go out in the daytime.”
“Fear of skin cancer?” I said. “She freckled?”
“Nope… Wait for it… She thought she was a vampire.”