Dead In The Water (Rebecca Schwartz Mystery #4) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series) (21 page)

“The right kind of buses, with a little planning, could be convenient as hell, carpooling— You know what? Even walking. Walking wouldn’t be half-bad for most things, but we never walk. We are busily polluting the planet beyond redemption. And why? To impress our friends, that’s why. There is no other reason, believe me.” He paused, wrinkling his nose. “You may be wondering why I drive this undersized excuse for a transportation machine. Well, Sylvia got the good car. It’s only temporary, I assure you.”

He turned into a lot shiny with new BMWs, and that was okay with me. If he wanted to get his vicarious car jollies through me, I’d be glad to go along with the gag—I was sorry now I’d scared him away from the Mercedes lot, but I’d try to make it up to him. I prepared to get rabidly excited about Beamers. Maybe I’d even insist on driving a Jaguar. If there was a Rolls in Monterey County, I might take it for a spin.

But I did have one needle to deliver. “Esperanza told me you’re such a reverse snob you won’t even get an answering machine.”

“Rebecca, read my lips. I am from the Southland, where we worship the automobile. We’re talking religion here.”

“Praise Henry Ford and pass the cell phone.”

“But Esperanza’s damn right about those dumb machines. A stupid toy for stupid people who keep hoping someone will have something interesting to say to them sometime.”

“That’s certainly what I hope when I play my messages. You sound like someone from another century.”

“Only in certain areas. I’ll tell you something—as soon as I can afford a nice car, I
am
getting a phone for it.” He gave me his million-dollar smile. “It’s the L.A. way.”

He led me over to a metallic-finish convertible, somewhere between bronze and silver, very discreet, very professional.

“This one might do,” I said.

Julio was walking around it, admiring from all angles. He patted it. “Gorgeous little 325i, aren’t you, baby?” His tone had turned to baby talk. Sometimes I feel men and women will never begin to understand each other, and there’s no point trying.

His hand still caressing the paint job, he looked back at me, reluctantly, I thought. “I really like these better than the 560 SLs, which would run you at least sixty-five. Little baby like this, you could probably get for thirty-five.”

My knees turned to Jell-O. Humor him, I told myself. This whole adventure is for his amusement. It’s nothing to do with you. “Let’s look at it in red,” I croaked.

“Are you getting a cold?” he said, but the late-arriving salesman, not nearly so Johnny-on-the-spot as Black Magic, had now caught up with us and sailed into his role: “Yes, ma’am, I’ve got one that’s going to make you forget you ever heard the name Mercedes, Saab, Jaguar, anything else.”

“Red?”

“Just like this one, only the color a fire engine gnashes its teeth and dreams about being.”

The salesman was hardly taller than me, and wiry, dressed in an absurdly fashionable baggy suit, like something you’d wear to a South of Market nightclub but otherwise wouldn’t be caught dead in. It was a shiny olive, with a small print in it. One lock of hair trailed down his silly-looking back, and his voice was shrill. It wouldn’t have mattered if he’d looked like Jabba the Hut. Julio was hanging on every word, and the words had started to come with the speed of semiautomatic weapon fire. Me, I was more or less tuning out.

Idly, I followed the two of them, mentally sketching a picture for a kid’s book—a sleeping fire engine, closed eyes where its windshield should be, great gnashing teeth set into its hood. All the cars on the lot looked pretty much alike to me. That is, they did until I spotted one that looked different. Very different. Somebody’s trade-in probably.

It looked entirely out of place on that lot, exuding as it did a quiet dignity yet earthy charm. It was a car that looked like it could go anywhere, indeed practically seemed to be in motion already, though it was just sitting there lording it over the Beamers. If you scratched the paint, it wouldn’t be a major tragedy, it would just give it more character, as if it needed any. This was a car with the character of a stagecoach or a hansom cab, maybe even the Orient Express.
And
it was a convertible every bit as snappy as those little 325s.

I stopped dead.

“Rebecca? What is it?”

“I didn’t know they came in white.”

“White? Why not white? We’ve got every color you can name and then some.
Sure
they come in white,” said the salesman.

I walked, as if in a trance, toward the car I knew I had to have.

“Rebecca!” shouted Julio. “That’s a Jeep!”

He was so enraged I would have feared for his sanity if he hadn’t explained about the car sect he belonged to.

“That,” I said, “is a chariot.” And he saw that I was a lost cause.

Due to one thing and another regarding the surprise of love at first sight and my lack of cash on hand for such an eventuality, I couldn’t actually drive the Jeep out of the place that day. But I drove it around for about half an hour before I could bear to say good-bye, and by the end of the test-drive, Julio had come around. He sat beside me singing the theme from “Rawhide” and cracking an imaginary whip at nonexistent dogies, which may have been meant to annoy me, but ended up getting both of us caught up in the pioneer spirit of the thing. The salesman sulked in the backseat.

Back in Julio’s car, I was so exhilarated, I threw my arms around him and ended up in a serious lip-lock.

“See you tonight?” he said.

“Yes.” No question. Absolutely.

I picked up my rented car at the aquarium, stopping first at the American Tin Cannery. There was a lingerie outlet there. After a small but satisfactory shopping spree, I headed for Carmel.

* * *

Katy’s maid was a loose end I needed to tie up. She met me at the door of her little house with a face swollen from crying and an air that was frankly eager. Her belongings were strewn everywhere as she attempted to pack, extremely inefficiently it looked like, distracted by grief. She seemed glad to see someone, anyone.

I explained my errand and was told I must not call her “Yolie,” that only Katy had done that, that it reminded her too much of the woman who had been her employer for fifteen years. Her name was Yolanda Estevez, she said, all very formally, but even in her sadness, I could see why Ricky had called her a “great old gal.”

She was pushing sixty, probably, and she carried a lot of weight, but she wasn’t fat; she was motherly. A serene, gracious kind of mother who’d probably raised seven or eight kids of her own before taking on one nearly her own age. That she had taken care of Katy in ways an adult didn’t usually need was obvious from her conversation. I can’t say I was surprised. Anyone who drank as much as Katy apparently needed a mother.

She wore a simple blouse and skirt that went well with a simple hairdo—her hair was almost shoulder-length, naturally curly and becoming. Occasionally she touched the front of her skirt, as if wiping her hands on an apron, but she wore no apron today. It was obviously the habit of a lifetime, and it brought to mind the aromas of baking bread and bubbling sauces.

The little house Ricky had remodeled had been fixed up with pillows and plants—modest things—but it was a comfortable place to be, or would have been if not for the disarray. Clearly Yolanda had the knack of making you feel comfortable and cared for.

Distractedly she continued packing as we talked, but her heart wasn’t in it. She made practically no progress, and I could see she was doing it only because it kept at least a part of her mind off Katy.

“I feel like I had my arm chopped off,” she said. “I been with Katy so long, I don’t know what to do without her.”

“It must be awful for you.”

“They say she was beaten. They say someone beat her before they strangled her. They beat my poor, delicate, beautiful Katy.”

“Ohhhh.” Involuntarily I let the noise out. I had put the horrible image of Katy’s pathetic, beaten body out of my mind. Yolanda’s words brought it back.

“What is it, baby?”

“I saw her. Ricky found her body and he called me before the police.”

Yolanda stopped her aimless packing and sat down. “You poor child.”

“I know this is hard for you.”

“For so many years I love her like a daughter. I do everything for her—I cook, I wake her up and get her to bed when she fall asleep somewhere else, I remember her appointments, I get her ready to go.” Her arm made a wide sweep. “Everything.”

“You two must have been very close.”

She nodded, blinking tears.

“Do you think you’re up to answering a few questions?”

“Chure.”

“Do you know the Sheffield Pearl?”

“Chure.”

“Ricky says you were here the night she showed it to him—do you remember that?”

“She give it to him, I think.”

“Did you see her give it to him?”

She shook her head. “No, but she give it away twice before. To two other men. She asked me later if she give it to Ricky. She forget sometime.” She frowned and tapped her forehead.

“You were here Friday?”

“Tha’s when all that happen. She get a phone call from somebody asking about the pearl.”

“She did? Did you answer the phone?”

“No, but Katy tell me about it. First, she send me to see if the pearl was missing. I go look and say it is. Then she get off the phone and she say, ‘Yolie, the pearl couldn’t have been stolen, could it?’ I say, no, I bet you give it to Ricky. She say, ‘I
knew
it couldn’t have been,’ and snaps her fingers like she remember she did give it to Ricky.”

“Did she say who the caller was?”

“No. I don’ think it was Ricky, though. If she give him the pearl, he wouldn’t tell her it was stolen, would he?”

“Is that what the caller said?”

“Tha’s what I think he said.”

“He? Was it a man?”

“Lemme see.” She closed her eyes and thought for a few minutes. “I don’t know. Katy didn’t say, one way or the other.”

“I wonder. Did you know Sadie Swedlow? Could it have been her?”

At the mention of her name, Yolanda teared up again. “Oh, Sadie! Sadie die, too, the minute I leave town. They both die.”

It was no good reminding her that she’d been out of town every weekend of her life and they hadn’t died then. I asked again, “Could she have been the caller?”

Yolanda shrugged, her large shoulders heaving, the gesture meant to work off some of her hurt as much as anything else, I thought. “I guess so,” she said.

“What time did the call come in?”

“Late afternoon. Four, five, six. I don’ know. Seven, maybe. Night looks like afternoon this time of year.”

“But you must know. You left Friday night. Was it just before you left or earlier?”

“I lef’ Saturday morning. The las’ time I saw Katy was Saturday morning.” Her voice was so thick with held-back tears I didn’t have the heart to go on.

The fog came in as I drove back to Monterey, lowering the temperature, dampening the air. I usually enjoy fog, find it exhilarating rather than ominous. But I got an eerie feeling on that drive, as if things had suddenly slipped very much out of kilter. I found myself driving erratically.

My heart was beating fast and, despite the cold, I was sweating; my mind kept slipping in and out of gear. The car, not surprisingly, nearly slipped off the road. I skidded and braked and finally brought it back under control, but in a much-sobered condition—either the brakes were going or I really shouldn’t be driving right now. I slowed down as much as I dared and, rolling into the Pelican Inn at almost a crawl, couldn’t be sure whether the brakes or I was the problem. Probably I was. I was shaking.

I peeled off my clothes and stood in the shower for twenty minutes or more, rivulets running off my hair and into my face, trying to figure out what was wrong with me, why I had so much invested, why I should care so much, and whether I was simply being silly.

In the end, I called Julio and said I was very sorry, I couldn’t make it, I had an emergency. I called a cab—I didn’t trust myself in the damn rented car again—and pulled on jeans and a red turtleneck while I waited for it.

Libby answered the door, but she was so engrossed in some TV show she barely gave me a cursory hug. Familiarity, I surmised, was breeding the usual thing.

From upstairs, Marty hollered, “Rebecca? Come up a minute.”

She was getting ready to go out.

“Date night again?” It’s possible there was the slightest irritated edge to my voice. Marty as sweetheart of the rodeo was getting to me.

“Committee meeting,” she said, seeming not to notice. I sat on her bed as she tried on a belt, discarded it, tried on another. Perhaps she had a date after the committee meeting. Or maybe Jim Lambert was on the committee, whatever it was. I didn’t care; in fact, I had a feeling the less I knew about her personal life, the better.

“Is Keil babysitting?”

“No, he’s over at a friend’s. I’m taking Libby to her dad’s before I go.” She turned away from the mirror and stared at me. “Listen, I’m running late and I have to stop by the aquarium on the way. You couldn’t run her over there, could you?”

“Sorry. I came in a taxi.”

“Oh. Just to visit?”

“No. I need to know something. I just talked to Katy Montebello’s maid. She said you called Katy on Friday. In fact, she told me a very interesting story about your call.”

Once again she abandoned the endless fascination of her own reflection to look me full in the face. “What are you talking about? I don’t even know Katy Montebello.”

I said sweetly. “Give me a break, please. We talked about her.”

She resumed her mascara application. “I know we talked about her, Rebecca. But I didn’t say she was my bosom buddy. I didn’t call her Friday and I’ve never called her.”

“Are you familiar with the Sheffield Pearl?”

“Sure. Everyone around here knows about it. About every six months the local paper does a write-up on Katy, or she puts the pearl on exhibit at some benefit, and that gets written up. Nobody doesn’t know about it—why?”