The Curse of the Holy Pail #2 (19 page)

I took a deep breath to calm myself down a bit before continuing. "And besides, you wouldn't have been there in the first place if you and Trudie hadn't been up to monkey business. Court filing, my foot, Steele. This is me you're talking to. I'm the one who deep- sixed the evidence."

"Evidence? Of what?" His tone was really snotty now. The drugs must be wearing off instead of kicking in. Leave it to me to catch him coming down instead of flying high.

"The evidence, Steele. The little wrappers left behind in your trash can."

Another round of silence, longer this time. I took the time to collect myself. I held steady, refusing to be the one to back down.

Finally Steele spoke. "Have the messenger get that stuff to me ASAP, Grey." Then he hung up.

While I had the phone in my hand, I placed a call to the number Carmen Sepulveda had given me. It was an Orange County number. The name Willie Porter was written on the message slip, but the date and time of the call had been left blank. The phone on the other end rang several times before an answering machine picked up. It gave no introduction, just a mechanical prompt to leave a message at the tone, which I did, leaving both my work and home numbers.

Once the messenger was on his way to the hospital with the items Steele had requested, I got down to the business of straightening my office. It was surprising how fast I was able to tidy up once I applied myself. Joe and one of the male paralegals righted my file cabinet for me and replaced it in its original corner. I cleaned up everything else, using the opportunity to rearrange my desk and file drawers. I was about done when the phone rang. Looking at the display, I recognized Zee's number.

"Hey, you," I answered cheerfully, happy for the break.

"Hey back;" she said. "So when were you going to tell me about your office being trashed?"

"How'd you find out?" I asked in surprise. "Is it on the news?"

She laughed. "It's news, all right. Seth heard it from Doug." Zee was referring to Doug Hemming, Seth's law partner. "Doug heard it from an attorney he had lunch with today, who heard it from his secretary, who heard it from a court reporter, who heard it from his girlfriend, who is a word processor at a law firm where the husband of one of your firm's attorneys works."

Ah, yes, the legal circle of life. We're so caught up in confidentiality when it comes to our clients that we can never resist gossiping about ourselves. All that pent-up chatter had to vent somehow.

"I was going to tell you tonight. I'm cleaning up my office as we speak," I said.

"You mean they actually trashed your office? Not just the office in general?"

"Doug didn't tell Seth that?" I asked with a slight chuckle. "He's falling down on the job."

"Apparently not," she told me. "And I'm sure Seth wouldn't have left that out. All I got was that the firm had been vandalized and Mike Steele was in the hospital. I figured it was a disgruntled employee. Lots of Steele's ex-secretaries floating about. Not to mentioned disgruntled husbands of ex-secretaries."

She had no idea how close she was to the truth. It was here at Woobie years ago that I had first met Zee. She was a young mother with only one child then, and Seth was starting to build his own practice. Though she was long gone before Mike Steele came onboard, she had heard the stories, and not just from me.

"Zee," I said into the phone quietly, still not believing it myself, "my office and the file room were the most seriously damaged. The police, and even Steele, think the guys last night were looking for something that might have been in my office. Like maybe the Holy Pail."

"You're joking," she said, her voice getting tense. "But you told me you don't have it." "

I don't," I insisted yet again. "I only have the Zorro box and that they left behind. I found it on the floor under my desk without so much as a scratch. As far as I can tell, they took nothing or else didn't find what they were looking for."

"Mercy," Zee whispered into the phone. "This is just too strange."

We hung together silently on the phone, clutching each other over the phone lines, guarding against the possibility of danger, unseen but very real. We didn't need to speak.

"Oh, I heard from Greg," I finally said. "He's coming home Sunday afternoon."

"Good," Zee said, sounding relieved to change the subject. "Any decision yet?"

"Uh-uh" Quickly, I changed the subject back to the Holy Pail, finding that easier to think about than Greg and his proposal. "Tomorrow, I have an appointment with one of the actors from the old Chappy Wheeler Show. Maybe I'll learn something from him. His name is Lester Miles."

"Lester Miles," Zee said, musing. "Is he a midget or dwarf or something like that?"

"Yes, a dwarf," I answered. "You know him?"

"I know of him. He used to be in lots of movies and TV shows." She was quiet for a second. "And I think he was in a made-for-TV movie just a couple of weeks ago. In fact, I'm sure of it. Something about a grandfather who raises his grandchildren in spite of everyone's objections. You know, the usual three-hankie stuff."

"He lives in Glendora, according to Joe Bays. Do you have any idea where that is?" I asked.

"Somewhere near San Dimas, I believe. I only know because it's near the waterpark the kids like."

I looked down at my hands. My nails, bad a few days ago, were truly shameful now after the cleanup.

"I think I'm going to see if I can get a nail appointment around ten or ten thirty and leave from there" I picked up a pad of Post-It Notes and jotted down NAILS on the top sheet so I would remember to call for an appointment when I finished talking with Zee.

"By the way," I said into the phone, "do you know anything about the Good Life Center? It's a day spa or massage place or something like that?"

"Sure I do," Zee answered.

Why was I not surprised? Sometimes I wondered why I ever wasted my time doing research when all I had to do was call my best friend. She was a bottomless well of information, a virtual fount of minutia.

"Remember earlier this year, when I won that spa visit for high sales from Golden Rose?" she asked. "Well, that's where my gift certificate was for. It was wonderful. It's over off of Jamboree Road, in the same shopping center as Houston's." "

I found out that it's owned by Sterling Price's son, Kyle," I told her. "His father signed the final papers the day he died"

"Nice gift."

"I'll say. Price also deeded over the house in Newport Coast to Kyle the same day. Seems the whole thing caused a big ruckus in the family the day of the funeral"

"He signed the papers and a few hours later he's dead?" Zee asked. "Well, that's about as fishy as an open can of tuna."

I could almost see her standing by the phone with one hand on her bulky hip. It was her intimidating stance, a posture that said she wasn't having any of it.

"I agree," I told her. "But did someone kill Sterling Price because of the gift to Kyle or to stop it? Or did someone kill him to steal the Holy Pail?"

"I'm leaning toward the theory that the theft of the lunchbox and the murder had nothing to do with each other," Zee threw in. "What better time to steal something valuable? I mean, think of the chaos after he was found."

"That seems to be the consensus," I said. "But if that's the case, why would someone search our law firm for it, if that's what their motive was last night? And who were they? Steele thinks there were only two men, and he said they wore ski masks."

"Which matches the description of almost every burglar in history," Zee said with a frustrated sigh. "I just don't like the idea that they searched your office."

That made two of us. I was trying to decide if I should tell her about the poison, but knew she would worry needlessly. It also occurred to me that we may all be off base. Maybe the murder had nothing to do with either the Holy Pail or the gift to Kyle. Maybe there was still a missing motive, something eluding me in all the hubbub.

"I have to run," Zee said in a hurry. "Seth and I are having dinner tonight in Laguna Beach with the Carroltons. I still need to get some things done before I start getting ready. What are you doing tonight?"

I groaned audibly. "Going to my dad's. A belated birthday din„ ner.

I could hear a soft chuckle from the other end of the phone. "I'd tell you to have fun, but I know better," she said. "So just have as good a time as possible."

I mumbled something that I hoped passed for a human sound.

"It may be your birthday dinner, but tonight is really for your father," she added.

I tapped my nails on my desk in impatience. She was right, of course. Tonight was more for Dad. My occasional visits brightened his dreary existence among the evil mole people more commonly known as my stepfamily. Under my breath, I cursed Greg for not being here to go with me. Then I thought about his Uncle Stu and his sweet Aunt Esther, now a widow, and immediately felt guilty and cheap for my selfishness. Greg was where he needed to be at this moment, and I could weather the visit to my father's solo. I'd done it for years already.

"You be careful tomorrow, Odelia," Zee said before saying goodbye and hanging up.

Hmm. Tomorrow didn't worry me. It was getting through dinner tonight without being charged with homicide. That would be the real challenge.

SIXTEEN

PARKED CURBSIDE, I STUDIED my father and stepmother's house. From the outside, it looks like any normal three-bedroom bungalow found in a Southern California working-class neighborhood. Painted the color of a honeydew melon and sporting white shutters, it sits in the middle of a no-frills lawn consisting only of welltended grass and low-maintenance shrubs. There wasn't a flower in sight and, unlike a lot of their neighbors, not an RV in sight either. My father, Horten Grey, still does the lawn work himself, even though he's in his early eighties. Once in a while, he hires a neighbor boy to cut the grass when the summer heat gets to him. The outside of the house, as simple and as uncluttered as a shoebox, is much like my father.

They bought the house over thirty years ago when they first married. I had been thirteen when my parents divorced, fourteen when my father married Gigi, and sixteen when I came home from high school to find my mother gone. Against everyone's wishes but my father's, I moved in with my father and Gigi, striking out on my own almost before the candles on my eighteenth birthday cake were blown out.

It's not like anyone within the walls of this house ever beat me. In fact, my father never laid a hand on me in anger my entire life. But I can only take my stepmother and her family in very small doses, like arsenic. Let me put it this way: holidays and family dinners resemble a casting call for The Jerry Springer Show.

My own mother had been no picnic either. A sullen alcoholic, when we lived alone together after the divorce, she would go days without speaking to me. She was emotionally devoid and unavailable, as if her insides had been beamed up by aliens, leaving behind a shell. It was the middle of May, just weeks before the end of my junior year of high school, when I came home from school and found her gone. She took only her personal items and left the rest of the apartment intact, as if she thought I would live there alone after she left, like a discarded roommate instead of an abandoned offspring. She left no final note, and I have not heard a word from her since. Looking back at things now with an adult perspective, I'm surprised she didn't leave earlier.

The main reason I was still sitting in my car in front of my father's was that I wanted to mull over the disturbing call I received shortly before leaving the office tonight. It was my return call from Willie Porter.

The call did not go the way I had expected, although I am not sure what I did expect. Still, it rattled me from the ground up and left me shaken and thrilled at the same time-like riding out a fair- to-middlin' earthquake.

Willie Porter was very articulate, with a confident, cultured voice. In short order, I had pegged him as another wealthy business tycoon hoping to land the prized lunchbox.

I was wrong.

Once he established my identity and place in the Holy Pail saga, he announced himself satisfied and got down to business. I could tell that this was a man used to being in control and calling the shots. In a firm voice, he informed me he had information, important information, about Price's murder and the curse of the Holy Pail.

Quickly, I had changed my idea of Willie Porter as a wealthy collector to just a kook looking for attention-well-spoken or not. I advised him to call the police if he had a lead on the murder. Before I could recite the final numbers of Dev's cell phone, Porter dropped a bomb.

"My real name is William Proctor," he had said evenly.

I half expected him to follow up with "... and I've got a secret" On this, I would not have been wrong.

"I owned the Holy Pail before Sterling Price."

I thought carefully about Porter's claim before answering him. This could easily be someone who read the magazine article and knew the order of ownership.

"But you can't be," I said firmly into the phone. "William Proctor is dead."