An Affair to Dismember (9 page)

WE DROVE out of the historic district on Pear Lane and up farther into the mountains, where a gated community had taken root against the wishes of the Cannes Historical Preservation Society. Cannes citizens had an aversion to McMansions in their otherwise quaint town, but the McMansions fed the town with much-needed property taxes, and not everyone was against them.

We had gotten off to a slow start. Grandma was right about it being a bad day for driving. Lucy’s Mercedes had a flat about a block away from my grandmother’s, and the auto service ran into a fire hydrant on its way to help us. Luckily, Ruth Fletcher was walking by at the
time and changed the tire for us, muttering something about how many worthless cappuccino drinkers it took to screw in a lightbulb. We made a promise to switch over to Earl Grey and visit her at Tea Time as soon as possible.

The mountains were beautiful in summer, filled with wildflowers and virtually untouched by civilization. It was hard to imagine that a bank robber would live in a town like Cannes, let alone that a murder had taken place here.

“You like dogs, right?” asked Lucy.

“I love dogs. I worked as a groomer in Long Beach for five days, and I was a dog walker in Pittsburgh for two weeks.”

“Good. Uncle Harry has two dogs. The important thing is not to show fear. Pretend you’re not scared.” Lucy gripped the steering wheel, and her knuckles turned white.

“Should I be scared?”

“Yes,” she said. “And today’s his poker game, and having all those men around makes the dogs extra nervous. They’re Rottweilers, the biggest Rottweilers I’ve ever seen. Every time Uncle Harry has a poker game, he has to have an ambulance standing by.”

“Can’t we just call him?”

“Uncle Harry is more of a face-to-face person.”

LUCY ANNOUNCED us to the guard at the gate. He wrote something on his clipboard and opened the gate with a push of a button. I heard that the cheapest house in the neighborhood was $9 million. The homes were all large, sprawling affairs, stone-faced structures in earth tones. Lucy drove to the top of the hill. There was another gate with another guard. She gave him our
names, but this time the guard checked the inside of the car, the trunk, and underneath.

“I didn’t know you had family in the area, Lucy,” I said while the guard shimmied on his back.

“Uncle Harry isn’t technically family,” she said.

The guard opened the hood and inspected the contents. “How did you meet Uncle Harry?” I asked.

“It was at the beginning of my career,” she explained.

“He’s in marketing, too?”

“Uh, something like that.”

The guard gave us the thumbs-up and opened the gate. As Lucy drove up the driveway, we heard the dogs bark, growl, and snap their teeth.

“Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,” I said.

Lucy reapplied her lipstick. “Listen, Gladie. We are meant to get to the bottom of this. I’m sure that a murder took place across the street from your grandmother’s house. You are involved, whether you like it or not. The murderer is still hanging around town, and the police are not looking for him because some stupid eggnog-addicted coroner says it was an accident. For all we know, a killer may be living across the street from you. Did you ever think of that? Doesn’t that make you the least bit nervous?”

I did think of that, and it did make me nervous. It also occurred to me that Peter and Jane were playing a cat-and-mouse game with me. And I wasn’t the cat.

“Let’s go,” I said. “Let’s say hi to Uncle Harry.”

THE DOGS threw themselves against the closed, thick wooden door, making a terrible racket, like bears caught in a trap.

“Don’t show fear, don’t show fear, don’t show fear,” Lucy repeated over and over—to me or to herself, I wasn’t quite sure. I was trying to recall the last time I’d had a tetanus booster when the door opened, and a bald man—the butler, I assumed, who resembled Lurch from
The Addams Family
—greeted us with a nod. He motioned us to enter, but the Rottweilers were jumping and barking with drool spilling from their fangs, and I didn’t know how we were expected to get past them alive.

Nevertheless, Lucy stepped over the threshold. I held my breath, waiting for her screams of pain, but the dogs didn’t touch her. They didn’t calm down, either. They continued their growling and barking. I closed my eyes and followed her in. I prepared myself to be mauled any second, and I was considerably surprised when we made it all the way past the living room, down the hall, and into the card room without a puncture wound.

“You can shut up now.”

I turned toward the speaker, a man who was at least three inches shorter than my five foot seven. He wore gray slacks and a button-front striped shirt with the sleeves rolled haphazardly to his elbows. His hair, what was left of it, was shoe polish black, and his eyes were small but expressive. His most notable physical trait was a complete lack of a neck, which suited him somehow. Despite his looks, charm oozed out of him, and he had an unmistakable charisma that had an instant effect on Lucy.

“I said, shut up,” he repeated to the dogs. They ignored him and continued growling. “They’ll calm down eventually. Hey, sexy, how’s tricks?” He embraced Lucy and gave her a juicy kiss on the lips.

Lucy lit up with a toothy smile. “Hello, Uncle Harry. Thank you for inviting us. This is Gladie. The one I spoke to you about on the phone.”

“Yeah, sure, sure. Gladys Burger, how you doin’?”

I took his hand, and he gave me a firm shake.

“You can call me Gladie,” I said.

“Correction, Legs,” he said, eyeing my lower half, on display in my dress. “I can call you whatever I want.”
He winked and turned back to the table to gather his chips.

He was right. The dogs did calm down. They found a place in the corner on a red velvet couch, and they went right to sleep. There was a lot of red in the room. Red couches lined the walls, which were draped in erotic tapestries. The center of the room was taken up by a large poker table, covered in red velvet and surrounded by thronelike red chairs. High ceilings were crisscrossed with dark wood beams. We were not alone. The entire cast of
The Godfather
was there. Not really, but the men who were there could have been their first cousins.

Uncle Harry’s four poker buddies and a professional dealer were at the table. The game was winding down when we entered, and the players were busy cashing in their chips. They stood up when they saw us.

“Come, sit,” Uncle Harry said to Lucy and me. “My friends were just leaving. We’ll have some privacy.” He poured whiskey into a tumbler and took a seat in one of the red thrones. Lucy and I sat at the table and watched Uncle Harry say goodbye to his friends. They cleared out, and a silence descended on the room, making it very serene, even in its bordello-like way.

“You play poker, Legs?” Uncle Harry asked me.

“I’ve never played.”

“I bet you’d be good at it. Maybe I’ll invite you to join us one day.”

Me and the guys anteing up, raising stakes, going all in, and reminiscing about how
Sopranos
got it all wrong? Maybe not. Instead, I said, “Thank you. That sounds wonderful, especially if you’re playing for matchsticks.”

Uncle Harry roared with laughter. “Matchsticks. Ha, that’s a funny one. Lucy, I like this kid. Thanks for bringing her around.” He cleared his throat and took a swig of his drink.

“Down to business. I hear you got a problem with Randy Terns,” he said.

“I don’t have a problem,” I said. “He’s the one with the problem. He’s dead.”

Lucy piped up. “Dead, Uncle Harry. Gladie thinks he was murdered.”

“She does, does she?” This came from the other side of the room. I jumped in surprise. I hadn’t seen him sitting there, but there he was, wedged between two erotic tapestries, dressed in his shirtsleeves and Armani trousers. Spencer Bolton, the irritating cop, was even more attractive than I remembered, perhaps because his hair was slightly tousled and he had a look of surprise on his face that softened his Mr. Smooth image just enough to make him human.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“You know each other?” asked Uncle Harry. “We allow Spencer to play with us on occasion. Even though he’s a cop, we like him ’cause he’s young and energetic. We’ve decided to hold off killing him for the time being.”

“I appreciate it, Harry,” Spencer said.

“Coincidence of coincidences, Spencer has been asking questions about Randy Terns as well.” Uncle Harry finished off his drink and poured a new one. “It was ruled an accident, you know, Legs. Old man slipped, but Spencer has some doubts. I don’t know if Randy Terns was murdered, but if he was, he deserved it.”

“Uncle Harry, Gladie didn’t know about Terns being the tree bank robber,” Lucy said.

“Oh, that. Yep. The idiot tried to rob a bank while he was dressed as a tree. And not even a good disguise, just some leaves taped to him. What an idiot. It didn’t work, of course. He was caught, and he served major time. But that wasn’t the only bank robbery.”

“He used the tree disguise a lot?” I asked.

“You’re not asking the right questions, Legs,” he said. “Nobody cares about the tree thing. Listen, Randy Terns was in the business a long time. Randy was a wingman, and not a very good one at that. If somebody needed an extra hand, they would call him. But the guy had no luck. He was part of so many cockamamie schemes. He was with this one group that called ahead for the robbery. They actually called the bank and asked to have the money ready in bags ahead of time for when they got there, just like Chinese takeout. I’ll tell you, if idiots were dollars, there’d be a whole lot of money lying around. All those guys went to San Quentin for that one.

“Then there was the time he tried to stick up a miniature golf course. Miniature golf! So Randy’s standing there at the putter rental counter, and he’s got his gun in the face of this pimply-faced teenager at the cash register, and it’s hot outside, and ’cause Randy is sweating and all, his gun slips out of his hand—splat!—onto the pavement and falls apart into a million pieces. Randy dropped to the ground to put it back together, but by then the teenager had run eight blocks to the local police station. Randy didn’t serve no time for that one. He got away before the cops showed up, but you get what I’m trying to say? You understand who Randy Terns was?”

I nodded. “He wasn’t Einstein,” I said.

Uncle Harry smiled and patted my shoulder. “He wasn’t Einstein. Hell, he never even heard of Einstein.”

“Are you saying Randy Terns never successfully pulled off a job?” Spencer asked.

“See, Legs? Spencer asks the right questions.” Uncle Harry stretched his legs under the table and patted his hair in place. “All right. It’s 1972. Randy’s fed up. He’s got a couple kids and more on the way. He’s tired of all the penny ante stuff. So he puts together a gang. I might
have helped him meet a couple guys. I’m not saying I did, and I’m not saying I didn’t. But there were two guys with him, and they did pretty well together, a couple small jobs here and there that kept them flush enough to make it to happy hour every night. They broke up in 1977, the year the John Travolta movie came out.”

“Saturday Night Fever,”
I supplied. “So, where does murder come in? Did Randy’s gang break up amicably?”

“There’s not a lot of amicably in the bank robbery line of work, Legs. I heard this rumor about Randy, and it goes something like this: Randy had one big score. He knocked over a bank solo and cut his two colleagues out of the proceeds. According to the rumor, Randy made it into the safe of the Lichtenstein Bank out in Los Angeles. A really big score. They never proved a thing, and no one ever saw the money. In fact, the Lichtenstein Bank never reported the robbery, for whatever reason. So, who knows? But it’s hard to explain how a guy could raise a big family and live all these years in the historic district of Cannes without
doing a job
. His day job as stockroom supervisor at the Mart-N-Save didn’t pay great. You know what I mean?”

I did know what he meant. I also knew that his two colleagues would have been pretty angry about being cut out of so much money. “He hid the money from the other gang members?” I asked.

“That’s what I heard,” he said. “Before you ask, I don’t know where the other gang members are,” he said. “Jimmy the Fink and Chuck Costas. For you, Legs, I’ll ask around and get back to you.”