Elizabeth Zelvin - Bruce Kohler 04 - Death Will Save Your Life (6 page)

“The Farm is known for getting the best people it can,” Barbara said. “If he’s big in his field, it might make him even more vulnerable to bad publicity if a client sued him. How about Jojo? How much did he need Melvin to keep laying those golden eggs?”

“He had sales last year, and he’s got forty or fifty clients. That means he’s well established.”

“What about Annabel?”

“Now, Annabel is interesting. Did you know she’s a psychologist too? She and Melvin got matching PhDs along the way.”

“Feather said they married young,” said Barbara. “At least Annabel didn’t go to work in an office to keep him in graduate school and then type his dissertation.”

“She did a study of families with what she called lost parents,” Jimmy said, “where an older child takes on parenting responsibilities.”

“I bet she used Melvin’s family as material,” Barbara said. “Does she publish?”

“Journal articles,” Jimmy said, “but no books of her own. Scuttlebutt says she wrote a lot of Melvin’s. She’s considered a pretty good writer and a talking head, too. Melvin was being considered as host for a reality show about couples, and some of Annabel’s fans thought she would do a better job than he would.”

“Fans? How do you know?”

“Blogs,” Jimmy said. “Bloggers know everything.”

“Intellectual property,” Barbara said. “If Annabel really wrote Melvin’s books, and he made a lot of money from them, could she sue him?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What if she’s going around
saying
she wrote his books?” Barbara said. “Maybe he could sue her.”

“He’s still the one who published,” Jimmy said. “The copyright says he wrote it. Barbara, don’t you think you should slow down?”

“I
said
no back seat driving. Melvin was litigious. Nobody likes to be sued. Even if Annabel wrote Melvin’s books, claiming it now, when it’s far too late, and getting sued for it would make her look like a fool.”

“I googled Feather and Madhouse too,” Jimmy said. “Last summer, they had a violent fight. It got into the local paper because Melvin brought in his lawyer from the city and got her to press charges. She withdrew them, but not till Madhouse had spent a night in jail. Barbara, slow down.”

“I can tell you the outcome of that story: Madhouse hated Melvin, if he didn’t already, and Feather had a harder time than ever in her marriage. She has no backbone at all where Madhouse is concerned.” Barbara bounced up and down in her seat. “Wow, this is getting exciting! We’ve got a whole batch of suspects with great reasons to be mad at Melvin.”

“Barbara, slow down!” Jimmy said.

“Cut it out! I’m not even speeding, I’m going only seven miles over the limit which means I’m barely keeping up with traffic, and please remember that I’m the driver at the moment, so why should I?”

“Because,” Jimmy said, “an unmarked vehicle with flashing red lights has been clinging to your tail for the past five minutes.”

Barbara cursed and braked hard.

“Thank you, God, for anti-lock brakes,” Jimmy muttered.

“I got excited,” Barbara wailed. “I was enjoying the conversation. So maybe my foot got a little heavy on the gas. And I totally forgot to check the rear view mirror.”

“And when we were wrong, promptly admitted it,” Jimmy quoted. Step Ten. “But please, petunia, not to the cops.”

They let the siren wail until Barbara pulled over onto the shoulder. The unmarked car stopped behind us, lights still flashing. Barbara sat very still with her head bent and her shoulders hunched, as if to present the smallest possible target. Jimmy was too big to shrink, but a marble statue couldn’t have been more rigid. I was glad not to be the one in trouble for once. I peeped out the back window.

The police car driver’s door swung open, and an ominously booted foot emerged.

Jimmy muttered the Serenity Prayer a couple of times. The cop clumped toward us. He looked about seven feet tall as he loomed over the Toyota. Barbara rolled down her window.

“Well, well, well.”

It was Callaghan.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Jimmy muttered. I didn’t think any of them fixed tickets. But it was no time to be a smartass, so I kept the thought to myself.

“What did I do?” Barbara’s constricted throat produced a husky squeak.

“License and registration, please.”

Detectives doubled as traffic cops? Small force for a small town. So much for our low profile. Jimmy handed Barbara her bag without looking at her. Her hands shook as she fished around for her wallet.

“Are you aware that you were doing seven miles above the posted limit?”

He really had clocked us. He slapped at Barbara’s license and registration with his fancy rollerball pen. If he was going to give her a ticket, I wished he’d just go ahead and do it.

A second cop emerged from the other side of the unmarked.

“Cal! For God’s sake!” we heard him say. “You’re not a traffic cop any more. Why don’t you just relax and enjoy your promotion?” Nice to have one mystery solved.

Callaghan stumped back to the cop car. The seconds ticked away. Here in the country, even on the highway the air smelled good. A trilling bird call drifted through the window.

Jimmy was still muttering the Serenity Prayer. I doubted he knew he was doing it. I joined in under my breath. It couldn’t hurt.

Finally Callaghan returned. He stuck his arm stiffly through Barbara’s window, handing back her license and registration.

“This is your last warning.” He glared impartially at all three of us. “And I don’t want any monkey business from any of you.”

“Thank you,” Jimmy breathed, poking Barbara.

“Thank you,” she mumbled.

“Detective!” Jimmy called out as Callaghan strode away. “Can you tell us when we’ll be allowed to leave the area?”

Callaghan turned. A grin, the first we’d seen, spread over his face.

“When I say so.”

“Could have been worse,” I said brightly. “Glass half full!”

Barbara might have murdered me, but the seatbelt restrained her, and the cops were still watching.

My feet dragged as Barbara herded me up the hill to Shangri-La. She said all I had to do was lie on a bench and get hot. And here I thought a sauna involved going to Scandinavia and rolling in the snow.

“Do I have to strip and socialize with nekkid people?” I whined.

“You can wear a towel if you insist,” she said.

“Will you wear a towel too?”

“Why, do you want me to?” she asked.

“Yes, please,” I said. “Have a little mercy.”

Ten minutes later, each of us was wrapped in a skimpy towel bearing the Aquarius rainbow logo.

“How do I look?” I asked.

“Everything you don’t want anyone to see is covered just fine,” Barbara said. “You’re lucky. These towels were not designed for a Jewish goddess like me.”

Clutching her towel with one hand, she pushed open a heavy wooden door, letting out a blast of scorching air.

“Okay, what do I do?” I asked as I followed her in.

“It’s not complicated,” she said. “Lie down!” She made it sound like we’d been to obedience school together.

To my relief, the interior of the sauna was divided into several compartments, each with tiers of what looked more like shelves than benches to me. Barbara marched into the nearest compartment and flung herself down on a bench.

“Here, next to me,” she said.

“I’d rather have my own compartment, thanks,” I said.

“Why can’t you be a free spirit?”

“I
was
a free spirit, but then I got sober.” I arrayed myself cautiously on my back in the compartment next to hers.

“Now what? We just lie here and bake?”

“Like a piece of matzoh in the desert,” she said. “And matzoh doesn’t talk.”

It did feel like desert heat, so dry my nostrils felt like paper. My bare skin was toasting to a crisp. Even the towel around my waist grew hot. A faint wood smell, sweet and pungent, came off the benches, floor, walls, and ceiling, as if we were lying inside a giant cedar chest. I might have slept.

The door opened. I thought I heard two sets of footsteps, but since the feet were bare, I wasn’t sure until someone said, “Shh.”

“Shit. I hoped we’d have it to ourselves.”

I felt the faintest breath of a break in the heat in the air around me as someone sidled around the partition to take a peek at me.

“Are they asleep?”

I pretended to be asleep like crazy.

“Looks like it. Just don’t talk too loud. ”

My bench jounced as someone put weight on a shelf in the compartment on the other side of mine.

“Here, share the bench with me.”

My shelf jounced again. I had to strain to hear them, but they had my full attention.

“Where were you this morning?”

“Holding my little sister’s hand while she talked to the law. Well, Mel’s sister, but I’ve been looking out for her since she was a kid.”

“What did she tell them? And even more fascinating, what did
you
tell them?”

“Nothing they couldn’t find out on their own. The divorce wasn’t amicable, but whose is? I said it was ancient history.”

“What about the reality show?”

“They didn’t want to hear about my career. I said I make a good living and his current will has nothing to do with me.”

“Oh, bravo, dear, nicely played. Where did you say you were that night?”

“Why?”

“Now, now, dear, don’t get your panties in a knot. I thought you might like to have been with
me
.”

“What for?”

“What’s it worth to you?”

“Fifteen percent, you twisty little devil, and not a penny more. Isn’t that the going rate?”

“Now, now, dear, let’s not get nasty. You do want that show, don’t you?”

“It’s too hot to argue. I’m going to take a shower.”

The bench jiggled. The wooden outer door of the sauna, too heavy to slam, creaked slowly closed.

Huh. Annabel was right. Jojo was twisty. It sounded like he was trying to get her to give him an alibi for the night of Melvin’s murder. Maybe he
had
gone out. I couldn’t swear he’d never left the room that night. I’d had a horribly vivid drunk dream and woken up sweating, so scared it was real and then so relieved it wasn’t that I hadn’t so much as looked over at the other bed. I’d said the Serenity Prayer, put the pillow over my head, and gone back to sleep.

Barbara was enjoying Woo-Woo Farm. Since the couples workshop had disintegrated, she had been able to get into an unhurried rhythm. She had time to smell the flowers, both literally and figuratively.

The gardens were in their late spring glory. Bursts of flame-colored poppies glowed in the brilliant sun. Irises at their peak displayed an astonishing range of rainbow hues. Purple alliums, their fuzzy heads impossibly round, poked up in regiments. Peonies exploded in masses of silken pink and cream petals, releasing an intense fragrance.

Barbara sat and closed her eyes, letting the sun and the light breeze bathe her upturned face. At the meditation this morning, they’d practiced deep listening. Now she imagined herself breathing in through her ears. Four different bird calls. Insect sounds: a buzzing, a whine, a dry repeated click. The highway’s intermittent faint rush of passing cars. A quickening breeze that tossed the treetops into a chorale of sighs and whispers.

Three or four people walked by: soft voices, footwear that crunched, scuffled, and creaked. She folded them into the meditation. A distant train whistle wailed. The prolonged clackety-clack of a long string of freight cars followed. Shouts, crows of laughter, and a rhythmic thumping came from the basketball court behind the dining hall.

She smiled at the thought of telling Jimmy later that she’d been at one with the treetops and the dragonflies. It was her last self-aware thought as she slid into a trance state. She came back to herself to hear a soft percussive shushing that she couldn’t identify.

She breathed deeply in and out and opened her eyes. The flower beds shimmered; the sky dazzled. A small, weathered Asian man was combing the fine gravel of the path with a wooden rake. He worked steadily with a slow, smooth motion, smiling as if the task gave him enormous pleasure. Very Zen. He was probably one of the many Tibetans who visited the Farm.