Death at a Fixer-Upper Page 3

  A black-and-white patrol car eased in behind the Volkswagen. Now the cavalry arrives, I thought bitterly. Then my pulse quickened as Bernie Aguilar climbed out of the vehicle.

  I raised a hand in a casual wave to cover the usual rush of warmth I felt in the presence of Arlinda’s chief of police. Bernie was just over six feet and stocky from hard work and good Portuguese food. His hair was thick and dark, touched with silver; he wore a mustache and a beard trimmed to regulation standards. He was dressed in the navy blue of the APD, his name pinned over the pocket of his shirt and his badge over his heart.

  Maybe I’m a sucker for a man in uniform, but, to be strictly honest, I’d had a pash for Bernie even back in the days when he’d been my sister’s soon-to-be ex-husband. But I knew better than to act on it—or, at least, I thought I did. A few weeks back, topped off with beer and euphoria after learning our home offer had been accepted, I’d…well, kissed him. My mind stole back to that evening so cruelly interrupted by Bernie’s pager: his breath soft and warm in my hair, his hands on my breasts and then—

  I gave myself a smack on the head. This would never do.

  Bernie strolled over to where I sat, one hand resting on his belt, a smile flickering on his lips. “What seems to be the trouble, ma’am?”

  “Nothing I can’t handle.” I wrenched my thoughts back to the present and gave him what I hoped was a cool little smile, to show him I was a take-charge woman with full command of my impulses.

  He glanced over my handiwork. “Happy to help you change that tire.”

  “You’re looking at the new tire.”

  His smile widened. “Of course. What was I thinking?” He shifted his weight so that he was leaning against the van. I didn’t want to be caught staring up at his off-duty hardware, so I clambered to my feet, making plenty of noise to cover the creaking of my joints. I brushed the street off my jeans and looked up to find his eyes on mine. We didn’t say anything for a moment.

  “So what brings you here?” I said, before the pink flush stealing up my neck could reach my cheeks.

  “My duty to protect and serve. Report of a motorist in distress.”

  “And?”

  “And I heard you might be free for dinner Saturday.”

  “I’ll have to check my social calendar. How’d you hear that?”

  “I’m a trained investigator. You still in your old place?”

  “We close Wednesday.” Knock on wood. “I figure it’ll take the rest of the week to get our stuff moved.”

  “Perfect. You won’t want to stop packing to cook. I’ll bring you dinner and help with the heavy stuff.”

  “What’d you have in mind? Nothing fancy, I hope.”

  “Not at all. Pizza, actually. I could bring over a pie from Big Louie’s.”

  I bent down and gathered up my tools to buy myself some time. Dinner was a mistake. Still, Max had plans and would be staying with friends on Saturday. It was only pizza, right? Wrong. There was a lot more on the table here than a pie from Big Louie’s.

  My mouth opened to tell him no, no, no. “Pizza sounds, um, good. Perfect. Six o’clock?” Inwardly, I cursed my traitorous libido.

  “I’ll be there.” Bernie’s fingers brushed my shoulder, and my body temperature ratcheted up a few degrees. “I like this shirt. It’s new, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. Fifty percent off at the big box store.”

  He leaned in, his words caressing my ear. “Maybe Saturday we can make that a hundred percent.”

  —

  After Bernie drove off, I was conscious of a certain degree of unseemly warmth that didn’t mesh well with my professional-woman image. So instead of rolling straight to the office I parked at the town common, a green square of grass with a bronze statue of William McKinley at his crankiest in the center. The corner bakery had just set out a basket of buttery chocolate-chip muffins fresh from the oven; I grabbed a coffee and a muffin, still seductively warm inside its white bakery bag. Nutritionists tell us chocolate is a superfood, and I was never one to argue with science.

  There was a vacant bench on the Plaza near McKinley, and I settled down to cool my fires and do some people-watching. The bench kitty-corner to me was occupied by a gentleman dressed in a makeshift kilt composed of two plaid shirts tied at the waist, one in front and one in back. To complete his ensemble, he wore a puffy dark green vest with nothing underneath, his arms sticking out like unbreaded chicken wings. He hiked a leg up to adjust the laces on his boots, and I was treated to a view of the lower Hebrides in all their glory.

  I looked away hastily and focused on a banner stretched between the two tall palms at the Plaza’s northeast corner; it proclaimed that the twenty-third annual Kinetic Sculpture Race would be held on Memorial Day weekend, which happened to be this weekend. Thousands of tourists flocked to town to watch the race kick off from this very location, to drink beer and smoke dope and to cheer on their favorites. I’d been a dedicated spectator of the off-beat, oftentimes bizarre event for as long as I could remember—but never so much as this year, because Max was racing.

  Arlinda’s a funky little seaside town of fifteen thousand people, less than a third of whom supplement their income by growing marijuana in their garages. I’d spent my formative years here, with what could only be described as mixed results. Sometimes my personality seemed mirrored in the character of the town: independent, eccentric, and a little off-putting until you get used to it. I’d earned a degree from Redwood State, and somewhere at the bottom of a moving box had the diploma to prove it. I’d also met a man, married him, had a baby, and been abandoned by the guy, all in the space of a few short years Not what I’d expected from life, but one adapts.

  I took a bite of muffin. It was moist and rich. Until recently, I thought I had the single-parenting thing handled. But a few weeks ago Wayne, Max’s father, had shown up at my door after an absence of thirteen-plus years. And I hadn’t told Max. Yet. What was I waiting for? I suppose, for starters, I wanted to be sure I hadn’t imagined the whole thing. I’d been under a lot of stress at the time. A psychotic break, or whatever they called it these days, could happen to anyone. Just look at Biddie.

  Moodily I finished my second breakfast, brushing the crumbs from my jacket and thinking of my exchange with the chief of police. A little cautionary bell was going off in my head about Bernie Aguilar. It had been a long time—thirteen years, in fact—since I’d let down my guard. I was too careful, too wounded to make that mistake again. Now I had a dinner date. Better I should have my head examined.

  On top of that was the family connection. There was something positively Oedipal about dallying with your sister’s ex-husband. Then again, Stacy’d cut him loose with relatively little fuss. She’d always had a short attention span when it came to men: the four years she’d been married to Bernie, before she found her soulmate in her Pilates instructor, was an eternity by her standards. Still, there was history there, messy and indisputable. I didn’t need the complications.

  The orange-and-yellow city bus rumbled down Ninth Street toward the Plaza. Five minutes after the hour, right on time. It made its ponderous right turn to head to the university and points north. I watched the faces flash by, framed in the big Plexiglas windows down the length of the bus. Most bent their heads over laptops or talked into their phones, but others gazed back at me incuriously, like a woman with a round pasty face, and that man in the…was it…Wayne?

  In a flash, I was on my feet and running. The bus growled its way up the hill, belching a cloud of exhaust from the vent on top. I was gaining, even in my clogs, which were not ideal pursuit footwear. But, goddammit, I needed some answers. I shouted and waved, trying to catch the attention of the driver. There was a bus stop outside Wanda’s Waffle Emporium and I heard a grinding of gears as the bus slowed down, preparing to pull over. The signal flashed. I was going to catch it.

  Inexplicably, the bus surged back into traffic and picked up speed. No! It was pulling away from me. I put everything I had int
o a last, frantic sprint. My left shoe flew off and landed in the street. The bus crested the hill and was gone.

  My cell phone rang as I gulped in air like a stranded fish and retrieved my clog before some rude driver ran it over. I yanked my phone out of my bag and didn’t recognize the number. Punching a button, I snapped, “Hello!”

  “Oh. Sorry. I must have dialed the wrong number. I was looking for a real estate agent.”

  Oops. “You got one. Sorry. Hold on just a second.” I held the phone away from my ear and took a deep, calming breath, then blew it out. “Sam Turner here, Home Sweet Home Realty.”

  “Oh, good.” A man’s voice, a pleasant bland tenor that still somehow impressed me negatively. “I apologize if I’ve caught you at a bad time.”

  “Not at all. This is perfect. How can I help you?”

  “My name is Richard—Richard Ravello, with Eastside Builders. It happens I’ll be in town tomorrow for a day or two. Our firm is based in Redding. Quite a contrast in climates, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Definitely.” The temperature in Redding often hit triple digits, with such searing dryness that it hurt to breathe. Arlinda enjoyed a more temperate climate ideal for the cultivation of mold and fungi.

  “I’m sure time is valuable, so let me get to the point. I got the green light from Eastside to investigate a piece of land that’s ripe for development. Plus it would give us a toehold on the coast. The Redding area is somewhat overbuilt at present. Interest in new homes is stagnant.”

  I read between the lines and decided no one wanted to live there. And who could blame them? “Did you have a particular property in mind?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do. Just came on the market this morning. The address is 13 Aster Lane.”

  My eyebrows climbed. Talk about coincidence. “You realize, Mr. Ravello—”

  “Richard, please.”

  “—that this isn’t a vacant parcel? There’s a house there.”

  “In very poor repair, from what I understand. There’s no question in my mind that razing it and building a planned community of up to twenty-four semi-attached homes, each with its own square of lawn and access to a central play area for the kids, will represent a significant benefit to Arlinda’s economic well-being.”

  “Wow! That many homes?”

  “We reduce the footprint of each home and build vertically to create a higher-density, more intimate living environment,” he said smoothly.

  “I think you’d have to clear that with the Planning Department.”

  “I trust I can leave that up to you,” he said. “I’ll be in Arlinda tomorrow morning. Shall we say eleven o’clock at the site?”

  I gave myself a brisk rap on the head. What did I care what a buyer did with a property? My job was to make the deal and deposit a big fat commission check in the bank, not lecture potential clients on local building codes.

  “I’ll set it up,” I said. “Can I call you at this number if there’s an issue?”

  “Absolutely. I look forward to meeting you.” He hung up.

  I folded up my phone and stuck it in my bag. The brief exchange had left a bad taste in my mouth. There was something off-putting about Richard Ravello. He was too glib, too slick. Or maybe I had a prejudice against out-of-towners. It couldn’t be any fondness for the derelict old mansion. The place was a wreck. Demolition was surely the only cure. An image of the wishing well and its backdrop of sweet-smelling roses being scraped away by a bulldozer’s blade made me wriggle with discomfort.

  I chided myself for being a sentimental fool and checked my watch. I needed to make the appointment with the listing agent in order to meet the twenty-four hours’ notice required, so I hauled out my phone again and punched in Lois Hartshorne’s number, resting my spine against the façade of Art’s Printing and T-Shirt Screening. The phone rang four times before a gravelly tenor said, “Hartshorne and Associates.”

  “Lois Hartshorne, please.”

  “Speaking.”

  “Oh. Hello. This is Sam Turner. I’m with Home Sweet Home Realty.”

  “Good for you. How can I help you?”

  “I have a client who’s interested in looking at your Aster Lane listing—”

  “What for?”

  I blinked at the phone. “To, ah, build there. He’s a developer.”

  “Not gonna happen. There’s issues. Don’t waste your time or mine.”

  “What kind of issues?”

  “The kind that require you to do your homework. You remember ‘due diligence’ from whatever online real estate school you studied at? Or did you skip that chapter?”

  My mouth dropped open a little. In my limited experience, agents were gracious, even fawning, when contacted by other agents who might have a buyer for their listings. Lois Hartshorne bordered on the openly hostile. But maybe that was her style.

  She went on in her grating voice, “There’s a tenant in possession. She agreed to vacate the better part of the day tomorrow to allow showings. So I don’t have a slot to waste on some looky-loo.”

  “I met the tenant this morning. She seems nice.”

  “How’d you manage that? No showings until tomorrow. I can have you up for disciplinary action.”

  This was too much. “Just a minute. I was with Biddie from our office. She told me you okayed a preview.” My heart thumped in my chest at the thought of facing a disciplinary board.

  She made a noise in her throat. A chuckle? “Don’t get your undies in a twist. I guess you could see the place at noon tomorrow.”

  “My client requested eleven o’clock.”

  “Christ. Fine. You’re down for eleven. Don’t forget to leave me a signed, dated business card. And double-check all the doors.”

  I drew in my breath to tell her I wasn’t that much of a goddamned rookie, but she’d hung up. Sheesh. I waited for my pulse to slow down, then pushed myself off my perch and headed to the office.

  Chapter 3

  Home Sweet Home Realty was a boxy ex-Laundromat on the corner of Fifth and Sunset. Its stucco exterior was painted a creamy yellow, diluted to a drab tan by the morning’s haze of fog. My broker, Everett Sweet, had purchased the building for a song about five years back and converted it to office space. It was positioned on a high-traffic corner—good visibility, as we say in the trade—and smelled as springtime fresh as Bounce fabric sheets.

  I used the rear entrance, jogging up a couple of wooden steps and crossing an expanse of redwood decking to reach the door. The deck was a pleasant little oasis for lunch and a quick and discreet way to exit the office should it become necessary. In fact, just recently—but that’s a story for another time.

  I passed the old computer-and-printer combo squatting on a long counter at the back of the building, next to a canister vacuum and a mop in a bucket. Everett didn’t believe in a lot of frills, but he’d grown on me over the months I’d worked for him. His real estate knowledge was extensive and his understanding of human nature instinctual. Plus he didn’t take any shit, something I’m known for as well. We got along all right.

  Small shifts in the air current inside the building told me I wasn’t alone. I walked past the kitchenette to my own little cubbyhole and found my colleague Gail Kelly at the desk we shared. Gail was another rookie, slowly finding her footing in the business. Today her hair was lavender, styled in a soft bird’s nest of curls on top of her head. She had a stack of marketing postcards in front of her and her cell phone in her hand. When she saw me, she put it down.

  “I was just about to call you,” she said. “There’s a woman waiting for you in the lobby.”

  “No kidding. What’s she want?”

  “I didn’t ask. To buy real estate, I suppose.”

  I picked up a trace of doubt in her voice, and it made me curious. Pointing to the cards, I said, “You know that’s a waste of time.”

  “Busywork.” She peeled an address label from a sheet of about five hundred and pasted it somewhat off-center on a card. Then she tosse
d the card on the desk, creating a new stack. Four hundred and ninety-nine to go.

  I took a few quick steps down the hall and ducked into the bathroom to scrub the grease off my hands and check my appearance. I’d seared my hair with a blow-dryer this morning in an attempt to give it more “lift,” making the dark brown strands stand out from my head like the stiff bristles of a toilet brush. My eyes were green and startled-looking; my nose, which used to tilt a bit to the left, seemed curiously straighter following an incident a few weeks back where it had gotten in the way of someone’s fist. I adjusted the little black tee that I’d bought to give me something dark to wear that didn’t advertise Welkie’s Green Waste and Compost, and polished some traces of chocolate from my teeth until they shone pearly white. Could a career as a supermodel be far off?

  A few steps down the hall took me through the kitchenette and into the lobby. My visitor was seated on the rattan love seat. Immediately I regretted not taking a bit more care with my appearance. She was reclined against the floral cushions with her legs crossed above the knee. Her hair was a glossy brunette, worn shoulder length and styled by a professional, not a lick and a promise. Flawless makeup emphasized a creamy complexion and dark, languid eyes. She wore a white knit top that displayed an immodest amount of cleavage, easily twice what I could muster even with duct tape. A clingy black knit skirt rode high on her thigh, revealing legs that were long, lean, and elegant; strappy sandals encased her feet. Her toes were lacquered a deep blood red.

  She leaned forward when she saw me, almost spilling out of her stretchy top. “Sam Turner?”