The Lavender Lane Lothario, page 1
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For the late, great Ray Bradbury, who kindly gave this aspiring author the single most valuable piece of advice I’ve ever gotten: “Write what you love to read.”
PROLOGUE
HE WAS A LUCKY man. Many, many people said so.
Except they didn’t know him. They didn’t know the gloom that lived inside of him, day and night. Didn’t know that some mornings he could barely force himself out of bed. No one knew this about him. He didn’t let them. He had responsibilities. There were people who depended upon him. They thought he was satisfied being who he was. Happy, even.
People, he’d learned, could be remarkably stupid that way.
It was the last Thursday in April. Not yet dark out, but raw and blustery. The temperature had never made it out of the fifties that day. There was a Citgo mini-mart on Old Shore Road near the corner of Pitcairn Avenue that was open. But Pitcairn Avenue itself was absolutely deserted. Everything south of Old Shore Road was deserted during the off-season. The flimsy wood-framed buildings weren’t winterized.
Slowly, he eased his car past the boarded-up ice cream parlor and T-shirt shop, past Abe’s tattoo parlor and John’s pizzeria, past Patsy’s fried everything takeout seafood stand and the Sound View Kiddie Arcade. There was, for him, something incredibly forlorn about Pitcairn Avenue in the off-season. The buildings looked so beaten-up and neglected.
The Pit stood at the very end of the avenue facing Sound View Beach. The ramshackle beer joint was plenty rowdy on hot summer days. The picnic tables out on the patio were packed with people. After dark, it was an even rowdier dance club that was mobbed until 2:00 A.M. The summer people flocked there, most of them young. The Pit was their place.
Right now, it was no one’s place. Sand drifts blew across the parking lot, which was empty except for one car. The person whom he was meeting had already arrived. He parked and got out of his car, sorry he hadn’t worn a jacket. The wind was really gusting down at the water’s edge, billowing his pant legs as he trudged across the lot. The water of Long Island Sound was slate gray and choppy. It was hard to believe that in a few short weeks people would be sitting out on this patio in their bathing suits drinking ice-cold Coronas.
A hand-lettered sign on the door read: WE’LL SEE YOU AGAIN MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND! HAVE A GREAT WINTER! The door was unlocked. Inside, it was almost the same temperature as outside. The Pit had no heat, no insulation. It smelled faintly of beer in there. Spilled beer that had soaked its way into the worn wooden floorboards. It was a smell that never went away no matter how many times the floor was swabbed.
“Hello…?” he called out. “Are you here?”
No one was there.
He made his way over toward the bar. There were some empty glass Budweiser pitchers on it. Nothing else. The cash register was wide open to show that there was no money to steal. The weathered wooden picnic tables from the patio were stacked in the middle of the room with their overturned benches piled atop them. The walls were adorned with electric signs from many different breweries. The Pit proudly carried eighteen beers on tap and another twenty-four in bottles and cans. Also hanging on display were dozens of brightly colored bikini tops and bras that had been shed, and autographed, by their wearers after drinking many, many of those beers.
“Hello…?” he called out once again.
That was when he got hit.
He didn’t know with what. Only that he’d been whacked incredibly hard on the back of his head, so hard that he let out a groan of pain as he sank to his knees, dazed. Then he got hit again. And again.
And then … then he felt himself tumble over onto his back. There were bright flashbulbs going off in front of his eyes as he gazed up at his killer, who was smiling at him. And saying something to him now. But he couldn’t hear the words over the incredible roaring sound in his ears. And then he couldn’t see anything, either. He didn’t feel what came next. He was very lucky that way.
He was a lucky man. Many, many people said so.
THE PREVIOUS EVENING
CHAPTER 1
“I MUST SAY, MASTER Sergeant. This qualifies as the most unusual date we’ve ever been on.”
“It’s not a date.”
“Are you sure? It feels like a date.”
“It’s not a date.”
Des and the chronically overweight Jewish man in her life were sitting together in the darkness on a picnic blanket in Duck River Cemetery, not far from the marble tomb where the great Aurora Bing had been interred since her death in 1961. It was an elaborate tomb compared to the historic cemetery’s older, simpler headstones, set apart by a stone retaining wall and adorned with intricate scrollwork as well as an inscription courtesy of Byron:
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meets in her aspect and her eyes …
The night was foggy and damp. Des wore a Gore-Tex jacket over her uniform. Mitch had on his C. C. Filson wool packer coat. They’d brought a Thermos of hot coffee and a bag of ham-and-cheese sandwiches. The sandwiches were for Mitch. There are two types of people in this world, Des had come to realize—those who eat when they’re on edge and those who don’t. Which explained why she, Desiree Mitry, Dorset’s resident Connecticut State Trooper, had zero fat on her leggy six-foot-one-inch frame and why he, Mitch Berger, bore an uncanny resemblance to the Pillsbury Doughboy. They’d been waiting here since darkness fell. It was nearly nine o’clock now and way quiet, aside from those mournful blasts of the foghorn from the Old Saybrook lighthouse across the Connecticut River.
“I’m on the job right now,” she reminded him. “And you’re keeping me company because I didn’t feel like doing this by myself. Cemeteries weird me out.”
“No problemo,” he assured her, munching on either his third or fourth sandwich. “Although I do keep expecting vampires to show up. This really reminds me of one of those color-drenched Dracula movies that Hammer Films made with Christopher Lee. Would you believe that he played Dracula for Hammer seven times? Starting with The Horror of Dracula in 1958 and ending with The Satanic Rites of Dracula in 1973, which incidentally featured Joanna Lumley as Jessica Van Helsing. You may remember her from the British sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, better known as Ab Fab. She played Patsy, who was best buds with—”
“Mitch, you’re getting your jabber on.”
“Sorry. Cemeteries weird me out, too. Plus we seem to be out of sandwiches.”
“I can’t imagine how that happened.”
“Hey, I know what…” He reached into his jacket pocket for his new cell. “I’ll take your picture with my super-duper new Batphone. It has its own built-in flash.”
“Maybe later.”
“It can also tell us precisely where we are.…”
“Mitch, I know where we are.”
“And answer any questions you might have about baseball, agriculture, world religion, you name it. Ask it anything. Go ahead. You have no idea how amazing it is.”
“Kind of do, wow man. I’m the one who’s been begging you to upgrade to a smart phone, remember? You’d still be clinging for dear life to your vintage Agent Fox Mulder clamshell if you hadn’t dropped it in the bathtub. Does this mean you’ve finally been won over?”
“Is it that obvious?”
“Only to me.” She heard a night creature skitter in the woods a few feet away.
Mitch heard it, too. “Um, I forget, how long do we have to stay here?”
“Until they come.”
“You think they will?”
“I know they will. My troop commander schooled me about this when I first took the job.” The leafy New England village of Dorset, jewel of Connecticut’s gold coast, came equipped with all sorts of peculiar quirks. Though none quite so peculiar as this one. “They’ve been pulling stuff since long before you and I were born—ever since Geoffrey Gant took his own life way back in 1938.” Gant had been one of the leading lights of Dorset’s artist colony, right up there with George Bruestle. He was renowned for his landscape paintings, many of which depicted the countryside near his farm up in the hills on Eight Mile River Road, where the painter had lived with his wife and two sons.
“Aurora Bing owned White Gate Farm right across the road from him. She was a widow in her late forties, and still a very beautiful woman. The two of them fell madly in love, but when Gant refused to leave his wife for her she broke it off. He couldn’t deal with it and hanged himself right there in his studio. His sons blamed Aurora. On the first anniversary of his death ‘someone’ burned her barn to the ground. Gant’s sons were questioned but released. She rebuilt it. On
“Fairly harmless as in…?”
“They’d pee on it, one by one.” She glanced over at him in the foggy darkness. “Why do guys do that?”
“It’s considered the ultimate show of disrespect.”
“Why?”
“Dunno. Just is.”
“There are times when I don’t understand your gender.”
“We’re complex,” Mitch acknowledged. “But we’re not deep.”
“No one got super upset about it until last year, when they decided to up their game by spray-painting the word whore all over Aurora’s tomb. It was hateful, plus it took a lot of hard work to clean off.”
“Did they get busted for it?”
“Geoffrey Gant’s grandson, Sherm, and Sherm’s son, Leland, were questioned but released. No proof that they did it. But it was them. And they’ll show up here tonight and do it again. Or try. Sherm is not a very nice man.”
Sherm Gant, popularly known as the mayor of Pitcairn Avenue, was a major player in the Dorset business community. And one of those crusty small-town New England types who, once you got to know them better, turned out to be just plain nasty to the bone. Sherm was an unpleasant bully with a drinking problem. Condescending, too. Someone who felt he was just a tiny bit superior to everyone else because his grandfather had been a famous artist and because he, Sherm, had inherited a substantial amount of real estate. Geoffrey Gant’s paintings had fetched quite a bit of money after he died. Money which Sherm’s father had used to buy up dozens of summer rental cottages in the 1950s, as well as most of the commercial properties on Pitcairn Avenue. Sherm came into all of it when his father died, and he had proven himself to be a thoroughly inept landlord. He’d lost many of the cottages to the bank in recent years, but still had a stranglehold on the summer businesses on Pitcairn Avenue. He collected rentals from the folks who ran the ice cream parlor and kiddie arcade and so on. And he owned and personally operated The Pit, the rock ’em, sock ’em beach bar that was not exactly a source of pride among Dorset’s moneyed blue bloods. Nor was Pitcairn Avenue itself, which they considered to be a low-class, honky-tonk destination for low-class, honky-tonk summer people. In fact, they preferred to think of Pitcairn Avenue as belonging to the less affluent neighboring town of South Dorset, though it did not. Des had the arrest records to prove it.
“Sherm also has a personal grudge against Hubie Swope,” Des pointed out. “Which means you’ve got bad blood on two counts.” Hubie Swope, Aurora Bing’s sole grandchild, was the town of Dorset’s stickler of a building inspector. Last summer, two weeks before Labor Day weekend, Hubie had shut down The Pit for numerous building code violations. Sherm had been infuriated. Still was, because Hubie was refusing to let him reopen for the upcoming season unless Sherm undertook enough upgrades to pass a rigorous inspection. “Trust me, Sherm will be showing up here any minute now, spray paint in hand,” Des said, shivering from the damp cold. “And he’ll drag his son Leland along. I just hope they get here before we freeze to death.”
“Want some more coffee?”
“No, I’m good. Thanks for doing this with me. By now you must be incredibly sorry you said yes.”
“Not a chance. I’m sharing a blanket with the woman of my dreams in a spooky old New England cemetery. It’s delightfully foggy out. The marsh is giving off the ripe aroma of rotten eggs and dirty sweat socks. This is my idea of a good time.”
Des reached over and touched his face, smiling. After her bitter breakup with her cheating dog of a husband, Brandon, she’d been positive that she would never, ever let another man into her life. And then Mitch came along. They made no sense together. None. She was a woman of color, a West Point graduate and Gulf War veteran who’d risen fast to become a lieutenant catching homicides for the Major Crime Squad—until she’d tangled with the wrong people and ended up back in uniform. Mitch was a Jewish film critic from New York City who’d spent most of his life sitting in dark rooms staring at flickering images on a wall. And yet they’d fallen madly in love with each other from the moment they’d met. Still, they were taking it careful and slow. Des needed time alone to deal with what she’d experienced on the job. She did that at an easel in her cottage overlooking Uncas Lake, where she drew heart-wrenching portraits of the many—too many—murder victims she’d encountered, deconstructing the horror line by line, shadow by shadow. And Mitch still wasn’t totally over losing his beloved wife, Maisie, to ovarian cancer at the age of thirty. Many nights, he sat up all night watching movies from yesteryear in his two-hundred-year-old cottage out on Big Sister Island. Old movies weren’t just Mitch’s life’s work. They sustained him. When she’d met him, Mitch had been chief film critic of the most prestigious daily newspaper in New York City. After the paper got taken over by a media conglomerate, he’d joined his editor’s start-up e-zine as an essayist. He also wrote quirky film encyclopedias that were very popular.
He reached over and took her hand. “But listen, if you’re feeling guilty about dragging me out in the fog like this…”
“No way, doughboy. Not going to happen.”
“How do you even know what I’m going to say?”
“Because I know you. And we’re not getting freaky on this blanket in the middle of Duck River Cemetery.”
“Are you trying to tell me you’ve never fantasized about having sex in a cemetery after dark?”
“Never.”
“Not once?”
“I believe that’s the working definition of the word never. I’m on duty, remember? I’m not dropping trou here in front of all of these dead people.”
“You can keep your pants on if you’d … Okay, ow, that hurt.”
“Why don’t you school me about Aurora? She’s in your wheelhouse, isn’t she?”
“Sure is. Not that you hear her name much anymore. But the lady in that tomb with a view over there was a huge star in her day—her day being shortly after the turn of the last century, when Aurora Bing was considered to be the most beautiful woman to ever set foot on a Broadway stage. She played Portia in a landmark 1908 production of The Merchant of Venice that was staged by the great impresario Henry Harris, who died four years later on the Titanic. Went on to star in a string of Broadway hits before Adolph Zukor signed her to a three-year film contract for five thousand dollars a week, which was a lot of money in 1915.”
“It’s still a lot of money.”
“Those were the early days of silent pictures. They were still making most of them in New York. For a brief while, Aurora was as big a film star as Mary Pickford. But when the industry moved cross-country to Hollywood, her film career fizzled out. She didn’t like it out there. They barely had paved roads. Aurora was used to the life of a Broadway diva. So she returned to the stage and married a zillionaire financier named Maynard Swope.”
“Who bought her White Gate Farm,” Des said, nodding. “Aurora gave birth to a bouncing baby boy and the family spent their summers here happily ever after until Swope lost his shirt in the crash of ’29 and took a flying leap off a tall building. Aurora had some money of her own that his creditors couldn’t get their hands on. And she had the farm, which Swope had given to her outright. So she raised her son here and went on to have a wild love affair with Geoffrey Gant.”
“Which, I believe, is where we came in,” Mitch said.
“Have you ever seen any of her movies?”
“No one has. They’re gone. Most of those early silents are. The nitrate film stock turned to dust. Would you believe that the great Will Rogers made a whopping eleven feature films that no longer even—” Mitch broke off. “Did you just hear that?”
