Ill Gotten Gains: Diary of a Gentle Grifter, page 16
When I managed to regain control of myself a moment later, I noticed Dru had backed away a foot or two. But she held up a dark blue binder. “I found a copy of Peter’s will in his filing cabinet.”
“And?” I eased myself down onto a dining chair. My head was pounding.
“He left everything to Mitch and Christopher. Including this hotel.”
There was much to think about—I still had no idea what our next move was going to be or how I was going to explain this unfortunate turn of events to Lucia; man, I was dreading that—but I did know that we had to get ourselves far away from the bloodbath just as soon as humanly possible. But first, we had to get busy erasing all evidence of us being inside Peter’s house that morning.
Before I allowed the ladies to do anything, I sat down and made a quick list in my notebook:
Find pair of Peter’s pants that’ll fit, take off my bloody pants & place in a garbage bag (take)
Put Andy back in original position, if possible
Put mimosa glasses we used into the garbage bag
Type suicide note on operable typewriter (use eraser end of pencil to type) & place on nightstand
Take photos of the pages of Peter’s will, wipe off fingerprints & return to filing cabinet
Wipe down any and all surfaces we touched
Lock front door
Leave property
Call police on burner when we’re clear
I was well aware that writing everything down was monumentally reckless and would someday seal my fate, easily putting me away for life if and when I’m caught and tried in a court of law. I think about that all the damned time. I knew the truth; I’m a certifiable idiot. I get it. But I’ve been chronicling my every move and my every thought, for decades. It gives me great pleasure. My notebooks are an extension of me. Part of my essence. And when I’m old and wrinkled and no longer able to grift my way through life, I’ll be able to sit back, read the notebooks, and attempt to write my life story. It’ll be sent to publishers after my death at the direction of my last will and testament, and then, from the afterlife, I’ll get a big fat kick out of laying myself bare for the world to read. I might hurt some folks left behind due to my blatant truthfulness, but what will I care? I’ll be dead.
And despite how that old pirate phrase goes, this dead man will be able to tell tales.
At least that’s what I keep telling myself.
I shoved the notebook and pen back into my bag and looked up at Drucilla and Meredith who were dutifully waiting for instructions. “We need a clever suicide note that sounds like it came from Peter.”
“How are you going to pull that off,” Meredith asked. “You just met him for the first time yesterday.”
Drucilla’s eyes lit up. “There’s a folder of old letters in his filing cabinet. The man kept everything.”
I thought that was an interesting development. “Letters to him or from him?”
“Both. I first pulled out a folder labeled ‘Will.’ Turns out that it’s filled with letters to some dude named…”
“…Will,” Meredith and I said at the same time.
“Right.” Dru jumped up. “There are rubber gloves under the sink where I found the Windex. I’ll use those while I read through a few letters. I’ll have Peter’s style down pat in a jiffy.” And off she went.
“You picked a good one,” Meredith said. “She’s one smart cookie.”
I shrugged. “Smart women are a dime a dozen. I picked her because she’s smokin’ hot.” I winked at the makeup artist. I hoped she knew I was kidding. Half kidding, at the least.
Ha! Who am I kidding? I did pick Dru because she’s smokin’ hot. Sue me. Of course, it didn’t hurt that she was whip smart, too, and a hell of a lot more resourceful than I’d ever realized. Despite the late-night drunken dalliance and the newly-discovered husband, I knew I had to find a way to have her by my side more often. She was a one of a kind, true asset.
Meredith started toward the kitchen but stopped short when she got to the bodies. “Let’s make sure we take the napkins off their faces before they dry there and get stuck.”
“Holy shit.” I jumped to my feet. “That never crossed my mind. Thank you.”
“I learned that from a couple of seasons working on CSI: Miami,” Meredith said from the kitchen. “Fun fact—that show was mostly filmed in Long Beach, California. It wasn’t Miami at all, except for some B-roll and establishing shots and stuff.”
“The magic of Hollywood,” I said quietly as I bent down over the bodies. I closed my eyes when I had a napkin edge in each hand, then carefully pulled them away. “Meredith. Bring me a few garbage bags, will you? The big black ones. Don’t touch anything else.” The napkins came away cleanly, thank goodness.
When she returned, I started the first burn bag by putting the bloodied napkins inside one of them.
Meredith cleaned around the dining room tabletop. I went around the house with an old dish towel and wiped down everything I could think of that we might have touched that morning or the evening before, just in case a forensics team was brought in.
Fifteen minutes later, the women and I found a typewriter with a viable ribbon from Peter’s collection. I placed it carefully on a credenza in Peter’s bedroom—where we intended to leave it when we were done—then I typed with a pencil as Drucilla dictated.
Friends,
These times are so very troubling to me and I can no longer mask my unhappiness and utter exhastion. I’ve lived well, but I’ve made mistakes. I’ve tried to love, but that has backfired too many times to count. I’m done counting. I have no more love to give.
I am sorry for troubling you, my dear friends. I pray you will always remember the good times we shared and won’t be sad for to long; it’s not worth your presious time. Live life to its fullest. That’s an order.
Peter
“You misspelled exhaustion and precious,” Meredith said over my shoulder. “And you used t-o when it should be t-o-o. See? Right there.” She pointed at the paper.
“Crap.” I started to pull the piece of paper out of the machine.
“No, no. Leave it,” Dru demanded. “Your mistakes are good. It makes it more authentic. Trust me; I read his letters. The poor guy couldn’t spell worth a damn.”
As we drove away from Swaying Palms, I gave Meredith the signal, and she called the police to report the gunshot she supposedly heard while walking down the sidewalk behind Peter’s house.
And then we all allowed ourselves to breathe for what felt like the first time that morning.
21
…THERE’S A WAY
During my seventeenth summer, I crushed on a girl who attended a different high school. We were both rising seniors, but she went to a prestigious private school, and I suspected she looked at me as just a plain old public school kid…not that there is anything wrong with that. Anyway, we didn’t meet because of school. We met at the Shocko Bottom candy store where we both worked. It was—and still is to this day, I understand—an upscale confectionary surrounded by museums, cafes, seafood restaurants, and bars in Richmond, Virginia’s hip downtown riverside area. It was a hike from my parent’s house on the West End, but I had loved the charm and history of the converted tobacco warehouse district since I was a kid, and I decided back then that I’d buy a loft in that area after I graduated. I was sure of it.
Of course, I was wrong about the Shocko Bottom loft, but I wasn’t wrong about Amanda Bains.
She worked in the fudge section, and I was behind the main counter, bagging various truffles, caramel turtles, and chocolate-covered pretzels for the tourists who descended on our shop in droves in the summertime. I didn’t know too much about Amanda except her family was majorly filthy rich because her father owned several luxury car dealerships. Apparently, he wasn’t the type to shower his kids with cash and prizes—he made them get jobs as soon as they were sixteen, which I thought impressive. It certainly wasn’t a common practice among the wealthier families I knew back then. Most of those kids were spoiled rotten and had zero work ethic.
Despite her well-known last name, family money, and hoity-toity private school, I knew Amanda was exactly my type: long brown hair, sparkling blue eyes, a wicked cute smile, and a consistently delicious smell. When we’d pass each other at the shop, I’d catch notes of jasmine, lavender, and linen in the air around her. She was always so…clean. Always put together. While the other girls simply pulled their hair back into a ponytail and skipped the makeup routine for a rough day of retail drudgery, she always looked as if she was ready for some sort of Paris or New York catwalk. Hair coifed. Makeup carefully applied. Jewelry in place. Absolutely no sensible sneakers for her, like the other girls wore. Amanda was deliciously high maintenance and somehow made it look effortless, as if she simply woke up that way.
In that era of tomboys, rock concert tees, and teased hair, she stood out as classy and classic. Timeless, even.
As luck would have it, she didn’t pay me even the slightest bit of attention, unless it was a direct job requirement. Besides a polite greeting in the morning or while passing off a box of Rocky Road fudge over the glass partition with a tiny hint of a smile, I got nothing else from Amanda. She seemed untouchable, but I didn’t let that fact stop me from featuring her regularly in my masturbatory fantasies. I decided she was the kind of chick who was prim and proper in public and an out-and-out hellcat in the sack. In my muddied teenaged mind, anyway.
Of course, I’d never experienced a hellcat in real life before that; I’d not gotten anyone into the sack by age seventeen. I was probably behind the curve, if you believed my braggart friends who all claimed to be getting some—what’s wrong with me? I’m not ugly or awkward—but I didn’t lose my virginity until my first and only year at Randolph-Macon College. (My parents are Randolph-Macon alums and they’re absolute nutso about their beloved alma mater, hence my brother’s and my first names. It’s tacky and embarrassing, but I decided long ago I wasn’t going to go stand before a judge and try to get it changed. Instead, I just gave shit to my parents about it. They never cared much what Randy and I had to say on the subject however; they harbor zero regrets about honoring their alma mater in that most tacky manner.) But I digress.
I was thinking about all of this as I walked the verdant grounds of the Parker. Drucilla and I had returned to home base and immediately dispatched the reluctant Meredith back to Los Angeles. I then extended our villa reservation for a few additional days, so we’d have time to forge a revised plan given the new, accidently deadly circumstances.
I knew why Amanda had returned to my consciousness after so many years of not giving her a thought; Dru was making me have those same feelings. Drucilla was also complicated. Mostly untouchable. Decidedly mysterious. Very striking. Always put together…
…and a liar.
Amanda had lied to me, too, when she told me she had a boyfriend. After four months of pining away from a close distance at work, and constantly debating with myself if I’d be able to get up the nerve, I finally asked her out on a date at the eleventh hour. The summer was waning and the first day of senior year was just a week away. We’d both be leaving the candy shop to focus on school. It’s now or never, ol’ boy!
Crushingly, it turned out to be never.
She was very polite about it though, and she said she was sorry, but she claimed there was another. Some guy named Thomas at her stupid rich-kids school.
I accepted that with a shrug and a nervous smile in the moment, but of course I wasted no time investigating her claim. I talked to a few of our mutual friends, quickly learning it wasn’t true. She and this Thomas character had broken up the previous April. I decided she thought I wasn’t good enough. Not cute enough. Didn’t have enough money. Didn’t attend the right school. Etcetera. Etcetera. The list was long. And it went into one of my notebooks, naturally.
That rejection hurt for a very long time. Still does, kind of.
Flash forward…Drucilla hurt me, too. I felt so close to her. Admired her style and beauty. Her talents. Her quick-thinkingness. But she had lied to me. Me—the semi-professional liar!
“Here you are.”
I turned to find Dru, now in white Capri pants and a simple pink sleeveless top, standing at the entrance to the Pétanque grove. I felt the urge to take a photo in that moment; she looked like a model in a vintage magazine ad. Very sixties. Very perfect and apropos for the venue.
“Yup,” I said after a few beats. “Here I am.”
“This game is like bocce ball, yes?” She moved one of the heavy balls with her foot. “Are you going to play?”
“No. I don’t have the energy. Let’s go to the Lemonade Stand and get a drink.”
Her eyes flickered. “You don’t have to twist my arm. That’s always a good backup plan.”
We bellied up to the counter and sat on the stools there. We were the only patrons. A fresh-faced young lady handed us small cardstock menus. I admired the heaping bowls of lemons to the left and right of us. They were most certainly freshly picked from the fruit trees that dotted the property.
“This is like something out of a movie,” Drucilla cooed as she took in our immediate surroundings. “So clean and manicured. I never want to leave.”
I agreed. “See why I love it here so much? If it wasn’t in California, I’d move right in.”
She frowned. “What’s wrong with California?”
“Besides the insane taxes, looming threat of world-ending earthquakes, rampant wildfires, the floods, the devastating droughts, and over-reaching regulations? Nothing, I guess.”
“Us Nevadans are lucky in the tax department, for sure,” she said as she turned her attention to the menu. “Not that I pay much. Living under the table certainly has its benefits.”
“You’re too pretty to live under a table, Cilla.” I winked at her.
Her expression soured in an instant and she let the menu fall to the countertop. “Don’t ever call me Cilla again. Do you understand me? I hate it with a white-hot passion. Always have.”
I leaned away from her. “My bad. Do you have any other nicknames? How about, Toots?”
“How about not.” She waved for the bartender. “Hi, hon. Can I get a Shanty, please.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
Dru pointed in front of us where the drink’s ingredients were stenciled on the wall; I hadn’t noticed it until that moment. “Right there, dummy. Three parts Hefeweizen and one-part lemonade. Looks really good.”
“Make it two.” I flashed the young woman the peace sign.
Dru crossed one lovely leg over the other. “So, we’re in a holding pattern? What the hell is next?”
I didn’t know for sure, but I decided to throw out an idea: “I think we have to go talk to Mitch and Christopher. They might not know it yet, but they are about to inherit a very hot piece of downtown real estate.”
She crinkled up her brow. “The chaps seemed nice enough, but what makes you think they’d pony up the cash? And, if we approach them, won’t they get suspicious we had something to do with…”
“Don’t finish that sentence,” I said quickly, cutting her off. “We both know what happened. We don’t have to repeat it in a public setting. Or anywhere, for that matter.”
“Sorry. I’ll tread more carefully.”
“Thank you.”
“You don’t think your client will back down when he hears the news?”
“He’s a she. And no. I doubt it. She’s wrapping up her business. Wants the money back so she can retire in relative style. I get the impression business has been bad for her of late.”
“I do not believe it,” Drucilla said, nearly falling off her stool. She lowered her voice to a whisper, “You’re talking about Lucia Marinelli, aren’t you?”
I tried to play it cool, but I’m sure my expression gave it all away. “Who?” I asked.
“Please. You know exactly who I’m talking about. Lucia ‘Mother’ Marinelli. Damn, man. How did you get yourself mixed up with the likes of her? She is super-duper bad news. Even I know that.”
There was no point in denying it. I exhaled deeply, then managed a small smile. “I guess I need to start trusting you.”
“I have given you no reason not to.”
I slapped a hand down on the counter. “Are you kidding me, Mrs. Bender?”
She cringed. “Okay, okay. Touché.”
We shut up for a moment when our drinks arrived along with a small bowl of house-made potato chips. I dug into them hungrily, realizing it was well past lunchtime. They were deliciously warm and crisp.
“I already told you this: Mr. Bender is not a subject I’m going to be discussing with you. But I wasn’t purposely hiding him either; I just didn’t mention him before, is all. I slipped up last night. Just a slip. He has no place in our relationship.”
“Relationship?”
Dru bristled. “Our business relationship, wise guy. Pure business.”
“It wasn’t pure business last night,” I said under my breath.
She took a sip of her drink with those luscious lips that, last night, were all over me. “It won’t be happening again.”
I put up my hands in mock defeat, because I wouldn’t really be giving up. “So you’ve said. Let’s table that issue for now.”
“And forever, Macon.”
That did it. “Please don’t call me that. Not here. Not anywhere in public. Or private, for that matter. Forget you heard it.”
“It’s hardly a secret if everyone knows your real name, bucko. Why continue with the charade? Especially with me.”
I shook my head. “Like so many other subjects of late, we’re tabling it for now. Can we please focus on the pressing matter at hand?”
