Whale Done, page 6
Binka pointed around the edge of the house, the opposite way that the pool guy had gone. “I have an outdoor shower over there. I think it’d be best if all of you use that before coming inside.”
I picked a piece of blubber off my shoulder and gave it a tentative sniff. It was absolutely vile. We had simply been surrounded by so much foul-smelling stuff that day that I had stopped noticing it.
“Is it true that Chase Buckingham blew up that whale?” Binka asked.
“How’d you hear that already?” I said.
“This is a small community, darling. And the number one sport here isn’t surfing. It’s gossip. This is all anyone will be talking about for weeks.”
“Chase was definitely involved,” said Summer. “We caught him red-handed. Do you know him?”
“I know his father,” Binka replied. “He’s a real piece of work. One of the biggest corporate lawyers in the state. I haven’t gotten to know his new wife yet, but there’s not much point. She probably won’t last much longer than any of the others.”
“How many have there been?” I asked.
“I think this is number six. But maybe it’s seven. What’s amazing is that Neil Buckingham can keep finding people willing to marry him. But then, I guess having a few hundred million dollars helps.”
I noted the irony in these words being spoken by a woman who’d married a wealthy man twenty years older than her.
Then it occurred to me that Binka might have some answers we needed.
“Chase wasn’t acting alone,” I said. “He was with another kid about his age who got away. They seemed to be friends.”
“Was he built just like Chase?” Binka asked, “But a few inches shorter?”
“Yes,” Summer answered.
Binka nodded knowingly. “Scooter Derman. Not surprising. Those two are practically connected at the hip. They’re even roommates at Harvard.”
“What’s Scooter’s real name?” I asked.
Binka started to answer, then paused. “I have no idea. I’ve never heard anyone call him anything but Scooter. Even his parents. Who, by the way, are even more loaded than the Buckinghams. Or the Queen of England, for that matter.”
A loud hum came from around the side of the house. The pool pump had been turned on to drain the water. There was a gurgling noise, and some large air bubbles blorped up from the drain at the bottom of the pool.
“Do you know where Scooter lives?” Doc asked, so suddenly that it caught all of us by surprise. I hadn’t even realized he’d been paying attention.
“They have a house down the beach,” Binka said. “Although if Scooter thinks he’s in trouble, I doubt he’d go there now. Not with all these police around. He probably went to his family’s home in Bel Air. It’s about twenty miles from here.”
“They have another house that close to this one?” I asked, surprised.
Binka laughed. “Half the homes in the Colony are second homes. If not third or fourth ones. The Dermans have more than I can count—although the Bel Air one is really something. I’ve been to a few parties there. It’s so big, they have servants whose job is solely to take guests to the bathroom, because otherwise they’ll get lost.”
“So you know Scooter’s family?” Doc asked. “Could you get us in to see him?”
“His parents are summering on their yacht,” Binka said. “But I can tell you where the house is. Maybe Scooter will want to talk.”
“Good enough,” Doc said, then turned to me. “I’m gonna shower. I’ve got whale in my hair. When I’m done, we’re going to visit this kid and find out what he knows.”
“We?” I repeated, surprised.
“Yeah. You’re good at solving crimes. I want you along to help figure out what’s going on here.” Without even waiting for me to agree, Doc strode briskly around the corner to the outdoor shower.
“Why do you think Doc’s so interested in solving this case?” I asked Summer.
She gave me a bemused look. “You really don’t know?”
“No.”
“Teddy, for a genius, sometimes you can be a real idiot.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
Before she could reply, Binka suddenly exclaimed, “Summer! I almost forgot! I called my PR person, and she wants to meet you ASAP. She’s coming over for brunch tomorrow morning.”
Summer groaned. “Binka! I told you I didn’t want to talk to her.”
“And I told you that was a mistake,” Binka insisted. “Trish is great. You’ll love her.”
“But Teddy and I have to help Doc figure out who blew up the whale.”
“Believe me, no one wants whoever did that to go to jail more than I do. I mean look at this.” Binka pointed to her plate glass windows, which had random pieces of blubber and viscera stuck to them like barnacles. “I just had these cleaned! And now they are covered with whale glop! But this won’t take too much time. It’s only a little brunch.”
“We’re going to be really busy with this case,” Summer told her. “Teddy and I were thinking that we should interview everyone who lives along the beach to see if they saw anything suspicious.” She gave me an imploring look, which I realized meant she wanted me to back her up.
“That’s right!” I said quickly. “And I was thinking, maybe we ought to talk to some of the surfers, too.”
“Good idea!” Summer exclaimed. “Like that guy Sharky.”
“Sharky?” Binka laughed. “What do you want to talk to that lunatic for?”
“You know Sharky?” Summer asked, obviously trying to distract Binka from the subject of brunch with Trish.
“Everyone in the Colony knows Sharky,” Binka told her. “He surfs this beach all the time. But his brain is fried from spending so much time in the sun. He’s always going on about some crazy thing or another. A few weeks ago, he said he’d seen Russian submarines patrolling the coast. And before that, he swore a megalodon had tried to eat him.”
“He thinks that and he’s still surfing?” I asked, stunned. A megalodon was a prehistoric shark the size of a humpback whale. They’d been extinct for eons, but still, if I thought I saw one, I wouldn’t have gone back in the water.
Binka said, “If Sharky thought there were piranhas armed with machines guns out there, he’d still go surfing. I’ve seen him out during thunderstorms and sewage leaks. Why do you even want to talk to him?”
“If he’s out here all the time, maybe he’s noticed some unusual activity,” Summer suggested.
“Although maybe he isn’t the most reliable witness,” I reminded her. “I mean, he thought someone had stolen part of the beach.”
“The beach?” Binka echoed. “How could someone steal a beach?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But Sharky claims someone made off with a couple tons of sand a few nights ago.”
Binka gave a short, sharp burst of laughter. “The sand moves around all the time! Four weeks ago, the beach in front of my place eroded so badly that I had to have that stepladder taped to the stairs. But that’s just nature! Some day, the tide will shift again and the sand will come back.”
“Sharky believes a thief did this,” Summer insisted.
“Well that’s just crazy,” Binka said. “Sharky’s really lost it this time.”
“I don’t think so.”
The last statement caught us by surprise. We all turned around to find the pool guy had returned to the deck. He was now armed with an industrial-strength skimmer to help him get the whale gunk out of the pool.
“What do you mean?” I asked him.
“I was surfing up at County Line a couple mornings ago,” the pool guy replied. “And some folks were saying that a bunch of sand had been stolen from there, too. I figured they didn’t know what they were talking about, but now… Well, I guess they were right. Someone really is stealing the beaches.”
I looked from the pool guy to Binka to Summer, trying to get my mind around this new revelation. It instantly brought up two huge questions.
How could someone possibly steal so much sand? And why?
7
THE PATSY
As Binka had said, the Derman family had another house only twenty miles from the Colony. It had seemed ridiculous to me that a family would have two homes so close together. But it turned out that distance in LA was very different from where I lived, because of traffic.
In the Texas Hill Country, the only real traffic was all the tourists pulling into the FunJungle parking lot in the morning. If you wanted to go anywhere else, the roads were almost empty, so traveling twenty miles was no big deal. I knew people who regularly drove to Houston for dinner, and that was over two hundred miles away.
However, we were in bumper-to-bumper traffic all the way from Malibu to Bel Air. The thousands of people who had gone to the beach for the day were heading back into the city, and then there was rush-hour traffic as well. Three separate car wrecks snarled everything up even worse. Getting through it all took us nearly an hour and a half.
But once we reached Bel Air, things were different. Bel Air was a wealthy section of Los Angeles, located on the southern flank of the mountain range that cut through the city, right next to Beverly Hills. Not only was there no traffic; there didn’t seem to be many people at all. While the homes in the Colony had been crammed together, the ones in Bel Air were spaced far apart on massive properties, most of which were surrounded by imposing walls or towering hedges. There were no sidewalks or bike lanes along the narrow, winding roads.
“Doesn’t look like anyone walks around here,” I noted.
“Maybe they’re all exhausted by walking from their bedrooms to their kitchens,” Doc suggested. “That looks to be at least a mile in some of these places.”
Even though Doc was joking, it didn’t seem to be that much of an exaggeration. The homes that we could see beyond the walls were enormous and sprawling.
Cass was driving us in her official NOAA vehicle, a pickup truck with an extended cab; Doc was in the passenger seat, while Summer and I sat in the back. The flensing knives and other autopsy tools were rattling around in the bed.
When Doc had invited her to come with us to question Scooter, Cass had jumped at the chance. (Although, like the rest of us, she’d used Binka’s outdoor shower to clean off first.) Cass seemed just as eager as Doc to find out what had really happened to the dead whale—and she also didn’t want to spend any more time getting yelled at by wealthy homeowners in the Colony. For most of our drive, she had been on the phone with the Coast Guard, trying to arrange for the remains of the whale to be towed out to sea; as far as she was concerned, there was no way to determine the cause of death with what was left.
Between calls, we had managed to learn a little bit more about Cass. She had grown up poor, in an area of Los Angeles called Compton, but done well in school and earned a scholarship to the University of California at Santa Cruz. Even though Compton wasn’t much farther from the beach than Bel Air, Cass still hadn’t been able to go often; she was ten before she had ever even seen the ocean. But UC Santa Cruz was located only a short walk from Monterey Bay. On the first day, Cass had seen a whale from campus and instantly fallen in love. The beasts were staggeringly large and yet surprisingly graceful. She wanted to know everything about them.
She also knew a lot about the history of Los Angeles. “A lot of these properties used to have normal-size homes,” she explained, weaving through the serpentine roads of Bel Air. “But now, only the exceptionally rich can afford to buy here. So they just scrape the old places off and build these monstrosities with more rooms than anyone knows what to do with.”
As she said this, we rounded a curve and came upon a mansion so colossal that it made all the others look tiny in comparison.
The entire summit of a small mountain had been removed, creating a mesa upon which a modern-day castle had been erected.
“Here we are,” Cass said.
“This is Scooter’s house?” I asked, surprised.
“Well, it’s his parents,” Cass replied. “This is the address Binka gave us.”
A large gate blocked the entrance to the property, and next to that was a guardhouse the size of my home. The two security men stationed there were both dressed like secret service agents, with dark suits, sunglasses, and earpieces. One stepped outside as we pulled up and eyed us suspiciously.
“State your business here,” he demanded gruffly.
“We’re here to talk to Scooter,” Cass said.
“And you would be…?”
“People he’ll want to see.” Cass flashed a disarming smile. “Tell him that we’re here from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. We’ve talked to Chase, and we know Scooter was framed for blowing up the whale. But we want to hear his side of the story. Especially the part about Sadie.”
The security man considered this for a moment, then returned to the guardhouse and made a call. A minute later, he stepped back outside, not looking nearly as gruff anymore. “Scooter would like to talk. Follow this road up to the main house and he’ll meet you there.” He glanced into the bed of the truck, then said, “For safety reasons, I’ll have to ask you to leave the weapons here.”
There didn’t seem to be much point in arguing that the autopsy tools weren’t really weapons. So we allowed the security men to remove them. The gates swung open, revealing a two-lane stone driveway that snaked up the mountainside. We headed along it.
Even though we’d had a glimpse of the mansion from the road, it was even more staggering up close. It appeared to be larger than my entire middle school, with an enormous four-story central building and two-story wings that extended out on both sides. The driveway led to a circular parking area big enough for thirty cars, with a giant fountain in the middle that seemed as if it had been stolen from Versailles. Another branch of the driveway dipped underground, indicating that there was another parking area below us.
A butler in a three-piece suit was waiting by the front door to greet us, but before he could, Scooter emerged from the house. He had showered and changed since we had last seen him, although his new clothes looked almost exactly the same as his old ones. He looked nervous and jittery. “Hey!” he said, running over to greet us as we climbed out of the truck. “I’m Scooter.”
“We know,” Doc said. “We came here to see you.”
“Oh yeah. Right.” Scooter nodded. “You’re the guys from the beach, right? The ones who chased us? Back there, I thought you wanted to arrest us.”
“We want to know what happened,” Cass told him. “We talked to Chase, and he told us a bit about how you were framed, but he couldn’t remember everything.…”
“Makes sense. Chase was pretty wasted last night.” Scooter laughed, thinking back to it. “He puked like ten times after we left that party.”
“So we were hoping you could fill in the blanks,” Cass concluded.
We had all discussed the story we should tell Scooter on the drive. Cass felt that we could get away with lying to him, because we weren’t actually law enforcement, and not subject to the same laws that the police were. The story had obviously worked. Scooter was so eager to talk to us, it never even occurred to him to ask what Summer and I were doing there. He just led us into his house while rattling off his hazy recollections of the previous night.
“The party was at our friend Darla’s house,” he said. “She’s in the Colony too, so of course the whale was all anyone was talking about. It was right out there for everyone to see, being all gross and smelly and stuff. Darla’s place was pretty far down the beach, but we could still see the whale from there, you know, because it was big.”
The entry foyer of the house was large enough to play tennis in, a great expanse of marble floor flanked by sweeping grand staircases. Scooter led us past them, into an honest-to-goodness ballroom. It was completely empty, save for two massive crystal chandeliers.
“How did you meet this Sadie?” Cass prodded, her voice echoing in the empty room.
Scooter said, “She was out on the deck, by the pool, talking to some other girls, and she was really pretty, so Chase wanted to talk to her and asked me to be his wingman. It was her idea to blow up the whale, not ours.”
“How did it come up?” I asked.
“I can’t remember exactly. We’d been talking to her for a while. Me and Chase and her had gone out onto the beach to try to see the whale better, and I think Sadie just said that it’d be a great prank if someone blew it up.” Scooter led us out of the ballroom into another expansive space that appeared to be for hosting parties. There were multiple sitting areas and two separate bars, although the most notable thing about it was the view. The entire rear wall was glass, looking out onto an Olympic-sized swimming pool lined by chaise lounges. Beyond that was a stunning panorama of Los Angeles that stretched from downtown all the way to the beach.
“And what did you say to that?” Doc asked Scooter.
“We agreed. Although we didn’t realize Sadie was going to blow up the whale so badly. She tricked us into doing that. We thought it’d be only a little explosion.”
“A little explosion?” Cass repeated.
“Yeah. Sadie said the whale would just pop, like a balloon. Not go off like a volcano. She had the whole thing figured out. She even had the dynamite and the detonators.”
“She just happened to have dynamite?” I asked.
“Yeah. In her car. She said her father worked in construction, so it was no big deal. She could get that stuff any time she wanted to.”
Summer gaped at him, stunned. “And none of this seemed suspicious to you at the time?”
“Well… no,” Scooter replied. “But then, we were pretty drunk.”
The back doors to the house were open onto the yard. Scooter led us outside. In addition to the pool, there was an outdoor kitchen, a formal garden with more fountains, a tennis court, a basketball court, a beach volleyball court, a bocce pit, and a lawn flanked by rows of cypress trees. We followed Scooter to a cabana by the pool. Inside it were several couches, a bar, and a flat-screen TV. “Any of you want anything to drink?” Scooter asked.
