I slept fitfully that night, and was entirely groggy when I heard phone ring at six. I couldn’t catch it in time, and momentarily fell back asleep, and then it rang again. I struggled awake, grabbed the phone and said hello as briskly as I could.
“Liza, it’s me Simba. Is it too early for you?”
I sat straight up in bed. “Simba, of course not, are you all right? Where are you?”
“I’m outside your door. Is it okay to come in?”
“Simba, just a minute, let me get my bathrobe on. I’m afraid I wasn’t quite up and running yet, but I’m a fast starter. I’m coming down to the door right now, and I’ll get some coffee going.”
I closed the door to the bedroom to hide the disheveled mess of an unmade bed and strewn clothes. I realized that I could do nothing about the pile of dishes in the sink, but was able to put the overflowing garbage bag in the utility closet. Just in time, I realized that the knot in my bathrobe had loosened and I was about to open the door in a state of near nakedness. I cinched it up, and opened the door.
Simba was wearing the same clothes as yesterday at the beach, but the impeccable ice blue skirt and jacket were now completely rumpled. I also noticed a worrisome stain along the hem of her sleeve. “Simba, where have you been? Have you been up all night?”
Simba looked down as I touched her stained jacket and starting laughing, “I can’t believe that you thought that was blood, but then of course you are a detective, and have probably seen worse. Yes, I’ve been out all night, and I probably got that when I stopped at one of those all night burger joints. Actually, it wasn’t that bad – I think that I used to go there when I was a teenager.”
I stepped aside to let her in and she immediately slumped down in one of my wooden kitchen chairs and put her head on the matching table. “I got into it a little bit with Sam last night,” she mumbled.
“Did he kick you out or hurt you?” My hand trembled as I poured the coffee.
“Sam, oh God no,” said Simba. One half of her face was flattened against my table and as she talked, small drops of saliva slid onto the table. “Sam’s a powerful man, but not violent,” said Simba, “and believe it or not, he still values my maiden name of Murphy, though you can see from my brother how little that means, but Sam would never threaten his entry into the Santa Rosa elite. I was so energized after my confrontation with Henry, and when I got back to our house, Sam was there for the first time in days, and I thought what the hell. So I took the strategy you suggested and applied it to Sam. I told him that I’d visited Chloe and that I thought that it would be better if she moved in with us, because Henry was not taking care of her properly, and that Dessa had even stepped in to try and help.”
Simba was now sitting up. I handed her a napkin, but resisted wiping up the little puddle of drool on the table, which was now joined by a small smear of her red lipstick. She picked up the coffee, took in a deep smell and took the first sip. “Thanks, this is just what I needed. But I just want you to know, I haven’t been drinking. I was mostly just driving around thinking. I even went cruising through Cutter City and I got so depressed thinking about the number of years that I wasted there. Just gone years.”
I wasn’t sure what she was doing here, but assumed that this was part of my new role as family confidant and mediator. “What did Sam say?” I prodded her.
“He actually said that it sounded like a good idea, and then I told him that we were planning to meet with Henry today, and then he said that he would take care of it, and that we’d have to get lawyers involved. I told him that I wanted to sit down and talk with Henry, coolly and calmly, and that was the point of our meeting, and he once again told me that he’d take care of it, and that I shouldn’t go and see him just yet. That is why I want you to go see Henry alone.”
“Wait a minute, Simba, Sam might be right, maybe it would be best to talk to some lawyers about how to switch guardians. There’s no point in rushing into this. And did you tell Sam that I was involved? You know he asked me to drop the case, so this puts me, or rather I should say us, in a difficult situation.”
“Yeah, well that did make him angry. Not at you, because I told him that I’d hired you with my own money and that you were just doing your job. I also told him that the issue was more than Chloe, that I wanted my family back, and that included Dessa and Goddard, and I thought that maybe they were refusing to talk to me because of the way Chloe was being treated. And then I told him that I wanted Henry back, that maybe he needed our help and that’s way I wanted to talk with him.”
She stopped talking and looked out the window. The rising sun was now shining gently on her face, and it seemed to highlight some of her wrinkles. She stared at me, “That’s when Sam got this strange look in his eye, and sort of a sarcastic grin and he said, ‘You want Henry back? Simba you’re in way over your head, believe me, I’ll take care of this, but you really need to leave Henry alone. He’s not a stable person you know. You really can’t talk to him until I talk with our lawyers.’ He was patting me gently on the back at this point, which might have looked like a loving gesture, but at the same time he was gripping my wrist very tightly.” She turned over her wrist, and was startled to see a blurry smudge of thumb print.
“Simba, do you need to safe place to stay?” I asked.
“No, like I said I don’t think that Sam’s dangerous. He’s certainly manipulative, and that’s what has made him a successful businessman, and I’m sure that some would call him ruthless. I suppose there’s a fine line between being manipulative and abusive – well okay, maybe he’s emotionally abusive, but not physically. But that’s why I want you to go and see Henry alone – I don’t want to challenge Sam even more, since he did say that he would get Chloe moved out, and I don’t want to risk that. But I also want some sort of détente with Henry, some sort of starting place for our relationship. Do you think that you can do that?”
“Simba, you’re putting me in a very awkward position and what makes you think that Henry would even talk with me in the first place? I’m sure that he’ll figure out that my presence at the bridge gathering was entirely contrived.”
“Well, what would be the harm in trying? Plus I think that you could imply that I am on his side, let him know that Sam might be up to something,” as Simba said this she turned away from me so that I could barely hear her, but when she turned back she was smiling slyly.
“Okay, I’ll go, but only on the condition that you call Henry first and tell him that it will be me alone,” I said.
“Oh yes, I can do that, and I will tell him that I can’t come because Sam has forbidden me to talk with him, but that I want to see him and that you’ll be there to arrange it.”
“Simba, who do you think would be more likely to tell you the cause of this big issue between them?” I put my hands up to demonstrate the size of the rift. “Would it be Sam or Henry?”
“You know that’s what I was thinking about as I was driving around last night. And I do think that it’s Henry, because beneath it all, we’re family, and that’s what I need to resurrect. And I think that Henry knows that he needs help, and that I am the only person to give it to him. Of course there’s Dessa, I think that she must know something that is going on. It’s that Penny that started this whole thing, isn’t it?”
I was surprised that she remembered Penny at all, and in fact it reminded me that there was still a dead girl amongst all the Venn diagrams back at Ralph and Fanny’s. “Yes, you’re right to remember Penny. It does seem that she made the opening crack in your family dynamics.”
“You don’t think that Penny was actually murdered do you?” said Simba. “You don’t think that it could’vebeen anyone in my family, do you?”
“Simba, I honestly don’t know, but I can tell you that the police are considering this a murder investigation, they know what kind of car it was, and they can tell that the car was accelerating when it hit Penny, so it looks like that, at the very least, it was a hit and run accident.”
Simba gave a deep sigh and whispered, “I don’t who I would prefer as the driver, either Sam or Henry?”
“Simba, We certainly don’t know if either was involved, it could have been an accident. I think we’ll leave this issue to the police.” I tried to move on quickly. “After I left you yesterday, I did a little more investigating, and I’d like to ask you a few questions. When I talk with Henry, I think that it will be helpful to subtly let him know that I know more than he imagines. That’ll help get him on our side.”
Simba’s head was back down on the table, and her arm hung limply on her side. “Simba, I need you to focus here. Can you tell me, what do you know about the library you and Sam endowed in Cutter City?”
“The library, what the hell does that have to do with anything?” Her words were barely intelligible, since she was basically talking directly into the table.
“Okay, well here’s the thing. Before it became a library, that building was apparently, well how should I put it, a whorehouse. There was a raid on the property, and Johnny Knox was arrested as the manager. He served a couple of years in prison. Johnny Knox was Penny’s father. I think that your brother Henry might have been one of the patrons at the whorehouse. Did Sam own that building before he rehabbed it?”
“Oh my God, are you saying that Sam and Johnny Knox were in cahoots in a whorehouse that my brother frequented? Oh my God.” She sat up again with great effort, and I began to think that after a sleepless night, I might be piling on too much information. “What can I say? I don’t know. Individually all that could be true. I could imagine Sam owning a whorehouse – I think that he was pretty fearless when it came to real estate, and if it made money, he was all in. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Henry had to use prostitutes for sex. You saw him. Even with all of his supposed money, I don’t think that anyone would consider him a good catch. I remember one of those dreadful family meals when Chloe asked Henry in front of everyone to tell us all about his new ‘lady friend.’ Henry was so embarrassed and didn’t say anything, but Sam was smirking at him the whole time. It might have been the next year we had the final blow up. Oh my God. Poor Henry, maybe his lady friend was a whore, and Sam found out about it and basically tortured him.”
“Simba, this is just bits and pieces of information that I am gathering and trying to piece together into a plausible story. I certainly don’t know that this is true, but the same people seem to keep coming up, including Johnny Knox, who Sam claimed not to know.”
“Oh, Sam has always had an uneasy relationship with the truth. You know, I knew that he was seeing lots of other women – late night business dinners, my ass. How about this for a theory? Maybe Sam ran into Henry at the – well let’s call it the library. And maybe it was Henry that had the goods on Sam.”
“See, there you go Simba, there could be a variety of explanations, but do you remember how or why the library got rehabbed?”
“Early on, I told Sam that we always had to give back to the community, even if it was just Cutter City, and I told Sam that I’d be in charge of our charitable giving. So every year he would give me a certain budget and then let me decide how to dole it out. He still does that, though the recently my budget has been drastically cut. He usually didn’t care where the money went – I gave something to the high school, can’t remember exactly what, that sort of thing. But I do remember that year, he came to me and specifically said that he wanted to rehab that building into something useful – when I asked him why, he said that it was just business, he didn’t care what it was, but he just wanted that building redone. So the library turned out to be the best use, and I have always like that project most of all the ones that I worked on, but that rehab cost two or three times as much as Sam’s charitable budget, but he didn’t care. I thought it was odd at the time. I don’t think that Sam has ever set foot in that library. I actually don’t know if he owned the building before, but he could have. He owned all sorts of houses in Cutter City that he would rent out, sometimes tearing them down and rebuilding them. But of course he made his biggest money buying vacant land and developing it when the prison expanded. That was shortly after the library project, and then we moved back to Santa Teresa. So what else did you find out? You might as well give it all to me now.”
“Simba, I’m sorry, this is just where the investigation has taken me.”
“It’s okay, this is what I signed up for – a mediator plus an investigator – the ideal combination for my situation. Continue on.”
“Simba, I can’t remember if I told you, but my father was a private investigator, and it turns out that both Sam and Henry were his clients at different times. I’m not sure why, it didn’t turn up in my father’s records, but Henry hired my father to follow Sam right before you got married and then right before Dessa was born, and then Sam hired him to follow Henry, and the weird thing was, my father was doing a surveillance on Henry when he went to the, hmm, library, and that was the night of the raid, but it doesn’t look like he was picked up by the police.”
Simba sighed heavily. “It reminds of those Mad magazines that I used to read as a kid, remember those Spy vs. Spy cartoons? What where they up to? I can’t even begin to imagine, nor do I really want to. I think that I have reached the point of too much information. But I might as well give you another piece of information. You haven’t asked for it, but I am sure that you already know and are just being kind. Dessa is not my real daughter, well she is my real daughter, but I am not her birth mother. I don’t think that anyone really know that except of course Sam, but I bet you suspected didn’t you?”
“Well, I did wonder,” I said, and left it at that.
“Well I was having all those miscarriages, and that last one was going so well, and then boom, 7th month, it all came crashing down. I was devastated, and I think that Sam just couldn’t handle anymore of my despair. I don’t really know if he wanted more children or not, but then he told me that we could arrange a private adoption, and about two weeks later, there was our beautiful Dessa. I don’t know how he did it, and I really try not to think who the birth parents are, because I suppose Sam could actually be the father. I just forced myself not to think about it. Do you know who the birth parents are?”
“No of course not, I said,” choosing not to give her the detail about Sam paying off a pregnant Sylvia Wister. “But it was probably something that Penny Knox was interested in. She was very into family trees, and had actually rediscovered her father that way, had done DNA testing, and somehow became interested in your family and Dessa.”
“Oh my god, poor Dessa. No wonder. Oh my god,” Simba moaned.
I had pushed her to the breaking point and she just sobbed uncontrollably. I had dealt with anger and despair when I showed women undeniable proof that their husband was cheating, but these woman had already suspected it or they wouldn’t have hired me. Simba was different. She was entirely unaware, or at least had forced herself to be oblivious. I wasn’t sure what to do. I went into the living room and organized the couch, got an extra pillow from the bedroom and a throw blanket. I went back into the kitchen where she was lying glassy-eyed with her head on the table.
“Simba, I am so sorry. What can I do to help you? Is there anyone I can call? Any friends, or how about your therapist?”
“No, no, there’s no one. If I have learned anything the last couple of days it’s that I’m alone. I just want to talk with Dessa.”
“There may be a way,” I said. I got a call from a young woman a couple of days ago, she didn’t leave her name, but I have a feeling that it was Dessa. I had given my name and number to the Great Days staff and told them to have Dessa call me. I returned the call, but she hung up quickly. But I have the number here. You can try and call it and maybe she will pick up. If you use my home phone here, your name will not come up on caller ID, and perhaps she would be more apt to answer it. You can give it a try anyway, and you can stay here for a bit to see if she calls back.”
“No, I think that I would like the time to myself, if you don’t mind. Her sobs had subsided to an occasional gasp for air. “I’ll give her a call right now, and pray that she sees fit to call me back. Poor Dessa.”
Follow Liza Blue on:
Share:
