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  “And Vorhees doesn’t divorce her because?”

  “He can’t afford to,” Tamara said. “Take him right off the gravy train. He’s got some money of his own, plus whatever payoffs he can get his hands on, but what lets him own a yacht and live in St. Francis Wood is her money. Inherited. Big bucks.”

  “Uh-huh. How do you know he collects payoffs?”

  “He’s a politician, isn’t he?”

  “You’re too young to be so cynical.”

  “Like I don’t have cause? And like you’re Mr. Optimist?”

  “Okay. Touché.”

  “Anyhow,” she said, “he stays for the money, and screws around because he knows he can get away with it up to a point. Only he crossed some line with Cory Beckett that the wife wouldn’t put up with. Affair getting too public or too involved. Woman like Margaret Vorhees gets jealous enough, she’s liable to do anything.”

  “Such as framing a rival.”

  “Or having an affair of her own.”

  “Is that another blog rumor?”

  “Yep.”

  “Sauce for the goose,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  Sometimes I forget young people can be unfamiliar with the old sayings codgers like me grew up on. “Never mind. What else does the blog rumor mill say?”

  “This is where it gets juicy. Evidently the dude Mrs. Vorhees had her affair with is Frank Chaleen.”

  “Well, well. What did you find out about him?”

  “He’s a peanut vendor.”

  “A … what?”

  “Owns a company that makes packing material—you know, plastic peanuts. Chaleen Manufacturing, founded by his late father. Lives high, big bachelor pad in Cow Hollow. Had political ambitions for a while. Hooked up with Andrew Vorhees at some political rally and worked on his campaign for supervisor. But … they had a big falling-out about five months ago. Loud face-off one night at the Red Fox, so it made the blogs.”

  The Red Fox was an expensive downtown restaurant that catered to local politicos. “Because Vorhees found out Chaleen was sleeping with his wife?” I asked.

  “Yep. The old double standard. Okay for him to screw around as much as he wants, but not okay for her to be doing it with one of his pals. Apparently he’s the one who pushed for the separation, one of those on-again-off-again deals. Mostly he lives on the yacht and she rattles around in the St. Francis Wood house.”

  I chewed on all of this for a time. Andrew Vorhees, Margaret Vorhees, Cory Beckett, and Frank Chaleen, all tied together in a not-so-neat little package. “Is Chaleen still seeing Mrs. Vorhees?”

  “If he is, it’s on the sly,” Tamara said. “You thinking that’s how she got him to help her frame Cory?”

  “Could be. Might also explain why she hasn’t tried something like it again.”

  “Only the frame didn’t work on account of Cory’s ten years younger and has a lot more to offer in the bed department.”

  “Uh-huh. In which case Chaleen either initiated contact with Cory for that reason, or they were already seeing each other. Maybe met through Vorhees when he and Chaleen were still tight.”

  “Must’ve pissed Cory off big time when she found out she was the target,” Tamara said. “Kind of woman she is, she’s not about to let her meal ticket go without a fight.”

  “So she jeopardizes her relationship with Vorhees by sleeping and conniving with Chaleen. Why? What kind of fight do you put up by letting your brother get framed instead of you? For that matter, why didn’t she just let Vorhees handle the necklace business with his wife and get Kenneth off the hook that way?”

  “Maybe that’s what not wanting to rock the boat means.”

  “Still doesn’t explain all the scheming.”

  “Well, Kenny must know or suspect what she’s up to. That’s why she was so eager to have us find him—get him back home where she can keep an eye on him.”

  “Can’t be the only reason,” I said. “She has to have some feelings for him. Took care of him in southern California, lets him live with her here.”

  “Took care of him when he was a kid, too, after their mama died.”

  “Which makes her motives all the more inexplicable. She must want him to beat the theft charge, or she wouldn’t have hired a high-powered lawyer like Wasserman to defend him.”

  “Kind of a mind fuck, all right,” Tamara said.

  I gave her a look, and she grinned and waggled an eyebrow. Old-fashioned workplace decorum defeated once more by the modern penchant for casual obscenity.

  “What else did you find out about the Becketts?” I asked.

  “Nothing else on Kenny. A few more eyebrow-raisers about her.”

  “Such as?”

  “For one, she got busted one night in L.A. when she was nineteen for lewd and lascivious behavior, soliciting, and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Got caught with a kid from a rich family she did some nanny work for, fifteen years old, doing the nasty in a public park.”

  “Where does the soliciting charge come in?”

  “Seems she told the kid she’d let him screw her for two hundred bucks. She had the cash in her purse.”

  “Nice,” I said sourly. “Disposition of the case?”

  “Wasn’t any. All charges dropped before she could be arraigned.”

  “How come?”

  “The kid changed his story about who offered the two hundred, said it was him, not her. His old man refused to press the other two charges. So she got off with a wrist-slap fine.”

  “Why would the father step in that way?”

  “Why do you think?” Tamara flashed another impish grin. “Not that there was any hard evidence to prove he was screwing her, too.”

  I let that pass. “She have any other trouble with the law?”

  “One brush, about a year later. Got mixed up with an ex-con named Hutchinson. Ugly biker dude with weird-ass tats all over him—there’s a photo on the Net. Had a list of burglary and armed robbery priors a foot long. Suspected of a couple of murders, too, but the law couldn’t prove anything.”

  “Hutchinson. Beckett mentioned that name to Jake.”

  “Right. Wonder why. For sure he doesn’t have anything to do with what’s going on now.”

  “No? How do you know?”

  “Dude’s dead. Been dead six years. Shot and killed by the Riverside cops during commission of an armed robbery. Some suspicion Cory was mixed up in a couple of his other crimes right before that, but they couldn’t prove it. So she walked.”

  Evidently Cory Beckett was not in the least discriminating when it came to men. Young, old, handsome, ugly, felons, yachtsmen, and Christ knew what other kind. The only constant seemed to be money—how much an individual had, how much she could get her hands on.

  “What’s her family background?” I asked.

  “Grew up poor in a little town near Riverside,” Tamara said. “Father split around the time Kenny was born, mother worked as a housecleaner and died of an aneurysm when Cory was sixteen and Kenny twelve. Kids lived with an aunt for two years, during which time Cory got herself thrown out of high school. No public record of the reason, but you can pretty much figure it had something to do with sex. Right around then she moved out on her own and took her brother with her.”

  “Supported them how?”

  “Nanny jobs with rich folks. Humping for money, too, probably. Made enough to move to Santa Monica. That was when Kenny started working the boating scene. A year after that, she climbed on the big-time marriage-go-round.”

  “Pretty sorry résumé.”

  “Say that again. So what do we do about her?”

  “Not much we can do, unless Abe Melikian wants us to pursue the matter on his behalf.”

  “Not him. All he cares about is not losing his bond money.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that, given the way he’d fawned over Cory Beckett in his office; but then again, he’d always been a businessman first and foremost. “In that case, we’ll have to drop
it. You know we can’t continue an investigation without a client.”

  “Yeah. Damn, though. I’d sure like to know what that woman’s up to.”

  “So would I,” I said. “After the fact, with nobody hurt, and from a safe distance.”

  * * *

  Abe Melikian was another Saturday workaholic, in his office and busy with a client when I rang up. I told the staff member I spoke to to let him know I had news for him and would deliver it in person within the hour.

  Runyon checked in as I was about to leave the agency, with the news that Cory Beckett had brought Frank Chaleen along with her to Belardi’s. The woman was brazen as hell. Lied in her teeth to me about not knowing Chaleen, then as soon as I was gone, called Chaleen in to help her fetch her brother home.

  As Tamara had predicted, Melikian didn’t want us to do any more investigating. He was upset that we’d probed into her background as much as we had. He already knew that Kenneth Beckett had been found and Cory was bringing him back well ahead of his trial date because she’d called to tell him so, and why the hell hadn’t I notified him right away myself instead of going to her apartment and harassing her?

  I tried to explain about her background, her ties to Vorhees and Chaleen, the lies and manipulations we’d uncovered, but I might as well have been talking to a statue. He refused to consider that she might be anything other than the selfless sister she pretended to be; kept defending her and her intentions. Kenneth Beckett was unstable, he said, parroting what she’d told me; the kid’s sudden run-out proved that, didn’t it? The story he’d told Runyon was “a load of drug-raving bullshit.” Cory had her brother’s best interests at heart, was doing everything she could to keep him out of prison.

  Old Abe was hooked, all right. So deeply hooked that I couldn’t help wondering if she was sleeping with him, too. He was always paying lip service to family and family values—he’d been married thirty years, had two grown daughters and a son in high school—and I had taken him for a straight arrow. But when a sexy piece half a man’s age makes herself available to him, the temptation for some can be too strong to resist. Not for me, and never with a woman like Cory Beckett—that’s what I told myself. I hadn’t succumbed in her apartment, but how could I be absolutely sure I wouldn’t under different circumstances?

  I said, “Okay, Abe. Have it your way. We’ll back off.”

  “Damn well better. Beckett’s back, I’m not gonna lose my bond—case closed. You want any more business from me, stay the hell away from Cory and her brother.”

  So that’s the end of it, I thought. Kenneth Beckett gets convicted or acquitted at his trial, his sister goes right on lying, manipulating, using men to her own ends, and we forget the whole sorry business and move on. Case closed.

  Only it wasn’t.

  No, not by a long shot.

  8

  KENNETH BECKETT

  He didn’t know what to do.

  Scared all the time now. Scared of the trial, scared of going to prison, but mostly scared of Cory.

  She didn’t trust him anymore. Made him give her his car keys, wouldn’t let him go out alone after dark, locked him in his room at night when she went off with Mr. Vorhees or that bastard Chaleen. She said it was just until after the trial, for his own safety, even though he’d promised he wouldn’t skip out again like he had when she flew to Las Vegas with Mr. Vorhees and left him all alone. Well, maybe it was for his own good, but did she have to treat him like he was a snot-nosed kid? Or worse, a half-wit the way Chaleen did?

  She wouldn’t confide in him anymore, either. Or give him a hint of what her plans were. She had secrets again. Her and Chaleen. Ugly secrets, crazy secrets. He was sure of that much.

  She was out with Chaleen now, in the middle of the afternoon. Hadn’t said that was where she was going, just said she’d be out for a while, but he’d heard her on the phone through her bedroom door before she left and it was plain enough who she was talking to.

  He didn’t understand it. What did she want Chaleen for? She had a good thing going with Mr. Vorhees, a decent guy to work for, a guy who treated her right—bought her things, gave her money to help pay the rent on the apartment. Mr. Vorhees treated him decent, too, never talked down to him. Tried to get his wife to drop the theft charge, but Cory said the woman was too full of hate to listen to reason. Sure, Mr. Vorhees was still married, but legally separated, and Cory’d had affairs with married men before—“I don’t subscribe to society’s moral standards,” that was always her excuse. Besides, she said, it was different with Mr. Vorhees because he loved her and she loved him and they were going to get married after his wife was out of the picture. So why was she risking everything by sneaking off and letting Chaleen do it to her, too?

  She’d turned into a different person since they moved to San Francisco. Most of the time they’d lived in Marina del Rey and Newport Beach, she’d been loving and kind and caring, but now she was back to being the wild thing she’d been when that other bastard, Hutchinson, got his hooks into her. Or maybe she’d been that way all along, just didn’t let him see it.

  He didn’t like that Cory at all. Lying to him. Telling people he used drugs when he never had. Making him do crazy, hurtful things like being arrested for stealing Mrs. Vorhees’ necklace and then not explaining why, just saying over and over, “Don’t worry, Kenny, don’t I always do what’s best for us?”

  No, she didn’t always do what was best. She’d done a lot of crazy stuff he knew about and probably some he didn’t. Like messing with that damn rich teenager in L.A. for money. And all the sick shit with Hutchinson. And treating poor Mr. Lassiter so bad he’d ended up killing himself. That wasn’t her fault, she said, she had no idea he was suicidal, but it was her fault. Sneaking around with other guys, taking money she wasn’t supposed to have, fighting with the man all the time. Maybe she’d even planned it. There was something kind of funny about the night Mr. Lassiter died, too—Cory making him say he was there with her in the house when it happened, when she and Mr. Lassiter had been alone together. The lie was to keep people from getting the wrong idea, she’d said, and he believed her, but still it bothered him whenever he thought about it.

  All these things preying on his mind scared him, made him nervous as hell. He couldn’t sit still, just kept prowling the apartment. It wasn’t so bad when Cory went away at night and locked him in, not that she had to do that—he knew he had to stay in the city now, he was resigned to it, so he just watched TV or read one of his nautical books until she came home or he went to sleep.

  But it was different when he was by himself like this during the day, free but not free. He could go out if he wanted to, but the trouble was, he had nowhere to go. Well, down to the yacht club to look at the boats, Cory was okay with that, but he had to tell her ahead of time in order to get the bus fare. She wouldn’t let him have any money otherwise, and he didn’t have any now. The only other thing he could do was walk around the neighborhood, up and down the steep hills, and all that did was make him more nervous, more restless.

  God, he wished he had somebody to talk to besides Cory. A friend he could unload his troubles to, who’d understand what he was going through and maybe give him an idea of what to do. He might’ve been able to talk to Mr. Vorhees, but Cory wouldn’t let him on account of that damn necklace. Even somebody like the guy who’d found him at Belardi’s might be okay if he wasn’t a detective—he’d told Mr. Runyon more that day than he’d ever thought he could tell anybody, it had just come spilling out of him. He’d had a couple of casual buddies in Newport Beach, but they were just guys who worked in the marina like he did, guys he could have a beer and talk boats with. Up here he didn’t even have anyone like that. Hadn’t made one single friend in San Francisco. Except for Cory he was alone, all alone.

  Cory, Cory, Cory!

  Her bedroom door was unlocked. He went in even though he wasn’t supposed to without permission. The sexy perfume she’d put on for Chaleen was sweet in the air, sickenin
g sweet. It made him think of her and that bastard together in bed, Chaleen sweating and grunting on top of her, and he felt like gagging. He shoved the ugly images out of his mind.

  What were they planning? He thought it might have something to do with Mrs. Vorhees, a way to stop her from testifying against him and sending him to prison, and he hoped that was it, but at the same time he was afraid of what it might be.

  He moved around Cory’s room, the master bedroom. She’d always made a big deal out of him respecting her privacy, but he couldn’t stop himself from invading it now. He didn’t really believe there was anything here that’d give him an idea of what she and Chaleen were up to, but how did you know for sure unless you looked?

  He opened the drawer in the nightstand next to the king-size bed, and the first thing he saw was a package of condoms she kept in there. Right away he slammed it shut again and went over to her vanity table. Those drawers were full of cosmetics, and the ones in the red Chinese dresser were stuffed with silky underwear in the bright colors she liked. The walk-in closet was packed, too: racks of expensive shoes, coats, suits, dresses—five times as many nice clothes as he owned. Different size cartons and boxes jammed the shelf above. What was in them?

  He took one down, opened it. Fancy round cloth hat with a tiny brim. Nobody wore hats anymore, did they? He’d never seen Cory in this one or any other. He put it back, took down another carton. New cowhide boots that probably wouldn’t fit on the rack. He exchanged that carton for a smaller one with an Emporio Armani label on it. See-through nightgown. He put that away quickly, reached for a small, square box in one corner. Something hard wrapped in a cloth.…

  His breath sucked in when he saw what it was. New, too, brand new, and so small and cold he almost let go of it, the way you would a live thing that might suddenly bite. He stared at it, the fear and confusion in him growing.

  “Kenny!”

  He jumped at the sound of his name, swung around. She was standing in the bedroom doorway, her face clouded with fury. He’d been so focused on what he’d found he hadn’t heard her come into the apartment—she always walked quick and silent like a cat.