Fast Friends (Iris Thorne Mysteries Book 3) Read online

  FAST FRIENDS

  AN IRIS THORNE MYSTERY

  Book Three in the Series

  By

  Dianne Emley

  BOOKS BY DIANNE EMLEY

  Iris Thorne Mysteries

  Cold Call

  Slow Squeeze

  Fast Friends

  Foolproof

  Pushover

  Detective Nan Vining Thrillers

  The First Cut

  Cut to the Quick

  The Deepest Cut

  Love Kills

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright © 1997 by Dianne G. Pugh and 2011 by Dianne Emley.

  Text revised by the author in 2011.

  Fast Friends is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  ISBN-10: 0-9847846-2-4

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9847846-2-2

  Originally published as Fast Friends by Dianne Pugh in 1997 by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Cover design by Kimberly King.

  Published by Arroyo Bridge Books, a division of Emley and Co., LLC.

  First Arroyo Bridge Books e-book edition March 2012.

  For my father,

  William M. Pugh

  CHAPTER ONE

  Dolores Gaytan DeLacey knew she risked making her husband mad by straightening his newspapers, but if she just straightened them and resisted the temptation to throw any out, maybe he wouldn’t notice. She never threw out anything that belonged to him anyway. She’d learned her lesson a long time ago—even though he’d accused her of exactly that as recently as last month. He had eventually made her understand that the newspapers weren’t junk. He was going to read them when he had the time. And until he found the time, he’d keep them in his office, where she had no business being anyway. Why, just the other day, he told her, he’d taken one down and read it and had thrown it away when he was finished. So he didn’t want her saying he never threw anything away.

  Many of the piles of newspapers still had not been righted and lay where they had toppled over. Others listed to the side. It wouldn’t take much to send them tumbling to the ground too.

  She shoved the handle of her feather duster between the ties of her apron and leaned over to pick up a stack. She checked their dates to make sure she heaved them back where they belonged, then wiped beads of perspiration from her forehead and tried to catch her breath.

  It had been an unseasonably warm and dry January for Los Angeles. Even though the thick adobe walls in the old part of the house kept the air cool, Dolly was hot. It didn’t take much for her to overheat these days, but she didn’t want to sit down and rest. She’d had enough of that.

  It had taken her a long time, but she had finally made a navigable path to his desk. Of course he’d used his desk since the papers and everything else had fallen. He’d simply crawled over them with the ease of a much younger man. That’s one thing Dolly could say about her husband. Nothing, not even age, seemed to slow him down. Crawling up and over was not an option for her, not that she had any business in his desk anyway. She had no business there at all.

  She dropped heavily into his desk chair, the worn leather and old springs singing, and picked up the hem of her apron to blot her face. She looked out the small paned window that was cut into the adobe wall, and waited for her breathing to return to normal. The sun shone through lacy, dusty cobwebs strung across each of the corners. She wondered how she could have let her house go for so long. She told herself it wasn’t her fault, not really, but she still felt it was. After all, this was her house. It would always be her house.

  She pulled open the lower right-hand drawer of the old wooden desk and was glad to see that the metal box was still there. Grabbing its handle, she lifted it from the drawer, then carefully shoved the clutter on the desk out of the way to set it down. She opened it. It wasn’t locked. Why would he bother?

  The box held just two things. She took out the will, her will in which she’d left him all her worldly possessions. Those were the exact words: all her worldly possessions. She’d reread that phrase many times since she’d found the single typed sheet a month ago. The signature was shaky and infirm but it could have been her signature in 1971, twenty-five years ago, which was when the will was dated.

  She had no recollection of making the will but she remembered very little from that time. It was during her amnesia. Of course, she didn’t really have amnesia, but it was easier to explain things that way. Since then, some of her memories had returned, slowly creeping into her consciousness like creatures crawling from a dark cave. Most of the memories were joyful; some were not. Still, huge chunks were missing. Years and years. Vanished.

  But there was one thing she never would have done, even then. She never would have left him all her worldly possessions. There was really only one thing he coveted anyway, and she’d promised her father that her husband would never own the remaining five hundred acres of Las Mariposas.

  It was all that was left of the forty-three thousand acres granted to her great-great-grandfather in 1830 by the Governor of Alta California in payment for his services in Mexico’s war of independence. Her great-great-grandfather had named the rancho Las Mariposas because of the swarms of butterflies he said he encountered when exploring the property. In reality, he had confused fields of golden poppies with butterflies.

  Her husband said her father had specifically stated in his will that they were to own Las Mariposas jointly, but she still didn’t know how that had happened. It was one of the things that remained hidden.

  It would sort itself out. After all, her husband was twenty-two years older than she was. Certainly she’d outlive him. But things had been happening lately that made her uncertain. It had started with the baked chicken in mushroom sauce that he’d cooked. She was sick for two days after she’d eaten it while he remained healthy. Then there was the patch of flooring that had given way under her feet. She’d nearly dropped into the basement. One day she’d had a look around the garage and found all sorts of things that she’d never seen before. Rope, rat poison, saws. She’d only put it all together after she’d decided to stop taking her medication. It was as if a fog had lifted. Everything became crystal clear.

  Reaching into the metal box again, she took out the other item it held: a gold wedding band. She held it up so she could see the inscription etched on the inside. Gabriel y Isabella 14 Junio 1934. She clutched the ring in her fist and her fist to her chest. The tears came immediately, forcefully. She felt the need to sink down, to get close to the ground, or to cling to something like the desk or a wall, but she fought it. She had to be strong. She had to keep her wits about her.

  After calming down, she reached into her apron pocket, took out a square that she’d clipped from the neighborhood newspaper, the El Sereno Sentinel, unfolded it on the desk, and read it again.

  SECURE WITH YOUR RETIREMENT PLANS?

  UNCERTAIN ABOUT FINANCING YOUR CHILD’S EDUCATION?

  I was raised in El Sereno and attended the local schools where I later taught hearing- impaired children. Now, as a senior investment counselor for McKinney Alitzer Financial Services, I’m in a unique position to understand your financial concerns…

  Dolores looked at the small picture of Iris Thorne’s face in the corner. She picked up the heavy metal receiver of the old telephone. Her father, Gabriel, had installed that telephone. It had been the first one in th
e house. She looked around the desk for something to help her turn the rotary dial that had round openings above each number, which were too small for her fingers. She used a pencil.

  A recording answered. It told her what to do if she had a Touch-Tone or a rotary phone and Delores became confused and hung up. Her eyes again teared. She steeled herself and tried again and finally reached a real person, who put her through to Iris Thorne’s number.

  “Iris?” she asked apprehensively at the sound of Iris’s voice. It was another recording. Determined not to hang up, she clutched the telephone handset with both hands and listened carefully until it was her turn to speak.

  “Iris! It’s Dolly. Dolly DeLacey. I don’t think he knows I know. I don’t know who I can trust. He’s turned my children against me. He knows everyone on the police department and at City Hall. I think he knows the governor and even the president and the president runs the FBI. Who can I turn to?”

  She took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. She was getting hysterical. She knew firsthand that no one paid attention to a hysterical woman. “Iris, he’s trying to kill me. Bill’s trying to kill me. There’s a rope in the garage and some saws and poison, Iris! It says it’s for rats but there’s a skull and crossbones on the box. It’s deadly poison! Then in his desk I found a metal box with my will in it. But I don’t remember it, Iris. How could I leave him everything? What about my children? And my father’s ring is there, too…” She paused and listened. “It’s him! There’s his car. It’s him. Oh my goodness!”

  She quickly hung up, put the box back in the drawer, slid the drawer closed, pushed the chair underneath the desk, and with trembling hands tried to return the clutter on top of the desk to its original position. She started to leave the room, then rushed back to grab the ad that she’d forgotten on the desk. Hurrying out, she bumped against the stacks of newspapers. She felt more and more out of breath. Ducking into her bedroom, she closed the door and tried to compose herself. When she heard Bill go into the kitchen, just like she expected him to do, she began to calm down. Everything was going to be fine, she told herself. Everything was going to be fine because over the years she’d finally learned to think like he did.

  He walked into his office and said, “Huh,” when he saw that she’d straightened it up. Standing behind his desk, he reached down and picked up a small, carefully folded square of white paper that lay on the carpet. A self-satisfied smile crossed his lips as he wedged the paper back between the desk and drawer, down low on the far side. This was the best location—confirmed via many tests—for it to drop to the ground almost unseen when the drawer was opened.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Iris Thorne didn’t pay too much attention to the man with the squeegee. Sure, she kept her eye on him, like any good city girl, while he squeegeed the windows of his beat-up old boat of a car in the bay adjacent to hers at the self-serve gas station. He was a bit tattered, with long, gray hair that brushed his shoulders. His pants were frayed at the hem, and he was humming tunelessly to himself. His beatific smile was in such sharp contrast to the defeated expressions virtually everyone else in the city had worn during the previous few weeks that Iris suspected he was either deranged to begin with or had been recently driven to that point.

  She walked back to her give-me-a-ticket red 1972 Triumph TR6 after paying for her gas at the kiosk and saw the man now squeegeeing the Triumph’s windows.

  What the hell? she said to herself. She angrily unzipped her purse, suddenly pushed over the edge. I can’t take any more.

  As she fumbled to find a dollar, the man waved the squeegee, smiled warmly, and said, “Thought I’d clean yours too. I already had this in my hand.” He shrugged diffidently, dropped the squeegee back into its dirty bath, humming all the while, then got in his car and drove away.

  Iris watched him with her hand still jammed into her purse. What was that about? She inspected the TR for damage, calmed herself down, and drove away as well. She entered the eastbound Ten at its mouth in Santa Monica, passing the CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS TRANSCONTINENTAL HIGHWAY sign posted at the entrance to the McLaren Tunnel.

  It was 9:00, the end of the morning drive time, but traffic was still abysmal. The freeway was now dotted with the pickup trucks of carpenters, electricians, plumbers, masons, plasterers, landscapers, glass men, and fence installers, and with the sedans of insurance adjusters and government emergency personnel, and with large trucks carrying heavy equipment. Southern California’s economy was on the move.

  She normally left much earlier for her downtown L.A. office, but she’d had things to take care of at home. She’d finally managed to find a guy to board up her broken windows. With the demand these days, they were almost impossible to find. Glass men were even scarcer.

  At first she’d thought she’d just leave the windows and French doors as they were, letting the Big One be her ersatz redecorator. At least she’d get light and fresh air. But one day last week she’d come home from work to find two teenage runaways in her condo, watching television and eating one of her Sara Lee butter pecan coffee cakes. They’d thought the building had been abandoned and turned out to be as afraid of her as she was of them. Iris felt sorry for them and gave them some money, but didn’t sleep a wink that night, regretting her decision not to buy a gun.

  Nothing beats firepower in strange times like these. Most everyone in postquake L.A. was being nice and cooperative and listening to their better angels, but there was always that other subset of the population.

  She exited the Ten at the detour near Robertson Boulevard and joined the other drivers in gaping at the great fissure as they inched past it on the surface streets. The debris had been removed, the smaller pieces nabbed by souvenir hunters, and reconstruction was going full speed ahead both day and night. It still seemed impossible. The mighty Ten had fallen.

  A bumper sticker on the car ahead of her said: CRISTO VIENE. ¿ESTÁS LISTO?

  “Yeah,” Iris said. “I’m ready for Him.”

  Finally reaching her twelfth-floor office, Iris pulled open the heavy glass door marked MCKINNEY ALITZER FINANCIAL SERVICES in raised brass letters. She let out a sigh of relief as she walked through the suite’s plush mauve-hued lobby. Her priorities had changed considerably in the past few weeks. If she could get to work, get home, and manage to eke out a few hours’ sleep between the aftershocks, it had been a good day.

  She waved at the receptionist and swung left toward the sales department, her leather briefcase resting familiarly in her hand, her pump heels sinking into the thick carpet. She tried humming tunelessly to herself, like the squeegee man, to see if it changed anything. She altered her gait, adopting a long-strided, hip-swinging, loose-armed, above-it-all saunter, having learned long ago that appearance and consistency were essential to success.

  She strode past the cubicles where the junior investment counselors were already at their desks, their telephone headsets plugged in, the lines open and ready for anything. Their voices were bright and clear and tinged with the urgency bred of hunger.

  “Make money and pay lower taxes!”

  “Every day lost is money lost!”

  “Window’s closing. Don’t be left out!”

  “Never too early to think about retirement!”

  Iris could almost hear the snap of freshly written checks being pulled from their books. The day just might turn out okay after all.

  She smiled at Warren Gray, who raised his eyebrows slightly in greeting. Both Iris and Warren had been with the firm for five years. After being neck and neck the first year, Iris’s innate knack for the business began to shine through and she moved up quickly. She suspected that Warren resented her—many of the junior investment counselors did. It was a love-hate thing. They watched her not only to learn everything they could but to see if there was a way to topple her. She’d stopped caring about things like that a long time ago. It came with the territory.

  She shot a smile at Sean Bliss, who was always immaculately groomed and tastefully
dressed, who had pedigrees from the best schools, and who would have polite conversations with her at the same time as he lasciviously ogled her anatomy. Today he stared at her legs.

  She intentionally brushed them together as she passed, making her stockings whiz rhythmically. You’re never gonna get it, Sean.

  She entered the range where she could see into Herbert Dexter’s office in the northwest corner of the suite. The lights were on and she could see the reports he’d been going over, neatly squared on his desk. His desk chair was empty. One of his replica Remington sculptures, The Wicked Pony, was silhouetted against the bright sunlight that streamed in through his floor-to-ceiling window. The sculpture depicted a noble cowboy reaching up to grab the bucking horse that had thrown him. Dexter loved images from the Wild West. Even though the West they were living in now was about as wild as it gets, Dexter hid himself and his family in a gated community in a wealthy suburb. Iris and her cronies cattily noted that even the Dexters had been shaken by the quake.

  A secretary from a temporary agency sat at a desk outside Dexter’s door, brazenly going through the drawers. She was filling in for Herb’s secretary, Louise, who had taken a few weeks off to deal with her quake-ravaged home.

  Then Iris passed Kyle Tucker and mentally said, Hi sweetheart. She could tell he’d been calculating the proper moment to look up and greet her, not wanting to appear too anxious, which made him look all the more so. He was new to the industry, just barely out of graduate school, and was the latest in the firm’s seemingly endless supply of fresh-faced, testosterone-fueled young men. He was cockier than most and gregarious and funny. The type of guy, Iris thought, who could tie the stem of his cocktail maraschino cherry into a bow with his tongue. He was rakishly good looking, with strawberry blond hair and an expressive, rubbery gash of a mouth that seemed to be always in motion, like a caterpillar.