Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Disappearing Diva Read online

She pointed to the keypad mounted beside the front door. "Is that it?"

  He nodded.

  "No security cameras?"

  "Why would we need them?" he asked.

  Good point. His clients didn't usually get frisky.

  Irene walked over to the keypad and punched in some numbers while studying the readout. "That's what I thought." She turned to me. "I think we're about finished here." She glanced at Dominic Gordon. "We'll be in touch if we think of anything else."

  "Fine." His tone suggested it was anything but. "You might find it more convenient to call. My card." He handed me a flimsy gray business card. "Let me see you out." He rushed past us to open the door, practically shoving us onto the sagging porch.

  When the door closed behind us, Irene said, "He just made number one on the suspect list."

  We had a suspect list? We'd only talked to two people. "Why?" I asked.

  "You have to ask?" She shuddered. "You look up the word creepy, and that guy's picture is right there. I can just see him pulling a Norman Bates and keeping a dead body at his house for company."

  "Thanks for that disturbing image," I said. "But it's not a crime to be creepy."

  We got into the car.

  "True enough," Irene admitted. "If it was, some of the guys I've dated would be in jail."

  "What was that with the keypad?" I asked.

  "Just seeing how easy it would be to bypass."

  "And?"

  "Child's play."

  What was child's play for Irene and what was child's play for the rest of the world were two different things. Irene had started her computing career at age twelve by hacking into a government mainframe. She'd graduated MIT at fourteen, and she'd sold her first company on her twenty-first birthday, making her a multimillionaire before she'd ever bought her first beer. However, I tended to believe her when she said Gordon was skimping on security. He hadn't struck me as the overly vigilant type. Case in point—the missing body.

  "So, anyone could have broken in?" I asked.

  Irene nodded. "The real question is why. I mean, I get why someone would want to steal cash or jewelry. But why steal a body?"

  "Medical research?" I offered.

  "Totally great reason." She paused and shot me a look. "If this were the eighteenth century and you wanted to know how to cure the vapors."

  I gave her a playful punch in the arm. "You have a better idea?"

  She paused a moment, pursing her lips as she walked. "Okay, I can think of one reason," she said. "Necrophilia."

  "That is not a better reason," I told her.

  "I can easily picture Dominic Gordon propping Rebecca in a chair and going home to play Old Maid with her every night."

  "Really disturbing," I told her.

  "Tell me you can't see it happening."

  Thing was, I kind of could.

  "Okay, as ick as that is…but then why would he substitute another cadaver in her place? I mean, one body is as good as another, right?"

  "Hmm." Irene mulled that one over. "You're right. I mean, the only reason to sub bodies is so the missing Rebecca wouldn't be noticed."

  "Like at a viewing."

  Irene raised an eyebrow my way. "Now you're onto something, Sherlock."

  I flinched. "I wish you wouldn't call me that."

  But she ignored me, her mental hamster having jumped on his wheel. "Rebecca was originally schedule for cremation. It wasn't until after the last minute change to an open casket viewing that she went missing. Someone didn't want Rebecca viewed. Instead, they broke in, took Rebecca's body, and substituted a similar-looking corpse, hoping to pass it off as Rebecca for the viewing."

  I hated to admit it, but that was the best theory we'd come up with so far. "They might have gotten away with it too. I mean, it had been five years since her sister had seen Rebecca. And with the mortuary makeup and a little grief clouding Barbara's vision, it wasn't a half bad plan."

  "If Barbara hadn't insisted on seeing her sister before she was made up, it's possible no one would have noticed," Irene added.

  "So what about Rebecca did someone not want seen?"

  Irene turned to me, her eyes shining. Uh-oh. I knew that look. It was the same one she'd gotten when she'd made Forbes 30 Under 30 list—glee mixed with just enough determination to be scary.

  "Evidence of her murder."

  "Murder?" I choked out. "Wait—we're only looking for a missing person here. Dr. Watson said her death was accidental."

  "But what if it wasn't? What if she was pushed into that granite counter instead of falling?"

  I paused. "That would be hard to prove. The wound would look identical whether it was from a fall or push."

  "But it's possible."

  I nodded. "Watson is thorough. I don't think he'd miss evidence of a crime."

  "If he were looking for it," Irene cut in. "This was a simple slip and fall when it came to him. I mean, what if the evidence wasn't glaring? What if it was just enough that an open casket and visitation made the killer too nervous?"

  "I supposed it's possible," I said slowly. "But we're being paid to find Rebecca…not find out how she died."

  Irene grinned at me. "If we find out who killed Rebecca and took the body, it'll lead us to where the body was taken."

  While I could point out a couple of flaws in her logic and I had my doubts that Watson would miss a murder, it was becoming more and more clear that Rebecca's body hadn't just been misplaced—it had been taken. Someone had intentionally left Jane Doe in her place. Not something innocent people did.

  I nodded. "Fine. We can do it your way."

  "You won't regret it," Irene said.

  I already kind of did.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Irene had a charity dinner to go to, so she gave me a ride home and said we'd resume our efforts in the morning. I wasn't sure if it was more of a threat or a promise. Until my Victorian became habitable with an actual roof over my head, I lived in a second-floor shoebox in a building that time had forgotten. While it was a slight step up from the Victorian, the plumbing still groaned, linoleum still had more chips than Frito-Lays, and the walls were no thicker than cheap bath towels. And being that it was in Palo Alto, in the heart of the Silicon Valley, rent was exorbitantly high. I probably paid more for my just-above-the-poverty-level dwelling than most Americans paid for their McMansions. Fortunately, my landlord didn't live on the premises and didn't seem to want to step foot in the building any more than most of the tenants did, so I'd only had to escape down the back stairwell to avoid him once or twice when my day job as a barista hadn't quite paid off in "exorbitant" levels.

  When I opened the door, my basset hound, Toby, hurled himself at my legs, panting and licking furiously, aiming for my chin, my hands, or my kneecaps. Toby was another inheritance from my great-aunt Kate, and what he lacked in coordination he more than made up for in affection. Maybe because he'd come from living in the Victorian, Toby didn't seem to mind my apartment. It was a small step up.

  I took him out for a quick walk before returning home to change his water and put some food in his bowl. While he gobbled his dinner, I spent a few minutes going through the mail and surveying the food in the fridge for my own dinner possibilities. I settled on two slices of cold pizza, washed down with a glass of Pepsi. Toby and I were sharing an oatmeal cookie for dessert when the phone rang.

  "Is that old goat Isaac in there with you?"

  It was Mrs. Frist, who lived down the hall from me and spent most of her day glued to the peephole so she could catalog the comings and goings of everyone on the second floor. Especially my next-door neighbor, Isaac Bitterman, an 83-year-old myopic widower with an appalling lack of culinary talent, which didn't deter him one bit from sharing his creations. I'd already had to replace my microwave oven, a saucepan, and a few utensils thanks to his alleged cooking and its perpetually lingering smells and near cement-like textures. I couldn't afford to share too many more meals with Mr. Bitterman.

  Fortunately
, the senior female population in the building helped distract his attention. The ladies considered him quite a catch, since he still had some hair, an ill-conceived sense of adventure, and a healthy railroad pension.

  Mrs. Frist had staked her claim early on and protected it jealously. She was a wiry octogenarian package of silver hair and gold jewelry in a velour track suit, and she had it bad for Mr. Bitterman. For some reason, she viewed me as competition for his affections. I wasn't quite sure how to take that.

  "If he's in there with you…" Mrs. Frist trailed off, leaving the threat hanging.

  "If you mean Mr. Bitterman," I said, "I haven't seen him."

  "I thought we had a dinner date. He'd best not stand me up, if he knows what's good for him."

  If she knew what was good for her, she'd order takeout.

  I glanced at the clock. "Well, it's still early. I'm sure he'll show up."

  "He got a grocery delivery earlier," she said, managing to sound accusatory about it. "And I saw french bread. You don't eat alone when you have french bread."

  "I'm sure he's not sharing his French bread," I assured her.

  "He'd best not be cooking dinner for Mrs. Streelman in 4E," she huffed. "I caught him giving her the eye last week in the lobby. Isaac does like a nice turn of ankle, I can tell you that."

  Too much information right there.

  "Maybe he's just downstairs playing poker with Mr. Orgeron, and he's lost track of time."

  "We'll see about that," she huffed, and then she hung up on me.

  Toby looked at me from his doggy bed, his head cocked quizzically.

  "If she comes knocking," I told him, "don't answer the door."

  * * *

  "I don't understand. The medical examiner said she fell and hit her head." Barbara Lowery Bristol emptied a fourth packet of sugar into her coffee the next morning. Her plastic spoon made little scraping sounds against the cup when she stirred, as if she were digging her way through the bottom of the cup. We'd managed to find a window table at the coffee shop down the street from Irene's place, just outside The City. It was out of the flow of customer traffic, if not away from the morning white noise. As an added bonus, it was warm and smelled much better than the Victorian. Less musty, more spicy and sugary.

  My stomach rumbled softly. "That may well be true," I told her. "We just need to learn a little more about your sister so we can be sure it was nothing more than an awful accident."

  "Don't you believe the doctor?" She tasted the coffee, grimaced, and added a fifth sugar packet.

  Trust, believe, lust after. I took a bite of my banana walnut muffin to staunch the warmth rising in my belly.

  "Of course we believe him," Irene said. "But sometimes there are extenuating circumstances he might not be aware of. That's what makes us private detectives."

  Well, that, and a PO box and some imagination.

  "Was Rebecca having problems with anyone?" I asked. "Maybe a boyfriend? Someone in the opera company?"

  "I don't really know." Scrape, scrape. "As I told you before, we hadn't spoken in several years. I only knew she'd joined the company because I saw an article about the show in the Sunday paper." She hesitated. "That sounds pathetic, doesn't it, that I had to learn about my sister's career from a newspaper."

  "Families can be complicated," Irene said.

  "Complicated." She considered that before shaking her head with a soft snort. "I never would have expected it to come to that, but I had no choice. I couldn't watch Rebecca destroy herself anymore."

  Irene took a sip of her chai tea, her gaze sliding briefly to me above the rim of the cup. "What do you mean, destroy herself?"

  Barbara looked pained. "Is this relevant?"

  "Anything could be relevant at this point," Irene said.

  She set the spoon carefully on her napkin, where a milky beige stain immediately blossomed, and took a moment to gather her thoughts. "It's embarrassing to admit this," she said finally, "but my sister had a history of drug use. At first I wasn't sure, but after a while…well, you couldn't miss the signs, the way she acted, the way she spoke, even the way she looked. Sort of…cloudy, if you know what I mean. Like she wasn't quite there." She paused.

  "Go on," I said softly.

  Her mouth twisted with remembered pain. "Rebecca tried to hide it on the few occasions that she visited, of course, and when she couldn't do that, she let my parents ignore it. Which they were all too happy to do, and when they couldn't do that, everyone tried to justify it. It must have been the pain meds from her car accident that triggered the descent, or her latest boyfriend was a bad influence, or one of her friends introduced her to that life. It couldn't have been Rebecca's fault. She hadn't intended for it to happen. She was better than that. The talented golden child just couldn't be an addict."

  "I'm sorry," I said quietly, struck by the pain in her voice.

  She steeled her shoulders, gathering herself. "Anyway, by the time my parents died, I'd had enough. I needed to be away from her. Away from her drama. She reached out to me a few times, but I never returned her calls."

  "So you never spoke to her after your parents died?" Irene asked.

  Barbara shook her head. "In her last call, she claimed she'd cleaned herself up, but I know enough about addiction to know how fleeting those moments can be. Given Rebecca's lack of impulse control, it probably wouldn't have lasted. It didn't surprise me at all that she fell in her own home and killed herself." She paused to take a sip of coffee. "And I do believe that's what happened," she added. "I'd seen her stumbling around my parents' house in a drug-induced haze all too many times."

  Irene and I traded glances, and I could tell we shared a thought: ask Watson about the tox screen. While being high might have contributed to Rebecca's death, it could also have given someone a good reason to ditch the body. Designer drugs were like fingerprints—depending on the mix, they pointed directly at a certain dealer.

  "Do you know of anyone who was close with Rebecca?" I asked. "Someone who might know whom she'd been seeing, what she'd been doing for the past few years?"

  Barbara shook her head. "I'm sorry. I really don't know anything about her private life. But I do know she'd always been most comfortable at the theater. Even from high school, I think it was the place where she felt she could most be herself. Isn't that ironic? Rebecca was most herself when she was playing someone else." She glanced at us in turn. "Maybe a member of that opera company can give you more information."

  "We'll give it a try," I said. "And we'll let you know what we find."

  "Don't." She pushed her coffee aside, grim-faced. "Just let me know when you find her body so I can put this ugly business behind me."

  * * *

  "She's not exactly wracked with grief, is she?" Irene said fifteen minutes later when we were in her Porsche headed for the Bayside Theater, where, according to the theater's website, rehearsals were underway for Ethereal Love under the guidance of one Patrick Sterling Rossi. I'd done a quick internet search, finding little of note about Mr. Rossi. He didn't seem to be one of the leading lights in the opera world.

  "I think she's been grieving her sister for years." I slipped my phone into my pocket. "Besides, people grieve in different ways."

  Irene braked to allow some pedestrians through the crosswalk. "Did it strike you that she really didn't seem to care if her sister was the victim of foul play?"

  "That's not fair. We don't know her well enough to make that judgment."

  "Right. Maybe she's just the stoic type."

  I ignored that. "You're the one who said families are complicated. Besides, she flew out here, didn't she?"

  Irene shrugged. "Maybe she was hoping for a fat payday."

  "You're getting cynical," I told her.

  "That can happen to a detective," she said.

  "So what's your excuse?"

  She wrinkled her nose at me. We drove the rest of the way lost in thought. At least I was lost in thought. Irene was probably writing computer code in
her head for the next must-have app.

  Once we parked a few blocks down the street from the theater, we got out of the car and headed for the frosted glass entrance doors. I'd never attended a live performance at the Bayside, but I knew the theater was fairly large, seating roughly 1500 people, and had been refurbished a few times throughout the forty years of its existence. Performances ranged from ballet and dance troupes to Broadway productions and live musical acts. Its only drawback was its location bordering an industrial area, which reduced both foot and vehicular traffic, although it did make for easier parking in a city where that was notoriously difficult.

  We entered the cool, dimly lit lobby. Multiple crystal chandeliers sparkled overhead. The glass-enclosed box office stretched along the wall to our right. A broad open staircase to our left led to balcony seating. The theater proper lay directly ahead, behind two sets of closed double doors.

  Beyond the doors, someone sang in a high, clear soprano.

  "I can't understand a word she's saying," Irene complained. "What is that, German?"

  "Italian, I think." I hesitated. "We probably shouldn't go in there."

  "What do you want us to do, shout questions through the door?" Irene grabbed the handle. "Let's be bold."

  She did bold better than I did, but I followed her anyway. Pausing at the top of the aisle, we took in the plush red seats, the sparkling chandeliers, the expansive stage bracketed by red velvet curtains. A redheaded woman glowed in the single spotlight while minions orbited around a tall dark-haired man in jeans standing behind the orchestra pit, watching her.

  "That's probably the director, Patrick Sterling Rossi," I whispered. "We should start with him."

  Irene started down the aisle, but I grabbed her arm. "After she's done."

  "Fine." She dropped into a seat, arms crossed. "I can take it if you can."

  I sat behind her. "It's kind of pretty, actually."

  We listened for a few moments.

  "Wonder what she's saying," Irene said again.

  "Whatever it is, she seems upset."

  "Got any gum?"

  I blinked at her.