Vixen

7

“She’s a real piece of work, all right,” Tamara said when I finished giving her a short rundown of my interview with Cory Beckett. The woman’s apparent involvement with Andrew Vorhees didn’t surprise her any more than it had me. “Whatever she’s up to, you can bet it’s more than just being Vorhees’ mistress.”

“If she is his mistress.”

“Oh, yeah. Her name’s on the lease for that Snob Hill apartment, but the monthly rent’s fifty-five hundred. She came out of her marriages pretty well fixed, but not well enough to be living it up without some extra juice. Up until six months ago she and Kenny shared a small apartment in Cow Hollow that rented for about two K.”

“So you don’t think she could have afforded Abe Melikian’s five-thousand bond commission and whatever collateral she had to put up for the rest.”

“The five K, maybe, but what do you bet Vorhees supplied the collateral. There’s blog rumors he’s been keeping a woman on the side. Dude’s not exactly what you’d call discreet.”

“His wife must be a glutton for punishment,” I said. “Otherwise, why not divorce instead of separation.”

“Still loves the dude. Either that, or she doesn’t like to lose what belongs to her.”

“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.