Last Light in Paradise: Chapter 6

Every now and then, a story comes along that refuses to stay put. It lingers on your nightstand. It sneaks into conversation. For us, Last Light in Paradise is one of those stories, and we’re delighted to let it loose, one chapter at a time, in the pages of the Montecito Journal. Well, at least the first six chapters for the time being – then you can purchase the book at one of our local beloved bookstores: Chaucer’s, Tecolote, and Godmothers.

This book marks a first for us… Last Light in Paradise is the inaugural book published by MJ Media Group. Yes, we’re dipping a toe – perhaps a barefoot run – into the world of book publishing, guided entirely by our belief in a novel that is as cinematic as it is soulful, as local as it is timeless.

Set against the luminous backdrop of 1930s Santa Barbara, this is a tale of love and loss, mystery and reckoning, populated by unforgettable characters and infused with the kind of atmosphere that feels both dreamlike and deeply true. We invite you to settle in, turn the page, and join us at the edge of paradise… just as the light begins to change.

Chapter 6

By eight the next morning, Creek was parked beneath the broad Cyprus trees, tucked into a sandy shoulder of the sea road where he’d been last night, halfway between the driveway and the big villa. He watched the fogbank out to sea and knew it was moving landward. Wait for the fog, he thought, and they won’t see you coming.

He stared up at the great villa, partially visible above the cliffs and the forest of giant trees surrounding it. It resembled a tiered layer cake, he thought, with a cheesy palace on top that someone had painted pink. He had no idea what he would find there, but he did know it had to begin there, with an old lady peeking from behind a curtain.

Looking seaward, Creek saw a solitary lobster boat plying the edge of the fogbank. He watched the captain throttle back, lock the wheel to a gentle circle, then move outside the pilothouse to hoist pots. In a time-honored ritual, the crabs were plucked and flung back to the ocean, the lobsters gauged, culls also flung overboard, and the keepers given to a holding tank to be banded and sold. Each trap was rebaited and shoved back into the sea. Nowhere on that boat could Creek see a means for a fisherman to lose his head.

He finished his dry beef sandwich, tried to improve the memory of it with a wash of hot thermos coffee, stepped out of the Ford, and walked down to the beach, hoping something might have caught a tide and washed up on solid ground – the other boot, the dead man’s head, a crucial piece of boat debris. Working his way toward the bluffs below the villa, Creek watched the boat slip in and out of fog as he moved shoreward. He was amused at the irony of a common fisherman plying the oldest of trades in the watery front yard of one of the most expensive villas in America.

Creek had seen how death can happen unexpectedly when big rich lives right up next to big poor and the line between them is thin. Too much taunting, and poor sometimes has to reach out and touch rich – a bauble or a diamond or a neckline – and the result was often ugly. Sometimes the rich wanted something from the poor beyond their labor and service, like a wife or daughter or an unsavory favor, and this, too, could become ugly, but a whole lot harder to prosecute.

He wondered how you were supposed to go a lifetime with nothing when everything you’ve ever wanted is waving at you right across a road. Had Pony wanted something that wasn’t his? Had he crossed the road for some forbidden fruit?

There was no new evidence. After a final scan as the fog crept in and the boat faded back into it, Creek worked his way up to the ornate iron gate to the villa. Beyond it, a long driveway curled up to the big layer cake and disappeared into trees and mist. He chose not to ring the brass-button bell and jumped the stone wall instead, then started up the driveway. It rose steadily, the fog like veils through the trees, the sound of surf diminishing steadily, eerily. He thought of Pony, slopped in that surf, and made a note to find the woman who found the body and see if there was fog that morning.

He saw it first as an apparition, intermittent in the distance. Then, when he stopped to watch and it faded, he knew someone was following him. A hundred yards distant, the person and something like a dog, maybe larger than a dog, moved parallel to him. The sun was beginning to punch through, and Creek thought he glimpsed a rifle. The figure moved oddly, childishly, as if it were a young girl, and alongside it, he thought he saw the large tawny dog. And then they were gone in the mist and woods. Creek continued up the driveway, thinking that the dog hadn’t moved at all like a dog.

He came up to the roundabout and for the first time saw the great place at eye level. It was the color of washed coral, with cream-white trim and majestic roofs of silvery gray. It was three stories high and had tall windows and intricate verandas. Giant ficus, palm, and magnolia trees rose up past the balconies and gables, dwarfing the broad, stately patios, lawns, and gravel walks. He had been wrong. It was no layer cake. It was an authentic emblem, the very summit of American glamor, a genuine palace with a dusting of European class. For all its size and magnificence, it remained reserved, reflecting in its grandeur and understatement that its true opulence lay not in what you saw, but in what you could not see.

The sun burst through, and the palace grew iridescent. He was moved by the beauty of it. As he watched the light play, a man in the distance emerged from a patio door. The feeling of grandeur died, and Creek abruptly felt that crashing the party had been a coarse mistake. 

He wanted to turn and leave, but the man was walking toward him. Creek planted his feet and waited. He looked up at the house until he found the window where he had seen the woman, but it was just a blank window reflecting the sun. He noticed a young sharp-faced Mexican man and an old Chinaman in the distance, both raking the hard dirt beneath leafy trees. There were white iron tables and chairs and some balls like those he had used to play boules in France.

“Hey there, mister,” the man was saying, “You can’t be here. Lost or not lost, you’re on private property.”

Creek smiled and remained planted where he stood, curious to how the man would handle an unflustered trespasser. He was large and well dressed, with dynamic, wavy blond hair and was clearly not used to having strangers appear on his imperial grounds without invitation. He pulled up short.

“Did you hear me?”

“I did,” Creek said.

“Somebody invite you and forget to tell me?”

“They did not.”

“Then, leave the way you came, while you can.”

“Maybe. In a minute.”

“Buddy, if you don’t get the fuck off this property, believe me, what happens to you up here won’t matter much to anybody but your fat Aunt Sally.”

Creek grinned again. He could see the man trying to act his way into a solution, a man large enough to feel comfortable threatening a stranger but not seasoned enough to enforce it.

“You a cheeky fucker,” the man asked, “or just some loco jailbird I need to bring in the cops and their cop dogs to teach a lesson to?”

“Calm down, there, signor. Had a small accident, bottom of your cliffs, down there on the beach. I need to ask you a few questions is all. We found the body of a dead man on your beach morning before yesterday.”

The man stood ten feet from Creek, his jaw fixed, puzzling this, then blurted out: “You’re trespassing. One doesn’t have anything to do with the other. Now get off this property.”

“Good distance above a mean high tide,” Creek said. “Trust me, it’s your beach, your property, and that body has just about everything to do with my being up here.”

Creek saw the man churning on this and jumped on it.

“What’s your name?” Creek said it hard and with disgust.

As surprised as he was insulted, the big man stayed locked on the details.

“What do you mean, ‘body’?”

“The part beneath the head,” Creek said.

“Look, smart-ass. I don’t even know you. What is this?”

“What I said it was. A body. Without a head. On your beach. You own all this?”

“A goddamn body, on this beach?” Now he was more angry than rattled, and Creek saw a brief tableau of horror in his eyes.

“I asked you if you were the owner,” Creek said.

“Everybody knows who owns this place. Christ, that’s it – you’re new on the force, aren’t you. Where’s Chief Wade?”

Creek knew the man had been rocked by part of this news, but he showed less interest in who had died than the apparent insult of a police hire he knew nothing about, and Creek’s unforgivable ignorance as to the true and august ownership of the big pink house above the sea.

“Chief thinks an Indian is beneath his interest. I don’t. Name’s Creek. What’s yours?”

“Show me something.”

Creek pulled out the badge and looked at it as if for the first time, then held it up for the man to see.

“Kind of shiny, right?” Creek said, smiling. “So, what do they call you?” 

“I’m Tilden.”

“That your first name, Tilden?”

He did some calculating and Creek could see him gamble against making a scene.

“Robert,” Tilden said. Creek instinctively knew Tilden would hate the diminutive.

“Why don’t you tell the owner, Bobby, that there’s a man here who needs to talk to him. Try to leave out the headless and dead parts, let me bring those up. Can you do that?”

“Name’s Robert, ‘Bo’ to my friends, from my middle name, Beauregard. And, no, you may not talk to the owner. But you can have Chief Wade make an appointment with Miss Starbuck, and if she so chooses, she might talk to him. Capisce?”

There it was, Creek thought. The truth. The reduction of his name to anything so bluntly American as “Bob” pricked him, and he reacted with the vanity of a poser. Which meant, because he was pretending to be what he was not, he was going to lie.

“What I’d like from you, Bob, before I lose my temper and bring a squad of snoops onto your master’s property, are two things: I want to speak to your two gardeners over there. And I want to speak to whoever was looking out that upper window at about two o’clock day before yesterday. Right about when the storm broke.”

“Look, you. I run this, this estate.” He indicated the expanse. “I keep it green and tidy and safe so my employer can rest without the outside world leaking in. Been doing it a very long time now, so I am sure she doesn’t know jack about a body on any beach. Trust me. So, we’ll just leave her out of it.”

“She might have seen a murder.”

“She didn’t.”

Creek said nothing and waited.

“What do you mean ‘a murder’?” Tilden said. “You said it was an accident.”

“Why I’m up here asking questions,” Creek said.

“If it was an accident, why don’t you just bury the body and get the fuck out of here.”

“That’s a pretty steep drop off your land there. Maybe he was up here and fell off.”

“He didn’t,” Tilden said.

“Then maybe he was thrown off.”

“He wasn’t.”

“Had some pretty sour bruises on his body. Blunt force kind. Like somebody big knew where to hit him.”

“That a fact.”

“Maybe he stumbled up here by accident, pissed you off a little, and like you said, nobody would much care what happened if it got ugly. Except, me. I’d care, Bob.”

His size a natural weapon, Tilden moved a step closer, and Creek knew he was mad enough to uncoil but never would. His hands had never touched anything harder than a geranium or a scarf.

“I don’t know you,” Tilden said. “I don’t know what happened or who died. I do know I don’t like you. You say another word about it not being an accident, we’ll lawyer up and cram enough legal up your ass to make you wish – ”

“Mister Tilden.”

The voice, pretty as jewelry, came from behind them. It stopped Tilden mid-sentence. In the pause, both men looked over to see her standing only ten feet away on the garden terrace. It was the woman from the prior evening, and Creek felt the light of morning come through his body.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’d be happy to talk to the detective.”

The adrenalin shifted, and Creek took in the striped dress, the long legs and fawn colored hair, and how she looked more Hollywood than ballerina in the daylight. She was a knockout and a smart one, but he knew Hollywood was only a dreamland, a place where nothing real could survive, where only apparitions had substance. Being a cliff and a beach away from the headless body reminded him that he needed to know which was which, real or apparition.

He turned back to Tilden and said, “What is it I would wish for, exactly, Bobby?”

When Tilden spoke, Creek realized he knew his place and the lines between them were clear. Creek thought Tilden was too big a man to turn so abruptly subservient. It worried him. He decided not to be so nice with the woman.

“Ranny. Damn, he just walked the hell up here. I think he’s just a new deputy. Making some bad accusations. You don’t have to talk – ”

“It’s okay, Bo. I saw them Sunday afternoon. Only I didn’t know what it was.” She turned to Creek. “Was it a swimmer? I couldn’t see much, but it didn’t look good. Was he hurt? Badly?”

“Bad enough to be dead.” Creek watched her flinch.

“Oh. I’m so, so sorry,” she said. He wanted to believe her. But this was California, and nobody in California didn’t know how to act a little. She turned to Tilden.

“Is it someone we know?”

“For God’s sake, of course not,” Tilden said.

“How would you know that, Bob?” Creek said. “You telling me now that you knew about the dead man on your beach?”

Tilden seemed as confused as he was angry and kept looking at both of them.

“Jesus, Ranny. This fool has me flustered.”

The woman tilted her head to him and said, “Did you, Bo?”

“No! This mutt standing here is the first I heard about it. I have no idea who he is or where he came from. If it becomes important, have Wade come up here, and we’ll all talk.”

“Mind if I look at your hands, Robert?” Creek was grinning.

“Goddamn right I do. Jesus. Ranny don’t talk to this fool till someone legal gets up here. He’s just shooting without a target, I’m telling you.”

“It’s fine, Bo. The detective and I are old friends.”

It was as if she had slapped him.

“Tell you what, Bob,” Creek said, “give me a few minutes with your boss, here, and your gardeners. I got more questions. You and me can wrap it up after. Wade’s working for me, just now, so I’d count him a no-show.”

“You might have told me you knew her right off,” he said to Creek.

Creek smiled. “Just figured it out, old boy. For what it’s worth, your hands don’t look like they hit anybody. Pretty much ever. And do me a favor – don’t say anything to the gardeners until I talk to them. Fair?”

Tilden knew what Creek had seen in him and flushed with embarrassment. He nodded almost imperceptibly, and as he walked off to what looked like the garages, Creek wondered how a man as big as a boxer had ruled his roost of gardeners and servants so long from the mere authority of his size. Then again, in these times, a job meant the world. Creek turned back to the woman and gave her a quizzical smile.

“Ranny? I knew a girl called Larissa,” Creek said.

She smiled, shook her head slightly, and indicated a path into the trees. They began walking side by side.

“Larissa Carter was my stage name.” She put out her hand to shake, and Creek took it. “Ranny Starbuck. Nice to meet you. And you would be… ?”

“Creek.”

“Please forgive Mister Tilden. He has been my gatekeeper for many years.”

The remnant of fog on leaves, wet and fresh, as they passed through a spruce grove, made him feel lightheaded. He felt he could not keep from staring at her. But a cold worry had its hooks in him, and he knew just walking beside her was slipping down the rabbit hole. There was a flaw up here, a false note, and he ought to pay attention.

“Are there parents?” he asked.

“No.”

“A Mister Starbuck?”

“No. Just our small tribe. And you – is there more to the name than Creek?”

“It didn’t rain much before the war. When it did, the creeks backed up, became swim holes. Couldn’t keep me out of ’em.”

“No last name?”

He smiled, shook his head, and said, “Just the one.”

He stopped and faced her. “I have a few questions I sort of should ask sooner than later. I wasn’t expecting to see you again and surely not this early in the day.”

She held his look and said, finally, “Oh, I think you were.”

She was smiling, and he tried to see if the smile held guile, but her accuracy was unnerving.

“I did see you sneak across the road and off into the dunes. I did see that.”

“No. No sneak. Just a stroll. By the night sea. To make it last longer.”

“What last longer?”

They walked, and she didn’t speak for a bit.

“I don’t get out much,” she said. “Almost never. It was such a lovely evening. The movie. The drive. You. And yes, I suppose, a little of, well, you being a stranger.”

“It never occurred to me that you would live here.”

“Well, I’m safe then.”

“The man we found, Ranny, on the beach …” He let it run on.

“Oh, God. Please say he wasn’t there last night.”

“No. We found him the morning before.”

“Thank God.” She walked silently, and he stayed with her. “Still,” she said, “it’s creepy. To think…”

The path led through the tall palm trees to the cliffs where the sea became visible, a bold, dark blue. She had a beautiful walk, and he liked how the sunlight passed through the trees and became shimmer upon her hair and shoulders.

“I’m sorry for him. Who was he?” she asked.

“An Indian man. Ranch hand to a friend out on Santa Rosa, John Penbrook. Boy meant the world to him, so I offered to pick him up. His name was Charlie Russell, but they called him ‘Pony.’ It probably was just an accident.”

“Was that his name…?” she said. He thought she said it wistfully.

“Yes. He had a bad leg, a kind of gimp. Does the name ring a bell?”

“No, it doesn’t.” She said it without looking at him. But he was sure the name or the gimp part meant something to her.

“Penbrook has a daughter about your age, Hopi. You ever friends, you and the Penbrooks?”

“My father knew a man named John Penbrook. I think Daddy hunted with him. We didn’t have much company growing up.”

“Oh?”

She looked at him like she’d look at a person about to catch her from a two-story fall.

“We are, were, an odd family,” she said. “My father was seventy when I was born. And I, well, after my mother died, I’m very sure you’ve heard the rumors. The slightly ‘over emotional shut-in.’”

They stopped, as if by some arrangement. “Your mother?” he said.

“No, me. You haven’t heard this?”

“No. I haven’t.”

She looked straight at him and said, “I don’t believe you, detective.”

“Miss Starbuck, I’ve been away a long time. I just bought a place a ways upcoast. Nobody calling to hook me up with the rumor mill up there. Especially with a story about a woman who must have hurt a lot to be this beautiful and afraid at the same time.”

She managed a smile. They continued walking.

“You’re artful. Well, the point is, there was no social life. Not here, not in those years. We’ve always been private people. That’s why Robert gets so flustered when trespassers come on the grounds.”

They came to the cliff’s edge. They both looked below, and Creek realized how far the view of the coastland extended. Pony’s debris could have scattered for miles. They both stared down at the beach for a moment.

“It’s so very sad,” she said.

“Yeah, even sadder if you knew the story. He was a good man. Miss Starbuck …”

“Call me Ranny. Please. You’re, you’re just so different from last night.”

“And you are not just a pretty girl without a ride home today.”

“Yes. Of course.”

He turned and looked up at the villa. The highest floors were visible above the trees.

“Someone was watching us yesterday. The third-floor, westernmost window. Was that you?”

“I’m sure it must have been. I spend a lot of time… in that wing. Looking out at the world. And looking at nothing.”

“You said you saw some of us, below.”

“Oh, well, I saw a group. Some policemen. I remember thinking maybe a swimmer had a problem.”

“A problem.”

“I was only vaguely aware of any of it. Actually, if you must know, I was studying you. Only I didn’t know it was you, then, if you see what I’m saying. I was obsessed with the way you were standing.”

“Standing?”

“You were standing a certain way.”

“Was I?”

“You stand planted on one leg, the other looser, with your head cocked sideways. And your shoulders hitched. Like, curious and bemused, at the same time. Thumb hooked in your belt, full of nonchalance. Like this.”

He was startled by how quickly, accurately, and expertly she mimicked him. It was as if she became him, and a shower of light spun through his body. He felt twelve years old and completely baffled by the prettiest girl at school. It cracked him up, and it delighted her.

“I watch such things,” she said. “It’s like homework, for a dancer. Yours is nearly a ballet pose, a contrapposto, only your foot would be splayed.”

“I stand like that. I do.”

“Like David. The marble statue. So at ease. Our whole life in dance is about pose and movement, so it made me curious. And then I noticed the crowd.”

“We haven’t found the boat yet. Haven’t found much of anything.” He paused. “All that time at that window, any chance you saw something?”

“No. I’d have told you.”

“Yeah? You said you didn’t know the Indian with the bad leg. I get the feeling you knew him but didn’t know his name.”

“No, I don’t. I thought for a second it rang a bell is all. Please don’t relegate us to some unapproachable formality. We met on equal terms last night. You spared me an embarrassment and amazed me by knowing who I was once. Can’t we be like that? Like last night?”

Creek tried hard to be fair, to not let the big wealth, the insular manners, and her blinding beauty con him or intimidate him. But all this lavish up here and the image of Charlie Russell’s body down there, it just spoiled it.

“What embarrassment?” he asked.

She turned away from him and said, as if batting away a flea, “Strangers, a dead battery, asking for a ride. People drown. I’m so sorry for him, but it has nothing to do with me, or us, up here.”

“The thing about this man, Ranny, who drowned… ?”

She finally turned and looked at him and said, “Yes?”

“Well, he had no head.”

She stared at him, not comprehending. Then, it slammed her, and she yanked her head away and folded her arms for support. Creek thought he could have slapped her, and it would have been kinder.

“Anything you might have seen, from that window, might help.”

“I didn’t! Not anything! I know – it’s a lot of time staring out a window with nothing to report. Does this give you the jitters, Mister Creek?”

Tough wasn’t working. He tried soft.

“Ranny. I drove an ambulance in France. I’ve known a lot of people who saw too much happen in front of them, and I know how ordinary life can stop being an easy thing.”

“But not for you?”

“Oh, yeah. For me plenty.”

As if by osmosis, they turned and began walking away from the sea view toward the house. They walked in silence for a time.

“On the way up,” Creek said, “I saw a girl, I think it was a girl, in the mist. She was walking a very large dog. I thought maybe it was your child.”

Ranny pulled up suddenly and flashed him a cold eye.

“No. There is no child. I have no child! My god, you are probing.” And then she changed, looked up at the trees, and slowly shook her head. “I see. I missed it. I might be lying. I might be – oh my, I am.” She looked at him now, startled. “I am a suspect. We all are.” He watched a darkness fall across her eyes like a storm.

“No,” Creek said, “nobody is. He was a really good soul, who some freak thing happened to, and he lost his head. Then, yesterday, they scorched him, so I’ll never know if he died right, or real, or real wrong – as in got murdered. It frustrates me, but I had no right to browbeat you.”

“Yes, Creek. Of course. Well, I’ve told you what I know, that I know nothing, and you are welcome to roam the grounds to learn what you can. Thank you for last night. You were gallant.”

She turned and started to walk away but stopped and turned back to him.

“Please,” she said, “when you learn how he died, will you call and let us know? The beach down there, it will never be the same.”

He watched her walk the path out of the trees, up the stairs, and across the patio into the house. Only when the door closed did Creek lose the urge to call her back and apologize. The conversation had derailed so fast that he couldn’t find the words to stop it.

Later, after he had talked to the gardeners and to Tilden, what he remembered most was how quickly an elegant woman had shaped her body into a bumpkin cowboy, long legged and rangy, always hitching his thumb in his pocket and planting himself so that standing for long periods didn’t bore him so much. In that one gesture, she had told him something funny and private and wonderful about herself, about how she felt about him. And he had doused her with cold water. He hadn’t even told her he was looking into the thing because he thought it might let him see her again.

And now he knew he would, and not only because he wanted to. She didn’t like the question about the girl. And something about Pony, the game leg, had triggered something in her. Creek had seen it briefly in her eyes.

Two false notes from the woman behind the curtain looking down at a crime scene she claimed she had no knowledge of.

Because you asked for it, we are publishing four more chapters here in the MJ. Read Chapter 7 of Last Light in Paradise here.