Free I Dreamed I Married Perry Mason by Susan Kandel Page A

her—how could he help it?—and murdered my sister to be with her.”

10
    I am a biographer. I understand people the way secretaries understand file folders and doctors understand femurs. Okay, that’s ludicrous. A file folder is a file folder any way you look at it, and ditto for a femur, but you’d have to be deluded, really gone, to think a person, any person, could ever really understand another. About as likely as turning base metals into gold.
    Still, it’s what I do. Given which you’d think I’d have some kind of feel for human nature. Woman’s intuition, at least. It is my birthright. But as I drove away from Theresa Flynn’s house, I had to wonder. Had I been dead wrong? What kind of man was Joseph Albacco, really? Had he been so in love with this Meredith Allan that he’d kill his wife for her?
    That name, Meredith Allan. It sounded so familiar. It was an ordinary kind of name. Meredith Allan could’ve been somebody I went to school with back in Jersey, somebody who’d blackballed me from the cheerleading squad. Or a bank manager who’d denied me a loan. There’d been a lot ofthose. Had that name come up in the transcript? I didn’t think so. Something was nagging at me. And I couldn’t help feeling that someone was playing me for a fool. What about Vincent—Vincent, the soul of kindness? Was it possible I had misjudged him, too?
    As I merged onto the 101, I pulled out my phone book and dialed Annie at work, almost plowing into a tour bus in the process. Well, Gardner had been a bad driver, too. Worse than me. He’d smashed a brand-new Model T Ford right through the garage of his first Ventura house. I’d visited the spot on a previous trip. There hadn’t been all that much to see. It’d been turned into a Mexican restaurant. Killer margaritas, though.
    Unfortunately, Annie wasn’t at work, though they had expected her that morning and had left dozens of messages because—hello!—they were shooting tomorrow, and the gold facade of the alien ziggurat was hideous, and if I got ahold of her, would I tell her to please, please, call Vanessa? I tried her at Lael’s, but there was no answer. Then I called her at home and got the machine. I waited for the beep.
    â€œAnnie, it’s Mom. Vincent stopped by yesterday. I’m trying to mind my own business, but I think we need to talk, sweetie—”
    â€œMom, don’t hang up!”
    â€œI’m here.”
    â€œSorry, I was out in the garden, weeding.”
    Annie’s garden meant everything to her. It always had. When she was in kindergarten, her class did a unit on plants. Most of the other kids could barely manage to send up a pea shoot. She grew peas galore, plus two twelve-foot sunflowers she decided were husband and wife. We documented themwith Polaroids. Annie’s tastes were simpler now. A thriving bean tepee was cause for celebration. A patch of mutant, colorless watermelons, equally thrilling. She got it from me, though I’ve always been more interested in aesthetics than organics. To which end I’ve learned, under Javier’s expert tutelage, to love and respect pesticides. I could never admit this to Annie. Watering, mulching, fertilizing, composting, harvesting, battling pests via alternative means—all were religious sacraments to her.
    Before she could get a word in edgewise, I told her I’d be there in an hour with a quart of her favorite veggie chili and hung up. She and Vincent had discovered a rickety stand deep in Topanga Canyon run by an old hippie who claimed that Jim Morrison was one of her customers (still) and that she had invented scented candles. Her chili was delicious, so who was I to argue?
    Then I remembered something I’d forgotten to mention to Theresa Flynn. I was on Pacific Coast Highway, waiting for a green light, and ostensibly less of a threat. I dialed the number and she answered with a