BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY MICHAEL MALLORY

      Kill the Mother! A Dave Beauchamp Mystery Novel

      The Mural: A Novel of Horror

      COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

      Copyright © 2013 by Michael Mallory

      Published by Wildside Press LLC

      www.wildsidebooks.com

      DEDICATION

      For Brendan, who is content being an only child.

      ONE

      It was a little after ten by the time I dragged myself to the office. After unlocking the door, I groped for the light switch, flipped it, and watched as the fluorescent tubes built into the ceiling flickered to life. That was a good sign; it meant the electricity hadn’t been shut off yet.

      Tossing the small stack of mail I’d pulled out of the box downstairs onto my desk, I went to the tiny sink in the office’s kitchen cubicle and turned on the faucet. A jet of water spurted out, hit the bottom of the sink and splashed back up onto my shirt. In another time and another place, I might have been annoyed, but today I was pleased. It meant the water was still on, too.

      So far, so good, kid, a familiar voice said. There was nobody else in my office; the voice was strictly inside my head. It belonged to Humphrey Bogart. Bogie was among the Golden Age Hollywood stars who talk to me regularly. Some people, I’m sure, would find this a sign of mental instability, if not outright insanity, but I find it comforting. I know I’m never alone. Besides, even if some people were right and I really was as crazy as a bedbug, it’s okay. This is Los Angeles, and if you can’t walk around insane in Los Angeles, where can you?

      I took advantage of the water’s presence to make a pot of coffee, after which I shuffled to my desk and took a closer look at the mail. There was yet another credit card solicitation; a begging letter from a charity to which I once gave twenty-five bucks, an amount they have far exceeded in postage by sending me junk mail; a bank statement, highlighting last month’s activity of too much money going out and too little coming in; and an official looking letter from Hot Ticket Home Entertainment Rentals.

      Oh, sheez. Was this thing ever going to go away? It started when I innocently rented a DVD of The Big Clock, the great 1948 film noir thriller with Ray Milland and Charles Laughton, from my local Hot Ticket and it was proving to be the worst decision I’ve made recently. I’ve never had any kind of problem with Edendale Video and Poster, an independent store that was presently my entertainment supplier of choice, but Hot Ticket, a national chain that seemed to be perpetually in bankruptcy, was a nightmare. Reluctantly, I opened the envelope and read the letter.

      Dear Mr. Beauchamp:

      Our records show that our last several inquiries to you, regarding your failure to return the DVD of The Big Clock in a timely fashion, have gone unanswered.

      That was absolutely untrue. I did answer their last letter and told them that I had returned the disk more than a month ago. Okay, so it was a year-and-a-half overdue because I had lost it, but once it turned up at the back of the refrigerator (oh, like no one else has ever opened the fridge with something in their hand, and then absentmindedly set it down when a milk carton starts to fall and forgotten about it), I got it right back to Hot Ticket. I had neither the intention nor the wherewithal to pay the two-hundred-dollar fine they were attempting to levy.

      Because you have made no good faith effort to resolve this situation we have no choice but to turn the matter over to a collection agency, a representative from which will be contacting you at their earliest convenience.

      Fine. Let them contact me. I used to be an attorney myself, so I had a pretty good idea of how far they could actually go in making a claim. Maybe if I was able to clear the matter up to everyone’s satisfaction, the collection agency would even throw some work my way. I put the letter in my less-than-crowded in box. The rest of the day’s mail, except for the bank statement, got dumped in the trash.

      The morning progressed without a single phone call, and since I did not have a pending case—yes, I am a private investigator, at least according to a piece of paper that fell off of my wall some time back—I occupied myself watching old film clips on YouTube. After discovering that someone had actually obtained and posted a clip of Linda Crystal from Cry Tough in her legendary state of undress—nothing by today’s standards, but shocking for a movie made in 1959 (in fact, I was so shocked I had to watch it four times over)—I was about declare defeat for the morning and break for lunch. That was when she walked in.

      She was a fox, all right, and she sashayed right through the door of my office. She was wrapped in fur and stunning, and my mouth dropped open at the sight of her. I wasn’t used to having foxes walk in on me like this.

      “Um…hi,” I said, stupidly. I say stupidly because I knew there was no way I was going to get a response from her, because she was a fox. A real fox. Four paws, reddish fur, big ears, pointy snout, and two squinty black eyes, which stared straight at me. And no, I don’t know for a fact that it was a female, but it was small and lithe, it looked like a vixen, and I did not particularly feel like examining its rear quarters to find proof for my theory.

      The fox was neither frightened nor frightening. She simply regarded me with dark-eyed curiosity, as though I was the out-of-place element in a slightly rundown office building on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, California, the heart of the San Fernando Valley. Then again, said a voice inside my head, a deep, raspy voice that I recognized as belonging to John Huston, this is Los Angeles where, in the right time and the right place, you’re liable to see anything.

      Ignoring John, I turned to the fox and asked, “You hungry?” I try to be a good host, even to forest animals. Never taking my eyes off the fox, just in case it suddenly turned feral, I got up and slowly went over to the kitchen corner, where I opened the tiny fridge and pulled out a carton of milk that I use for my coffee. Taking a plastic bowl down from a shelf, I poured a little into it and cautiously set it down on the floor, not far from the fox, who looked at it, then back at me, and then—I swear—appeared to shrug its shoulders and walk over to it. It stuck its tongue out and tried a bit, and apparently liked what it tasted, because it started lapping up the rest.

      What a remarkable creature, Clifton Webb’s voice said in my head, and I had to agree. You remember Clifton Webb, don’t you? Laura? Sitting Pretty?

      The fox had finished the bowl and I was contemplating giving it seconds when I heard footsteps coming down the hall. A man appeared in the doorway; he was middle-aged but dressed like Jungle Jim, as though he was on his way to a costume party…or wanted people to know he handled animals. “Hey, buddy,” he said, “this is kind of unusual, but by any chance have you seen—”

      Then he spotted the fox. “There you are!” he cried, rushing to it, and picking it up like a small dog. Glancing at the empty bowl, he then looked up and glared up at me. “Did you give her something to eat?” he demanded.

      “Just a little milk.”

      “Oh, Christ! Don’t you know that milk gives foxes diarrhea?”

      I had never really thought about it one way or the other. “Sorry,” I muttered.

      “She’s on a restricted diet!”

      Like every other vixen in town, a cynical voice said in my head. Thank you, Richard Burton.

      “It was only two percent milk,” I told the guy.

      “Doesn’t matter, milk is milk!”

      “Okay, all right, I’m sorry,” I said. “But if you don’t mind my asking, what’s the thing doing here in the first place?”

      “We’re doing a photo shoot downstairs,” Jungle Jim replied. “She’s in the shot. Dammit, if you made her sick, I’ll file suit!”

      I doubted he had any legal ground on which to base a suit. Then again, this was L.A. “If you think she’s going to become diarrheic,” I said, “I’d appreciate