by Thomas Perry
In fifteen minutes the three emerged from the front of the building and walked to a black Chevrolet Tahoe parked along the curb. Everything on the car that was usually chrome was black except for a border around the black grille and the inch-high TAHOE on the side. She started her engine and waited for them to get ahead and make the right turn onto Hollywood Boulevard.
The traffic everywhere was sluggish, and at times jammed. She could see that the crowds on the boulevard were still growing well after midnight. The men all seemed to be in black tonight. They wore dark pants with black jackets or T-shirts or pullovers, but the women tonight were wearing dresses, most of them light-colored and maybe too nice for the sweat and noise and press of the crowds. They made the men look like shadows passing among flowers.
The black Tahoe was doing just what Elle did, drifting in the right lane close to the sidewalk. Elle kept her passenger-side window open only three inches—just enough so she could hear the music, the yells from one person to another on the sidewalk, sometimes even make out a few words, but nobody could reach in and open the door. The club music sounded like a big machine that was pumping something through pipes beyond the open doorways. The noise didn’t begin or end, it just continued, the pounding rhythmic bass notes loud enough to thump and rumble.
She kept her eyes flicking from the street to the black Tahoe and back, trying to keep noticing everything. She kept watching for the Tahoe to do what cop cars did, to pull in front of the red curb at the corner, or even up over it, and leave the car there with lights blinking while the cops investigated their suspect or witness or doughnut. That would have confirmed that they were cops. But they kept driving, which confirmed nothing.
She dropped two cars back and then let another car in ahead of her so that the people in the Tahoe wouldn’t get interested in her. There were no floodlights on the Tahoe that she had seen; there was no sign of a computer or radio equipment, no extra hardware near the dashboard, no steel reinforcement on the front bumper.
She followed the Tahoe until it turned off Hollywood at Highland Avenue. She pulled out of line to go after it, but a nearby testosterone overproducer had seen the maneuver, tried to imitate it, and nearly hit her car. The driver leaned on his horn to punish her while she pulled the rest of the way out and moved off, but she had taken her eyes off the Tahoe and it was gone.
She turned right and sped up, weaving through the traffic and then straddling the double yellow line in the center for a block. At each intersection she glanced in both directions to scan for the Tahoe. She ran a red light at De Longpre Avenue, then tried it again at Fountain and narrowly missed a white pickup truck, but made it through and kept going.
The Tahoe was visible ahead of her now and just turning right. It kept going west until La Cienega Boulevard and then turned south again. The upper end of La Cienega was lined with restaurants that were mostly closing down at this hour, so the traffic was steady but not heavy. She pulled into the right lane behind a Mustang with black matte paint and dark tinted glass, but after a couple of blocks she realized the Mustang was too fast and was about to overtake the Tahoe. She watched it pull ahead and pass, and then she moved into the left lane to fall in behind a truck. She dropped back a few extra feet to watch the empty right lane and the empty left turn lane so the Tahoe couldn’t make a turn without her noticing.
She was beginning to believe she knew the general area of their destination. La Cienega was the preferred route to Los Angeles International Airport when the San Diego Freeway wasn’t moving. She let the Tahoe have more of a lead and kept watching for turns.
If the people in the Tahoe were police homicide detectives, why would they be going way down there? Kavanagh’s house was up in Beverly Hills. Maybe the LAPD had been called in to help. There were also little pockets near Beverly Hills that were policed by the Sheriff’s Department. Maybe these three were sheriff’s detectives. Either way, they looked like cops and they acted like cops.
She drove past the zones of cheaper restaurants and windowless clubs, then the zones of car sales and repair, and then general manufacturing, and, finally, storage and shipping.
It was a surprise when the Tahoe turned to the right before the traffic sped up and got funneled into the approaches to the airport. The vehicle moved along the dark highway, then went into a driveway and up to a white, windowless single-story building about 150 feet long. It pulled around the back of the building out of sight.
Elle tapped her brake pedal, then admitted to herself that stopping would be insane, so she kept going, staring as she coasted past. Nothing was visible except pavement and white wall, but once she passed the building, her mirror reflected the headlights of the Tahoe as it parked at the end of a row of four identical Tahoes. That was all she saw before the next few buildings blocked her view.
If they were cops, they were a strange unit. They didn’t have what she would have called a station. It was like a depot or a warehouse.
She allowed herself to follow the signs to the airport, around the oval, out to Sepulveda Boulevard, and up to the northbound entrance to the San Diego Freeway. She made good time all the way up to the San Fernando Valley and then along the 101 Freeway to her hotel.
12
Elle woke in the afternoon and lay in the darkness that was preserved behind the opaque curtains. She reviewed everything that had happened before she had slept. It was two before she was ready to drive to Burbank Airport and change rental cars again. This time she selected a Nissan Altima that was approximately the color of a year-old L.A. pavement—charcoal gray with a thin coating of dust. She drove back to the hotel, gave it to the valets to park, and went upstairs to begin her research.
The three detectives—if that was what they were—had given away their place of business. That was a small bit of progress. She supposed they might have been searching for her to charge her with some simple burglary she had committed and forgotten, but most likely they were trying to find out what she knew about the triple murder. So far she knew nothing but what she had seen on the recording. That was a problem.
She had devoted much of her energy to staying out of danger but had taken no real precautions, and her efforts had led the killer to Sharon. Elle’s own stupid overconfidence would haunt her forever. It didn’t make her feel better to suspect that one of her other friends or acquaintances had probably sold out both of them.
This afternoon she felt clearheaded. Sharon and Peter had not been killed for anything having to do with them. They were killed because Elle had stumbled on the murders in Beverly Hills. That meant Sharon’s murder was not something that could be solved directly, because the motive and the killer were from the first murders. The best thing for Elle to do right now was not to run away and hide from the killer for a few months. It was to find out everything she could about the first killing, the murder of the three strangers, and make sure the killer got caught.
She had a laptop, but she didn’t have a printer with her, or a drive, so she decided to see if she could use the hotel’s equipment for the moment.
Elle went down to the hotel business center, where there were computers sitting idle in a quiet glass-walled room. She picked one and began to search for entries on the triple murder. She had read a bit about the three victims in the newspapers, so she decided to turn her attention to the two husbands. In her opinion they were the ones most likely to be feeling ill-used enough to shoot anybody. If they hadn’t known the kind of thing their wives were up to, that wouldn’t be true, but they were the place to start.
The husband of the blond woman, Anne Satterthwaite Mannon, came first. His name was David and he owned two restaurants that almost rhymed, Muzu and Bissou. She had read that before. To Elle one sounded like Japanese and one like French, but Google Translate said Bissou was a Maltese word but didn’t offer to translate it, and Muzu was a word that didn’t seem to mean anything in any language. Maybe they were both proper names. Or maybe they were worse, nicknames or pet names. They told her nothi
ng except that whoever had named them was being cute. She had no proof, but she suspected it was Anne.
Elle maintained her patience. She had never had much affection for rich, spoiled people, and these were prime examples. But they had already paid the highest price for everything they’d ever done.
She clicked to open the web page for the restaurants. On the Bissou page there were photographs of a dining room with rough stone walls, a fireplace that was itself the size of a small room, and a polished bar that was long and glossy enough to skate on. The caption said the stone came from the walls of a ruined monastery in Greece. The furniture was heavily polished wood—also from southern Europe—and the menu was full of dishes from the Mediterranean.
There were pictures of Anne the blonde in a black dress with a décolletage that seemed to run nearly to her navel. There was a large silver cross hanging from a chain and resting over her sternum. Beside her was a man with curly dark hair wearing a tuxedo and smiling so his perfect teeth, white as a bathtub, were on full display. Surrounding the pair were people who seemed to be more friends than customers. Elle thought she recognized a couple of television actresses. The men all looked rich and a bit older.
She studied the husband, David, closely, enlarging his image. He was handsome and looked good-natured. She asked herself if this could be the man who had shot his wife and two friends. She studied his face, but looking at him told her nothing. Men got jealous, flew into rages, and killed their wives. He could be another. She had not seen the face of the man on the tape, and this was the first time she’d seen David Mannon.
Elle left the site and tried to Google Anne Mannon. She scrolled past all the entries about the murder, which seemed to be versions of the same story she had already read. There was a Facebook page about her. Anne Satterthwaite had been born in Middlebury, Connecticut, in 1983. She was a member of the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Association. She had graduated in 2005 with a major in art history.
Elle was pretty sure she smelled two kinds of money—the kind parents got from their parents and the kind that ambitious young men brought home. The parents were both professors of ancient languages at Wesleyan University. That meant there were at least two generations of very expensive educations with no potential for producing real money. That was a sign that the Satterthwaites had some already. But the restaurants came from the hardworking young man.
Two pictures caught Elle’s eye—one of Anne at college age with very long blond hair and looking better than anyone else in the group shot, and the other of her at age thirty-four, looking the same except this time with a $600 haircut and some tasteful diamonds—no flashy settings, but big stones.
Then Elle fell into the rest of the cache of photographs—beautiful children, one male named Cole and one female named Phoebe. Elle’s heart was torn. The two kids were left without a mother. Everyone had looked so happy—the wife, the husband, the kids.
Elle pulled herself back and tried to forestall any judgments for the moment. Right now she was gathering information, and she would limit herself to that. She felt sorry for the children. She had grown up knowing she was the daughter of a woman who could never be of any help because she had died in a stupid way. She pressed print and began to pluck the pages out of the tray.
“Hi. I figured you’d be here.”
She spun her head to see the Canadian cowboy, Tim Marshall, a few feet behind her. “Hi, Tim.” Her eyes shot to the side as her hand kept picking up pages. “What brings a thespian cowpoke like you into this workshop of global commerce?”
“I was looking for you, and you happened to be in a place with glass walls, so you weren’t too hard to find.”
“I wasn’t expecting anybody to try.”
“Are you going back to New York?”
“What makes you think that?”
“You were printing. Whenever I see people at hotel computers that’s what they’re doing—printing boarding passes.”
“Not me,” she said. “Just some work.”
“Are you one of those people who don’t like to talk about their work?”
“Yes. Some of it is confidential and all of it is boring.” The printer stopped and she snatched the last three pages, slid them into her bag, pushed the door open, and held it. “You coming?”
“Sure.”
He followed her out and along the corridor toward the elevator. Elle went past it to the stairs and began to descend.
“There’s an elevator right here,” he said.
“I know.”
“Are you claustrophobic?” He followed her onto the steps.
She looked surprised. “You’ve seen me take the elevator to my room at least twice.”
“To your room, sure. That’s the twelfth floor. You didn’t have much choice. It’s too far to climb.”
“How do you know that’s my floor?”
“You were alone in the elevator when you went up to change yesterday. The lighted number above the elevator shows the floor.”
She squinted. “Not all women like quite so much close attention.”
“This is where we started,” he said. “You telling me not to look at you.”
“I think I just said you’d be happier if you spread your attention around. I still think that.”
“Now that you’ve got your business done, would you do me a favor?”
“Probably not,” she said. “What is it?”
“A little help and advice,” he said. “They—the producers—sent a messenger over here this morning to deliver some sides. You know what those are?”
“A couple of pages of dialogue they give you to read so you can demonstrate your acting ability. I guess you’re going to a casting session.”
“I’ve never done this before. Would you help me go through my lines?”
“How?”
“You read the part of the other actor and tell me when I sound like an idiot or look terrible.”
She noticed he’d found a pretty good way of manipulating a woman. There was nobody who would root for him like someone who had invested time and effort in him. She was busy, and she wasn’t looking for male attention, but maybe the best way was to help him and then move on quickly.
“Where?”
He said, “I don’t know. I didn’t see anybody else in the business center, and it seemed to be soundproof.”
“Okay. Let’s get started.”
They went back into the business center, found a small conference room with a table and eight chairs, and sat down.
Tim’s sides consisted of a scene from what seemed to be a detective drama. She said, “I thought they wanted you for a reality show.”
“They didn’t say why,” he said. “I figure there are about twenty actors who know how to act for every job, so I doubt they need me, but …” He shrugged.
She didn’t want to tell him the truth, that there were closer to twenty thousand qualified actors for every job. “Maybe they just want to hear your speaking voice.” She looked at the sheets. “You get the first line.”
His eyes rose. “Mrs. McCutcheon, I’m very sorry about your loss.”
“He was a good man,” Elle read. “He always treated me right. We weren’t rich, but that didn’t matter to me.”
“Do you have any idea who might have done this to him?”
“I can’t imagine. Everybody loved Jonathan.”
Tim said, “I heard that he had a fight downtown a couple of weeks ago with a man named Gerhardt. Did he say what the fight was about?”
The scene went on for two pages and ended with a revelation. Tim said, “The one person at the dinner with your husband who could have dropped the pistol into the milk pitcher was also the one who took the pitcher back into the kitchen—you.”
If this was typical of the scripts, Elle wasn’t optimistic about the longevity of the show. But the two pages had been typed according to the standard format she had seen during her brief time as a temp, so it seemed real enough.
They went over
the lines again. “Too fast,” she said. “Talk more slowly and evenly in the first part. You’re a cop. All business, with just a hint that you’re sympathetic and understand what she’s going through.” When he tried again she said, “You’re looser now, but don’t be too friendly with her.”
After four tries, she said, “I think you’ve got it.”
“Really?”
“Yes. If you want to do it one more time, I will. But you don’t want to get stale.”
He took back the sides. “Then thank you very much for your help. I’ll thank you again from the stage the night they give me the best actor award.”
“I’ll be sure not to miss it,” she said.
“Will you go to dinner with me?”
“I don’t go out much on work nights,” she said. “Too much to do.”
“You can’t make an exception?”
“I don’t get paid to make exceptions,” she said. “And I need to get paid. Sorry.”
“Have you ever eaten at the restaurant at the Getty Museum?”
She felt startled. Was he a museum rat too? “I haven’t been there in a few visits. I like it, but I’m tied up tonight. Thanks anyway. Have a good night.” She went to the elevator and retreated to her room. She had waited long enough to go look at the homes of the victims. The police would be finished with their examination, and now it was her turn.
She had left the R9 pistol in the safe in her closet because she didn’t want it lying around where the maids might see it. Now she took it out, checked the load, wiped it carefully to remove any prints, and put it and a spare magazine in the belly band. She selected the tools she would take with her from the kit she had in her suitcase. She chose only a few, and they were all light and compact: a pair of wire cutters and a length of thin, strong wire; her sharp, spring-assisted pocketknife; her ring of bump keys; a lockpick and a tension wrench; a lipstick-size touch-up can of auto spray paint. She inserted fresh batteries in her compact flashlight. She put everything in the fanny pack’s zippered pockets so she could find the tools in the dark and they wouldn’t jangle against one another if she ran. She packed three pairs of surgical gloves.