“We’ll get some ice on that soon. But for now . . .” I took the bloody shirt into the bathroom and set it in one of the sinks, glancing at it for a moment and not liking what I was seeing. I brought Monette a towel. “Here, press this against it,” I said before I took a quick look around the suite. Monette’s immense walk-in closet was orderly and neat. Patrick hadn’t gone in there, apparently. The door that led to the service stairs was closed. Maritza had told me it was locked. I checked it and discovered it was unlocked—which might or might not mean something. I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything yet. “How many times did you shoot him?” I asked her as I heard the police sirens growing nearer.
“Twice,” she answered, holding the towel to her nose. “The first time, that is. I hit him in his shoulder and side, I believe. He fell back against the bed and slumped slowly to the floor. ‘You shot me, Queenie,’ he said, staring at me in utter disbelief. I said, ‘You’re damned right I did, you horrible bastard. Do you have any idea what kind of hell you’ve put me through? Do you even care?’ His response was to laugh at me. I thought he might apologize. Say something decent and human. Instead, he laughed and told me what a rotten bed partner I was. Went so far as to inform me that he’d had better sex with total strangers in the parking lot of Jerry’s. He wanted me to shoot him, I swear. So I did. Twice more, right in the chest. And I’m not the least bit sorry.”
“I’d advise you not to say anything more until Elliot can hire you an attorney. Just keep quiet when the police get here.”
“But I have nothing to hide.”
“Nonetheless, you’ll be better off if you keep quiet.”
She tilted her head at me curiously. “Why am I getting the impression that you’ve been through this sort of thing before?”
“Because I have. Take a seat in one of those armchairs by the fireplace. Keep holding that towel to your nose, okay?” I went back out into the corridor with Lulu, closing the door behind me.
Everyone was waiting out there expectantly. Everyone except for Kat and Boyd, who still hadn’t turned up. And Joey, whose bedroom door remained closed.
“What’s happened?” Danielle demanded tearfully, clutching Reggie’s hand tightly in her own.
“I’m sorry to say your father is dead. Your mother shot him.”
Maritza let out a gasp. Danielle and Reggie exchanged a look of utter horror.
“Is . . . Monette okay?” Reggie asked me, her voice faltering.
“She got beat up but she’s okay.”
“I don’t fucking believe this!” roared Lou, who picked up a glass vase filled with roses from a hall table and hurled it against the wall, sending shards of broken glass flying everywhere. “I’ll kill that bitch!”
“You’re not killing anyone,” I said to him. “Get a hold of yourself.”
“I want to see Mom,” Danielle said.
“I know you do, but that’s a crime scene in there. The police will want everyone to stay out.” I heard the LAPD sirens drawing nearer on Sunset. They’d just about reached the foot of Rockingham by the sound of them. “Elliot, she’s going to need a good criminal defense attorney.”
He nodded his frizzy head. “I’ll get her the best.”
Lulu was busy sniffing her way from the master suite directly to Joey’s closed door, the one that had the hand-lettered stay the fuck out sign taped to it. When she arrived there she sat, looking at me.
“Does Joey have any idea what’s happened?” I asked Danielle.
She let out a sob. “He always yells and screams at me if I bother him.”
I knocked on Joey’s door. When he didn’t answer I opened it and went in, Lulu darting in ahead of me as I shut it behind us. It was dark in there aside from his small desk lamp and the light coming from the screen of his Macintosh, where Joey was seated tapping away at the keyboard. He had his headphones on.
I thumped him on the shoulder.
He jumped, startled. “What do you want?” he demanded, removing his headphones.
I opened the wooden shutters over his windows, sending sunlight streaming into the darkened room. Joey blinked at me like the cave dweller he was. Or make that the cave dweller he wanted me to think he was. Because there was definitely something not right about Joey. He was wearing different clothes than he’d been wearing a half-hour ago out on the patio. Different flannel shirt, different T-shirt, newer, darker blue jeans. The cuffs of his flannel shirt looked damp. So did its collar and his long, stringy hair that tumbled over it.
Lulu went under the desk and sniffed at Joey’s beat-up black-and-white Chuck Taylor All Stars, snuffling and snorting.
“Your father’s dead, Joey. I’m sorry. Your mother shot him.”
“What are you talking about?” he cried out. “When?”
“Just now, in their bedroom. You didn’t hear the shots?”
He shook his head. “My headphones block out everything. That’s kind of the whole point.”
“Don’t you want to know if your mother’s okay?”
“I’m assuming she is or you would have said otherwise.”
“Fair point. Come with me, Joey. Your sister needs you.”
He gulped. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Be her big brother. Comfort her.”
“Okay. I can do that, I guess.”
Everyone was still standing out in the hallway. Except for Lou, who’d vanished. And Boyd and Kat, who still hadn’t appeared.
Danielle rushed to Joey and flung herself at him, sobbing. “Daddy’s dead, Joey! What are we going to do?”
The kid wasn’t exactly what I’d call a boa constrictor in the hugs department. He stood there stiffly, patting her gingerly on the back. They were quite a study in contrast. She was so golden, athletic and beautiful. He was so pale, pimply and gawky. It was hard to believe that they’d been produced by the same two humans.
“It’ll be okay . . . ,” he said as the police sirens pulled up outside the gate on Rockingham. Two cars, it sounded like. “Should we . . . go talk to Mom?”
“Hoagy said not to yet.”
“And God knows the Hoagster’s always right,” Boyd joked as he and Kat came up the stairs at long last. Boyd wore a cheerful grin on his face. Kat wore no expression at all on hers. Bored. She looked bored. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you folks. Why are you all up here? And what’s with the sirens?”
A buzzer went off in the kitchen. The police at the gate wanted in. Maritza went downstairs to buzz them in.
“Where have the two of you been?” I asked Boyd.
“Why, what’s going on?”
“Monette just shot and killed Patrick. Didn’t you hear the shots?”
“We thought they came from up in the hills. Somebody trying to take out a coyote or—or . . .” Boyd looked at me in disbelief. “Monette killed him? For real?”
“Doesn’t get more real,” I said as big Lou came charging back up the stairs. I didn’t bother to ask him where he’d been. I had a pretty good idea where.
“I have to phone Mr. Harmon Wright right away.” Boyd’s voice was heavy with dread. “He hates finding out this kind of news from CNN.”
I could hear the police cars pull up in the pea gravel turnaround outside. Car doors opened and closed. Footsteps approached the house. The doorbell rang. Maritza went to let them in.
Kat started toward the door of the master suite.
“You’d better stay out of there,” Elliot cautioned her.
She ignored him. She was Kat Zachry. Nobody told Kat Zachry what to do. She opened the door, took two steps inside and stopped, staring at the body of her lover dead on the floor.
I pulled her out of there, shutting the door. “You don’t want Danielle and Joey to see their father in that condition, do you?”
“I’ve never seen a dead person before,” she said to me, stunned.
“Did you care about him at all?” I asked her, hearing the husky voices of the cops downstairs. “Or was it strictly a career
move?”
She gazed up at me with those big, brown bedroom eyes of hers and said, “Fuck off.”
Then she found Kyle and stood there with him, glaring at me. He put an arm around her protectively. Trish stood next to them in her bikini with her red, splotchy neck and red scraped knees, possibly wondering why she hadn’t chosen to spend the afternoon scrubbing the stubborn mold from the grout between her bathroom tiles. It would have been a major improvement over this.
Two burly young cops in uniform came barging up the stairs and, from that moment on, the official process unfolded in its own painstaking, step-by-step way. One of them herded us downstairs and took down our basic identification and contact information while the other called in Patrick’s death and Monette’s injuries. The pair of cops who’d arrived in the second car remained outside in the driveway to make sure that none of the paparazzi jumped the wall and tried to get in the house. An EMT crew arrived soon to attend to Monette’s bloodied nose and arms. A pair of homicide detectives showed up soon after that. Then came two vans full of crime scene personnel—the technicians who would, just for starters, take a million and one Polaroid photos of Patrick’s body, Monette’s wounds, the murder weapon, the shell casings on the floor and the blood that was spattered everywhere. And then came the county medical examiner’s man to examine Patrick’s body and move it so that more Polaroids could be taken of the blood-soaked rug underneath him.
While all of this went on upstairs in the master suite, we waited downstairs to be questioned by the homicide detectives.
Danielle and Joey sat huddled close together in the conservatory with Reggie, who spoke to her grief-stricken niece and nephew in a soft, soothing voice. Maritza sat near them with her hands folded in her lap and a frightened look on her face as she watched the authorities clomp up and down the stairs.
Kat, Kyle and Trish sat together on one of the chintz sofas in the living room in impatient silence. Trish now wore her cropped sweatshirt over her bikini. Lou sat in an armchair by the fireplace sucking on a grape Tootsie Pop and perspiring like crazy. He was barely keeping it together. His breathing was rapid and shallow, and his massive hands were gripping the arms of the chair so tightly that I half-expected him to rip them from the body of the chair, let loose with a roar and go crashing out the nearest window.
Boyd and Elliot paced. The living room. The hallway. The dining room. Back to the living room. They’d made the calls they needed to make. Now all that was left was to ponder the dollars and cents ramifications of what had just happened. And pace.
Me, I grabbed Boyd by the back of his polo shirt and yanked him into the billiard room. “Where were you and Kat?” I asked him in a low, quiet voice. “And please don’t tell me you two were getting it on.”
“No way,” he protested. “She’s got a kid inside of her. What kind of a sleazy perv do you think I . . . ? Never mind, don’t answer that. We were out back behind the pool house, okay?”
“Doing what?”
“Climbing in through the window. Well, I was climbing in. Kat couldn’t risk it herself, being pregnant and all.”
“Why on earth were you climbing in my window?”
“She wanted to borrow your leather motorcycle jacket and—”
“Flight jacket.”
“And she told me you’d said it would be okay, but that you must have forgotten—because when we tried your door it was locked.”
“Did you honestly believe that bullshit story?”
Boyd’s eyes widened. “She was trying to steal it?”
“No, she’s not that dumb. She convinced you to do it.”
“Well, I didn’t. Couldn’t find the damned thing.”
“Of course you couldn’t. I hid it.” Tucked it safely away in one of the Roadmaster’s saddlebags. “What I can’t believe is she talked you into breaking and entering.”
“It was strictly business,” he said defensively. “She said if I helped her she’d let me represent her book.”
“Book? What book?”
“What difference does it make? We’ll cook something up. Kat’s money. And her upside is huge, or at least it was until an hour ago. Help me out here, amigo. You’re the one who knows everything there is to know about showbiz murders. Will this be good for her career or bad?”
At our feet Lulu let out a low growl.
“Why is she doing that?” he asked me.
“Because she knows that if you don’t get away from me right now I’m going to slug you.”
“All I meant was—”
“Far away.”
“Okay, okay . . .” He went back out into the hall and resumed his pacing.
I didn’t feel like talking to anyone else so I stayed in the billiard room and shot some pool. Lulu was planning to curl up on the Eartha Kitt sofa until she sniffed at it with a basset hound’s version of puritanical disdain and opted for a leather armchair instead. It wasn’t bad there in the clubby silence of the billiard room. The antique table was a beauty. The cue stick that I’d chosen from the rack on the wall was balanced just right. The balls went exactly where I wanted them to go. I found it comforting to listen to the timeless clink of ball against ball as the crime scene professionals tromped their way up and down the curving stairway, speaking in loud voices.
I didn’t hear the last of them arrive. Didn’t even know he was there until I saw him standing in the doorway of the billiard room watching me shoot pool with a boyish grin on his face. I knew him from the last time I’d been in town. Different star. Different murder.
Lieutenant Emil Lamp was the department’s go-to celebrity homicide ace. And as unlikely-looking an ace as I’d ever come across. He was a fresh-scrubbed, bright-eyed, eager little guy with neat blond hair, alert blue eyes and wholesome apple cheeks. He bore an eerie resemblance to Howdy Doody, to be perfectly honest. He wore a tan suit made out of something no-iron, a yellow button-down shirt, a striped tie and a pair of nubucks with red rubber soles. Lamp specialized in high-profile showbiz killings because he and his nubucks happened to be uncommonly good at not stepping on famous, sensitive toes. He was polite, tactful and way, way sharp.
“Cheese and crackers, Hoagy!” he exclaimed. “What in the holy heck are you doing here?”
“I was just asking myself that very same question, Lieutenant.”
He considered this for a moment before he said, “Shall we make it Chuy’s?”
“Chuy’s, by all means.”
Chapter Eight
Chuy’s was a little neighborhood place on Sawtelle and National where Chuy’s ancient mother made the soft corn tortillas by hand over an open hearth and served them to you fresh off the griddle—hot, fragrant and golden around the edges. It was a Saturday night but we got there at 5:30 so it wasn’t crowded yet. In another hour people would be lined up outside on the sidewalk, waiting for a table. Chuy’s didn’t take reservations.
Emil Lamp and I both ordered the chiles rellenos, which were the best I’ve ever had anywhere. I sipped a Dos Equis, feeling the comfortable weight of Lulu dozing on my left foot. Lamp had a Coke, sucking on the ice cubes as he sat across the table from me with a small notepad and a ballpoint pen at his elbow. The jacket of his suit was off, his shirtsleeves rolled up. He wore a bracelet of turquoise and silver on his right wrist. On his left a bulky digital watch with a black plastic band.
“It’s good to see you again, Hoagy,” he said brightly.
He was so chirpy that he made me feel tired and old. Mostly old. “Good to see you, too, Lieutenant.”
“How is Miss Nash?”
“Still circling Budapest, to the best of my knowledge.”
“What’s she doing there?”
“Shooting a film with Nick Nolte.”
“Oh, him.”
“And how is life treating you?”
“Super. Mom’s met a real nice fellow named Ron who teaches ceramics in Playa Del Ray. They’re having a blast together.”
“And you? Are you dating girls yet?”
“Hoagy, I’m not the innocent that you make me out to be.”
“So you’ve made it all the way to second base with some lucky girl?”
“I never kiss and tell.”
“So there has been kissing.”
He let out a laugh before his face fell and he said, “I sure wish we’d run into each other under happier circumstances.”
“As do I, Lieutenant.”
Monette Aintree had been arrested for the murder of her husband and taken downtown to be booked, fingerprinted and have her hands swabbed for gunshot residue. It being a Saturday, she couldn’t be arraigned until Monday morning, but in California they allow bail if a suspect’s arraignment appearance will be more than twenty-four hours away. Her criminal defense attorney, a high-priced Century City dick swinger whose name—I kid you not—was Seymour Glass, had secured her release for a $1 million bond. She’d been sprung by the time I left Aintree Manor to meet Lamp at Chuy’s, and she was currently at the Beverly Hills office of her personal physician, who’d met her there to examine her bloodied nose and arms and prescribe any medication she might need.
When I came riding out the front gate on the Roadmaster to meet Lamp, I discovered that the media mob had quadrupled in size. Now there were camera crews from all three network news operations out there, not to mention CNN, Entertainment Tonight and Inside Edition. There were newspaper reporters, wire service reporters, radio reporters. There were so many people out there that they filled the entire street, their cars and vans parked up and down Rockingham as far as the eye could see. News helicopters even circled overhead. Several additional cops were on duty to try to contain the madness but no one can do that when a Hollywood star has been murdered.
Elliot had made a brave, futile attempt at media damage control. The pudgy producer ventured outside the gate to read a brief statement, which was carried live on CNN, in which he called the shooting death of Patrick Van Pelt “a horrible family tragedy” but maintained that Monette had acted out of self-defense and that he was confident she would be exonerated. He asked that the media please allow the family to grieve in peace.
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