The Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes

by David Handler

  Joey and Danielle remained secluded inside the house with Reggie and Maritza. The others who’d been there at the time of the shooting had been questioned and allowed to leave—although we’d all been advised that further questioning would likely take place on Monday, which was the LAPD’s tactful way of saying don’t leave town.

  “What do you think Monette will be charged with?” I asked Lamp.

  “That’s for the DA to decide, but I’d say manslaughter,” he replied, sucking on an ice cube. “She’ll plead self-defense and I’m guessing she’ll be found innocent. The victim did beat her up pretty badly. But an acquittal’s not a slam dunk. The DA can build something out of her firing that second round of shots into his chest. She could have stopped after she wounded him with the first two. The man was down. A plausible case can be made that he was no longer a physical threat to her.”

  “A plausible case can also be made that she was bleeding profusely and terrified for her life.”

  “Which is exactly what her lawyer will say. Hoagy, how much time elapsed between those two sets of shots?”

  I tugged at my ear, mulling it over. I’d been swimming laps when I heard the first two shots. I had enough time to swim to the edge of the pool, get out, grab a towel and make my way to the patio before I heard the second set of shots. “I’d guess two minutes at least. It could have been three.”

  “And have we spoken to everyone?”

  “What do you mean by everyone?”

  “Is there anybody else who might have been on the grounds at the time of the shooting? Anybody we don’t know about?”

  “There’s Hector, the gardener. He’s been spying on the place for Patrick. In return, Patrick gave him the Rolex Submariner that Monette told me Patrick was tossing the bedroom for when she encountered him. Patrick was so heavy into drugs that he forgot he gave it to Hector, apparently.”

  “Back up one second, please.” Lamp jotted this down in his small notepad. “Spying on the place as in . . . ?”

  “Letting Patrick know if Monette was taking up with another man. Also keeping an eye on Maritza for him. Patrick had the hots for her. So does Hector.”

  “She involved with either of them?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “Was Hector around the property today?”

  “Patrick asked Maritza that very same question. She told him no.”

  “Did you believe her? Are we sure he wasn’t there?”

  “Lieutenant, I’m not sure of anything.” I sampled some of Chuy’s salsa with a tortilla chip, munching on it. “If Hector entered the property today by the service gate, the paparazzi out front would have seen him, wouldn’t they?”

  “Maybe not. People don’t notice what they’re not looking for, in my experience.”

  “There’s also a pool man. I saw him come in through the service gate early yesterday morning. I don’t know if he showed up today.”

  “He and Hector must know the access code to the security system. I’ll contact the home security company. They can tell me if the service gate keypad was used today.”

  “They can do that?”

  He nodded. “The newest keypads have a memory. And, believe me, the system at that place is as up-to-date as they come.” He glanced through his notepad for a moment before he sampled some salsa himself. “Tell me about Lou Riggio, the victim’s trainer or assistant or whatever the holy heck he is.”

  “Enabler is more like it. Lou totes around a blue nylon ditty bag stocked with Patrick’s coke supply. As soon as he learned that Patrick was dead and your people were en route he disappeared downstairs. I guarantee you he was hiding that bag in his GTO. If you’d searched his car, you would have found it.”

  “We had no probable cause to search his car,” Lamp countered with a shake of his head. “That’s why Lou put it there. The man knows the ins and outs. He moves a lot of coke and pot on the Radford lot. Our narcotics people have him in their sights. They’ve just been waiting to land on him hard enough that he’ll be forced to give up his supplier—or spend the rest of the nineties in San Quentin.”

  I signaled our waiter for another beer. “Does Lou have priors?”

  “A pair of assault and battery charges back when he played at Troy State. He beat up some frat boy in a bar after a game one night and urinated on him. A year later he went off on a clerk at a 7-Eleven and put him in the hospital with a ruptured spleen. Got off with community service both times since he was a great big football hero.” Lamp paused, leafing through his notepad. “Elliot Schein claims he saw Lou and Patrick snorting coke together shortly before Monette encountered Patrick in the master bedroom.”

  “I did, too. Your medical examiner will find coke galore in Patrick’s system. I’m guessing you can also throw in a designer cocktail of anabolic steroids and speed, not to mention a whole lot of Cuervo Gold. He arrived for the party shit-faced. Patrick’s nice-guy image was a sham. The real Patrick Van Pelt was a drugged-out rage monster. Extremely volatile. He was also not my idea of reputable.”

  “Can you give me a for instance?”

  “I can, but this isn’t for the media. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  “Patrick informed me that he had a vasectomy three years ago. Your medical examiner will no doubt confirm that.”

  Lamp looked across the table at me in surprise. “You’re telling me he isn’t the father of Kat Zachry’s baby?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Who is the father?”

  “He said it could have been any of a dozen guys. He didn’t know and didn’t care. He was just trying to stampede Monette into a more lucrative divorce settlement.”

  “I see . . .” Lamp frowned. “And Kat was, what, just playing along for the hell of it?”

  “She’s an actress who wants the media’s attention and doesn’t care how she gets it. Out here they call that star quality.”

  “That half-brother of hers, Kyle Cook, has a sheet up in Paso Robles.”

  “I know.”

  “Did you know that Elliot Schein has a sheet, too?”

  “That I didn’t know. Do tell.”

  “He served eighteen months in Rahway, New Jersey, for aggravated assault in 1965 back when he was a struggling talent manager. It seems he tried to strangle an old-time borscht belt comic named Sam Fingerhut to death over cheesecake and coffee at a diner in Paramus, New Jersey.”

  “Things like that are liable to happen if you go to Paramus. That’s why you’ll never find me there. Interesting that you should mention New Jersey.”

  Lamp peered at me curiously. “Why is that?”

  “Because both of the letters that Monette and Reggie received from their long-lost father, Richard, originated from there. First Edison, then Trenton.”

  “I loved his book when I was a kid,” Lamp recalled fondly. “Heck, I must have read it a half-dozen times.”

  “As did I, Lieutenant.”

  “May I ask how you got involved in Monette Aintree’s project?”

  “Richard asked for me, by name.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  Our waiter brought me my second Dos Equis.

  I took a sip. “All sorts of reasons. For starters, I have tremendous literary cachet. That and thirty-five cents will buy you a cup of coffee. Alberta Pryce, his literary agent from way back when, happens to be my literary agent. I also have a preexisting family connection. Reggie and I used to be an item.”

  Lamp’s eyes twinkled at me. “Regina Aintree is a very attractive little package.”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “Was this before you met Miss Nash?”

  “Long before.”

  He peered at me. “All sorts of reasons, you said. Are there any others?”

  “Yes, there’s one more.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s personal.”

  “To do with Regina?”

  “Like I said, it’s personal.”

  Lamp’s eyes narrowed slightly.
“I understand she’s been living in New Paltz, New York. Did you fly out here together?”

  “No. I did visit her up there before I left, but she told me she didn’t want to have anything to do with the project.”

  “What changed her mind?”

  “She got a letter from him herself. Decided to fly out yesterday.”

  “What airline did she fly?”

  “I have no idea, sorry.”

  “That’s okay. I can check it out.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “It’s what I do, Hoagy. I check things out.”

  Our chiles rellenos arrived on giant plates surrounded by rice and refried beans and accompanied by a basket of warm, soft corn tortillas. We dove in. The food at Chuy’s was even more delicious than I remembered.

  “Reggie and Monette have a complicated, acrimonious history,” I said as I ate. “Hadn’t seen each other for twenty years. Reggie had never even met Joey and Danielle.”

  “Joey’s had some problems,” he informed me, reaching for a tortilla. “He set a couple of fires back when he was twelve. One was in the boys’ room at his school. The other in a Dumpster out behind Vicente Foods.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me a bit. He’s an angry loner. Guys like us tend to act out at that age.”

  Lamp’s eyes widened. “Don’t tell me that you . . .”

  “I didn’t set fires. Shoplifting was my thing. Candy bars, comic books, magazines. You name it, I stole it.”

  “Ever get caught?”

  “Never. I was a master thief. To this day part of me still thinks I should have chosen a life of crime. Stealing was a hell of a lot more fun than writing. I take it Joey did get caught.”

  Lamp nodded his head. “His parents agreed to put him in counseling, and he hasn’t been in any trouble since then. Talk to me about Boyd Samuels. You’ve crossed paths with him before, haven’t you? I seem to recall reading about it.”

  “I have. You did. He’s a major-league scam artist. Don’t believe a single word he tells you.”

  “And yet you’re back in business with him.”

  “Couldn’t be avoided. You can’t work in publishing anymore without scraping people like Boyd off the bottom of your shoe. Do you mind if we don’t talk about him anymore? I was enjoying my dinner.”

  “No problem.” Lamp worked on his own dinner, leafing through his notepad. “Lou Riggio is claiming that he, Kyle Cook and this actress friend of Kat’s, Trish Brainard, were in the billiard room together when the shooting happened.”

  I nodded. “Having themselves a real good time on the Eartha Kitt sofa.”

  “Sorry, the Eartha Kitt . . . ?”

  “The leopard-skin divan. Your crime scene technicians will find semen stains on it. Lulu certainly did.”

  Lamp made a note of this, crinkling his nose. “Trish has a SAG card. A couple of bit roles in TV shows here and there including Malibu High, which is how she came to be acquainted with Kat. She’s twenty-two, comes from Yorba Linda. No priors, but no regular source of income either. Shares an apartment on Zelzah Avenue in Northridge with another young actress named Lila Lunt who has a slew of credits in films with titles like Splendor in the Ass and Babette’s Feet. But we couldn’t find any porn credits for Trish. What’s her deal?”

  “Nothing very out of the ordinary. Kat and Kyle paid her to be at that party—which is to say Kat paid her since Kyle has no actual job. Trish was Joey’s seventeenth-birthday present. They introduced her to everyone as their cousin from back home. Cute touch, don’t you think? Gave it a quaintly Petticoat Junction feel.”

  “You’re telling me they hired Trish to have sex with that kid?”

  “I am. As soon as Joey made it clear that he wasn’t interested, Kyle and Lou decided to help themselves. Trish’s time—and body—had been paid for, after all. Don’t expect me to sit here in judgment of her, Lieutenant, because I won’t. Young actresses like Trish are expected to perform sexual favors for powerful men at parties for free. That’s how they get jobs. Or, to put it another way, if they don’t perform favors they don’t get jobs. So if Trish can get paid for it, why not?” I said as Lamp looked across the table at me in total dismay. “I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, am I? Granted, you look like someone who climbs into bed at night with a plate of Fig Newtons and a glass of warm milk. But you do know how the business works, don’t you?”

  “I know how it works,” he said with quiet disapproval. “I’m the one who has to clean up the wreckage, and if you ask me, it stinks the way men in that business take advantage of vulnerable young girls.”

  “I knew there was a reason I liked you, Lieutenant.”

  Our waiter came and cleared our plates away. The Saturday night crowd had started to arrive. The place was filling up fast. We ordered coffee.

  “You went into the master bedroom suite after the shooting, correct?”

  I nodded. “Monette was still standing there holding the gun.”

  “What did she say to you?”

  “That she’d come upstairs to powder her nose, which is Miss Porter’s speak for pee, and found Patrick flinging drawers open like a crazy man in search of his Rolex Submariner. She reminded him that he’d given it to Hector. He accused Hector of stealing it. She accused Patrick of being a drunken mess as well as an all-around disgrace of a human being. He attacked her. She grabbed her Beretta from the nightstand and fired off two shots, wounding him. She carries a Beretta in the glove compartment of her Land Cruiser, too, by the way.”

  “She has permits for both weapons. An extremely high percentage of the wealthy people in this city are armed. And then . . . ?”

  “They exchanged more ugly words. And she shot him again. Fatally this time.”

  Our coffee arrived. I sipped mine as Lamp leafed through his notepad.

  “You were in the pool when you heard the first shots. Where were the others?”

  “Elliot was on the patio tending to the steaks on the grill. When he and I got upstairs we found Reggie and Danielle cowering in the hallway. They said they’d been in their rooms changing out of their wet bathing suits when they heard the shots. Joey was holed up in his room with his headphones on. Didn’t hear a thing, he claims. You already know about Lou, Kyle and Trish.”

  “What about the housekeeper, Maritza?”

  “She told me she was in the kitchen,” I said, volunteering nothing more, such as that I’d seen no sign of her in the kitchen.

  “And how about Kat Zachry and Boyd Samuels?”

  “Boyd told me they were busy trying to break into the pool house.”

  “Why in the holy heck would they want to do that?”

  “They were trying to steal this old leather flight jacket that I’m wearing. Kat saw it on me yesterday and decided I should give it to her. I refused.”

  “Kat claims that she and Samuels had taken a stroll to discuss a book project.”

  “Which is true, very loosely speaking. She offered Boyd a chance to peddle a tell-all book for her if he agreed to help her steal my jacket.”

  “Tell me about your book, Hoagy. Is there any connection between the Richard Aintree project and what happened at the house on Rockingham Avenue today? Or is that a stupid question?”

  “It’s not a stupid question. I’ve asked it myself several times. I do know that Patrick was against the idea. He told me so yesterday. He wanted Monette focused on their divorce, period. I also know that someone tried to scare me away the moment I got to town. There was a note from Patrick typed on Malibu High stationery waiting for me when I arrived. He asked me to meet him at a location shoot in Pacoima. When I got there the place was deserted—until someone in a black Trans Am pulled into the parking lot, floored it and tried to run me and my short-legged partner over.”

  “Is that how you got that scrape on your cheek?”

  “It is.”

  “Do you still have the note?”

  I pulled the folded note from my jacket pocket and han
ded it to him. “Patrick swore to me up, down and sideways that he didn’t write it.”

  Lamp glanced at it before he tucked it into the breast pocket of his jacket. “Did you believe him?”

  “Wait, there’s more. Monette told me that the night before I got here someone tried to run her off Coldwater up near Mulholland. Guess what he was driving? A black Trans Am.”

  “Did she report it?”

  I shook my head. “She was afraid of the negative publicity.”

  “Well, I can sure find out if anyone associated with this case drives a black Trans Am. You never know where a little piece of information like that might lead us.”

  “But you’re already there, aren’t you, Lieutenant?”

  Lamp sipped his coffee. “I don’t know what you mean, Hoagy.”

  “Monette has already confessed. I found her with the murder weapon in her hand, blood streaming from her nose and bloody gouges up and down her arms. It seems like an open-and-shut case.”

  “Not to me it doesn’t,” Lamp said with a shake of his head. “It’s too organized. I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer but I know an organized homicide when I see one. Domestic violence, in my experience, is always highly disorganized. This isn’t. It’s tied up nice and neat. The whole scene feels staged to me. I’m not buying it. I’m especially not buying that two- or three-minute time lapse between shots. Something happened during those two or three minutes. Something besides her standing there exchanging choice words with the victim. Nope, I’m not buying it. And you aren’t either, Hoagy.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because you are the sharpest knife in the drawer. So let’s not kid ourselves. We both know that Monette Aintree’s version of what happened in that bedroom today isn’t what really happened. Do you know what did?”

  “No, I genuinely don’t.”

  “Okay, then what do you know that you’re not telling me?”

  “What makes you think that I know something, Lieutenant?”

  His alert blue eyes locked onto mine. “Because I know you.”

  I weighed my answer carefully. There was plenty that was bothering me. Maritza bothered me. She’d changed into a different uniform by the time she came upstairs after the shooting and had lied to me about the door to the service stairs being locked. Why? Joey bothered me. He’d changed clothes, too. Yet Lulu had still smelled gunshot residue on the boy’s sneakers. Why? I didn’t know. Until I did, I was keeping my mouth shut. But I couldn’t get up from the table without giving Lamp something. So I said, “Monette’s long-sleeved chambray shirt.”