The Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes

by David Handler

  Lamp sped up to within four car lengths of Lou, flashing his lights to no avail, and called in to report that he was in the midst of a high-speed pursuit of a gray 1965 GTO heading west on Sunset toward La Cienega. He provided the license plate number and the name of its driver in a crisp, clear voice. He was very cool under the circumstances. Professional. Emil Lamp was a professional.

  As we shot past Doheny into Beverly Hills and the huge billboards changed over to palm trees, I heard the distant sirens of the black-and-whites that were responding to Lamp’s call. Lou was still tearing along at seventy, Lamp remaining a steady four lengths behind him. The Beverly Hills Hotel loomed up ahead in the distance—and the big man was showing absolutely no interest in slowing down despite the oh-so-obvious peril that lay just beyond it.

  I felt my stomach muscles tighten. “Please tell me he’s going to slow down.”

  “He’s not going to slow down.”

  “He has to.”

  “He’s not going to.”

  “But he’s almost at North Whittier. This is no place to play.”

  “Playing? Who’s playing?”

  “Lieutenant, I have a terrible feeling that Lou’s going to find out for himself that everyone was right.”

  “Hoagy, what in the holy heck are you talking about?”

  Lou was closing in on the sharp right bend at North Whittier now, the one that had been made legendary by Jan Berry and Dean Torrence. I held my breath as he tore his way toward it going way too fast. And realized it way too late. He panicked. Tried to swerve left instead of right. Went into an out-of-control skid across the intersection and crashed head-on at full speed into a parked Mercedes on North Whittier.

  The crash was so loud that Lulu dove to the floor at my feet, shaking.

  The horn on Lou’s GTO started blaring. And kept right on blaring right up until both it and the Mercedes exploded into flames. Lamp pulled over to the side of the road a safe distance away and called it in. Then we sat there in stunned silence, Lulu continuing to shake. I reached down and stroked her.

  The big red trucks from the Beverly Hills Fire Department got there in a matter of moments to put out the flames. There was nothing left of Lou Riggio beyond his charred remains. Fortunately, there hadn’t been anyone in the Mercedes, which, it was later reported, belonged to a member of the writing staff of Married with Children who’d been having brunch at his agent’s house across the street at the time of the crash.

  In death, Lou Riggio achieved a level of pop cultural infamy that had eluded him in life. He’d been a decent but undistinguished lineman at Troy State, a body builder, personal trainer and low-level supplier of illegal drugs to various show business personalities. As near as the LAPD could determine, he’d also murdered Kyle Cook. But none of that was what made Lou famous enough that his name would still mean something to people twenty years in the future. No, on that bright, sunny Sunday morning on Sunset Boulevard, Lou Riggio achieved a rare and lasting place in American folklore not for what he did but for what he didn’t do.

  He didn’t come back from Dead Man’s Curve.

  “I don’t want to see Kyle’s body!” Kat hollered at Lamp as she sat there with a small cluster of advisers in the living room of her bungalow on Stanley Hills Drive in Laurel Canyon. “And don’t give me any of your cop bullshit about how I have to because I am really not in the mood right now!”

  “There’s a process here, Miss Zachry,” he pointed out politely. “It’s the law, and the law has to be followed.”

  “I don’t give a shit about your law! And I don’t want to talk about this anymore! Are you hearing me?”

  “Quite well. There’s nothing wrong with my ears.”

  Kat’s bungalow was a furnished rental by the look of it. The décor was early Ramada Inn. Patrick had told me that Kat was a total slob who left dirty clothes and dishes everywhere, yet when we’d fought our way through the mob of cameramen and reporters out front and made it inside, we found that the place was neat and tidy. I had zero doubt that it was someone other than Kat who’d done the tidying. My money was on the network’s publicist, a beleaguered-looking young woman with Baba Wawa hair whose name was Rhonda. Kat’s HWA agent, a pint-sized young ferret named Joey Bamber, was there. So was the executive producer of Malibu High, a tanned, pencil-thin woman in her forties named Marjorie Braman, who wore a denim shirt, tan suede pants and red cowboy boots. And so was Boyd Samuels, who stood over by a front window talking on his mobile phone.

  Lulu took a quick lap around the place, nose to the floor, before she settled by the front door with a wary look on her face. She doesn’t care for explosions. Never has.

  Kat hadn’t exactly seemed shocked or grief stricken. Her only response to the news that her half-brother had been strangled to death was petulant annoyance that Lamp was bothering her about it. She flat out didn’t seem to care. She hadn’t exactly been blown away by the sight of Patrick lying dead in a pool of blood on the bedroom floor at Aintree Manor either. If anything or anyone touched Kat Zachry I hadn’t seen it so far. I was beginning to wonder if she had a heart of stone. I was beginning to wonder a lot of things about her.

  She was nibbling on some limp-looking takeout fries from McDonald’s and sipping a Coke through a straw as she sat there on the sofa in her Magic Johnson jersey and gym shorts, her bare feet up on the coffee table. Considering that she was three months pregnant, my feeling was that she’d have been better off with a stack of golden brown buttermilk pancakes and a glass of milk, but don’t go by me. I’d been obsessing about buttermilk pancakes all morning, and being around two dead men in the past hour simply made me crave them even more. My stomach’s a bit funny that way.

  “You still haven’t given me a straight answer, Marjorie,” Kat said to her executive producer. Apparently, she was finished talking to Lamp about Kyle’s murder. “What happens now?”

  “What happens now,” Marjorie responded quietly, “is that Malibu High will go on hiatus for two weeks so that our writers can construct an off-ramp for Patrick that is tasteful and respectful. The network would like to see his death handled in as dignified a manner as possible.”

  Kat peered at her dubiously. “Like how?”

  “One idea they were spitballing this morning was that Chip Hinton decides to go surfing during a powerful storm even though the Coast Guard has advised everyone in Malibu to stay out of the water. But Chip wants to catch that one last big wave while he’s still young enough to ride it.”

  Kat continued to peer at her. “And . . . ?”

  “And he drowns. His body will be found washed up on the rocks.”

  “He was shot! You think our audience doesn’t fucking know that?”

  “Patrick was shot,” Marjorie countered, keeping her voice soft. She did not wish to rile her nineteen-year-old star. “The network doesn’t want Chip’s departure from Malibu High to draw any attention to what actually happened to Patrick on Rockingham Avenue. They’re quite firm about that, Kat.” She mustered a warm, supportive smile. “Don’t worry about this, okay? The writers will work morning, noon and night until they get it right. They’ll come up with something brilliant.”

  Lamp cleared his throat. “Miss Zachry . . . ?”

  Kat looked at him in surprise, as if she’d forgotten he was there. “What do you want now?”

  “The same thing I wanted before. I need for you to formally identify your brother’s body. It’s an official legal process. You have to do this.”

  Kat rolled her big brown eyes at him. “Do I have to do it today?”

  “No, tomorrow will be fine.”

  “Fine, whatever.” She chewed on another limp French fry. “Where is he?”

  “Right now he’s being transported to the county coroner’s office.”

  She stopped chewing. “You mean he’s, like, stuffed inside a big plastic bag? Ewww . . .”

  “I’ll have someone from the coroner’s office contact you in the morning. Is there anyone whom I should
be contacting up in Atascadero?”

  “Like who?”

  “Any other relatives?”

  “None that I want to talk to. They’ll just try to hit me up for money.”

  “Were you and Kyle close?” Lamp asked her.

  “Not really. We didn’t grow up in the same house together or anything like that. And he was six years older than me.”

  “Still, you must find this very upsetting.”

  Kat glared at him. “Dude, I’ll do what you want. I’ll identify him. I’ll see that he gets a proper burial. But don’t tell me how I must be feeling, okay? When I moved down here, he tagged along to keep an eye on me. Things were going kind of sour for him up there. He needed a change of scenery. When I got the Malibu High gig, I asked him to help me deal with stuff. Answer my fan mail, run errands. I needed the help and he was family. But once a screwup, always a screwup, right?”

  Lamp frowned at her. “I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”

  “If he didn’t feel like doing something, it didn’t get done, okay?”

  “Would you happen to know anything about a business relationship between Kyle and Lou Riggio?”

  “Business relationship?” Kat looked at him incredulously. “You’re kidding me, right? They were a couple of dum-dums.”

  “So Kyle never said anything to you about doing a job for Lou?”

  “What kind of a job?”

  “One that required Kyle to tail certain individuals in his Trans Am.”

  “I have no idea what that even means.”

  “How about drugs? Was Kyle dealing for Lou?”

  “Kat, I wouldn’t answer that if I were you,” her agent, Joey, interjected. “Not without a lawyer here.”

  “Right.” She crossed her arms in front of her chest. “What Joey just said.”

  Boyd’s mobile phone rang. He answered it and talked into it for a moment before gesturing wildly at me to follow him into an adjoining bedroom, which was as tidy and impersonally furnished as the living room. Lulu followed us in there. She’s very protective of me if I’m alone in a room with Boyd.

  “It’s Mr. Harmon Wright,” he informed me in a hushed, reverent voice. “He’s calling from London.”

  “What does he want from London?”

  “To find out what’s up with our Richard Aintree project.”

  “It’s been temporarily kicked to the curb due to a slight death in the family, in case Mr. Harmon Wright hasn’t noticed.”

  Boyd murmured something a bit more tactfully worded into the phone, then listened before he said to me, “He considers Patrick’s death a minor tabloid distraction.”

  “The minor tabloids may beg to differ.”

  “He still wants to know where things stand.”

  “We haven’t heard from Richard. Not since Reggie showed up here with the letter he sent her in New Paltz. We’re waiting for him to reach out again. He likes to use express mail. The U.S. Postal Service delivers that on Sunday. Maybe we’ll hear from him today.”

  “So you’d say the ball’s in his court?”

  “I would, although I try to avoid using that expression whenever possible.”

  Boyd reported into the phone and then listened, his eyes widening before he said to me, “Mr. Wright wants to know if there’s any possibility that it was Richard who shot Patrick.”

  “I don’t see how. The man’s not even on the same coast as far as we know.”

  “Wait, hold on . . .” Mr. Harmon Wright had more to say to him. Boyd listened, nodding, before he said to me, “He wishes to make it clear that he’s not happy with how this is unfolding. He expected more results from you.”

  “We’re getting plenty of results. They’re just not the ones we anticipated. But tell him I’ll be delighted to leave on the first plane for JFK if he wants to bring in someone else.”

  Boyd gulped at me. “Do you really, truly want me to tell Mr. Harmon Wright that?”

  “Boyd, I really, truly don’t care what you tell him.”

  “Mr. Wright, Hoagy said that he’d be happy to . . . Hello, Mr. Wright . . . ?” Boyd exhaled slowly. “He hung up on me. That’s not a good sign.” He went over to a front window and peered through the bamboo shade at the media mob that was gathered out on the street. “God, has this project turned to shit or what? I hate it when this happens.”

  “Do you?”

  He looked at me curiously. “What does that mean?”

  “It means that whenever I get involved with you, the body count suddenly starts to pile up faster than I can say Terence Trent D’Arby. It means I should have told Alberta that there was no way I was getting caught up in another one of your toxic scams. If it had been anyone but Alberta, I would have. I am telling you right now, Boyd. If I find out you’re mixed up in this, I will bury you.”

  “Hoagy, I had no idea anything like this would happen, I swear.”

  “Is that right? You sure zoomed in on Kat awfully damned fast.”

  “That wasn’t my idea. Mr. Harmon Wright ordered me to. He has high hopes for her. Keeps telling me how much she reminds him of a young Natalie Wood. And, between us, he is not unhappy that her sleazy brother is out of the picture.” Boyd glanced through the open doorway at Kat sitting there with Lamp and the others. “The police think Lou Riggio killed him?”

  “They do. Was Kyle dealing dope for him?”

  “How would I know?”

  I glared at him in response.

  He ducked his head, nodding. “Kyle wanted to make some money of his own so he wouldn’t have to keep sponging off Kat, so Lou put him to work dealing to the kids in the cast along with their assorted friends and hangers-on. They really like to party. Half of them are still wrecked when they show up for makeup in the morning—if they show up. The production’s a total mess. Over budget, late, the works. I’m hearing that the network wants to fire Marjorie Braman and bring in an old-time ball buster to restore order. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if they fire everyone in the cast, too. Everyone except for Kat, that is.”

  “And you’re saying Harmon Wright knows all about this?”

  “Of course. He told me to be his eyes and ears out here. Why, where are you going with this?”

  “Nowhere. Just making conversation.”

  “Amigo, you are never just making conversation.”

  Lamp was on his feet and coming across the living room toward us, pointing at his wristwatch. “I have to get going, Hoagy. You mind?”

  “Not at all,” I said, following him back toward the sofa.

  “Thank you for speaking with me at this difficult time,” Lamp said to Kat. “We’ll be in touch first thing tomorrow morning in regards to the formal identification. And I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Whatever,” Kat said with a dismissive wave of her hand.

  Lamp and I went out the front door with Lulu on our heels. The media mobsters descended on us at once, shouting questions:

  “Hey, Lieutenant, what’s the mood like in there?”

  “What’s she doing?”

  “What’s she wearing?”

  “Is she crying?”

  “What can you tell us?”

  “What’s she wearing?”

  “I have no statement to make at this time,” Lamp replied crisply.

  “Aw, come on. Give us a break . . .”

  “How about you, Hoagy?”

  “Yeah, give us a break, Hoagy. You’re one of us, remember?”

  Just when I thought this day couldn’t get any shittier. “I have no statement to make either,” I said.

  And then Lamp turned to me and said, “I suggest we amscray.”

  “Excellent idea. Hold on, did you just speak to me in pig latin?”

  He didn’t respond—in English or pig latin. Just started elbowing his way through the reporters and camera crews to his car. Lulu and I took off after him, Lulu baring her teeth and growling as we fought our way toward the Caprice and got in. Lamp started it up immediately and pulled awa
y from the mob.

  After he’d driven two blocks, he pulled over to the side of the road, shut off his engine and stared straight ahead in taut silence, his jaw muscles clenching and unclenching.

  “Care to talk about it, Lieutenant?”

  “Not really,” he said tightly.

  “Then would you care to listen?”

  “To what?”

  “What would you say if I told you that I know how you can get this whole case buttoned up in time to take Belinda out for a nice steak dinner tonight?”

  “I’d say that you’ve been smoking some of Lou Riggio’s weed. Besides, Belinda’s a vegetarian. She eats tofu. Tastes like wet Styrofoam.”

  “Does this mean you don’t want to hear what I have to say?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “You mentioned that you’ll be wanting blood and hair samples from each and every person who was at Joey’s birthday party. Each and every person who’s still alive, that is.”

  “We need to check everyone for fingernail gouges, too. So?”

  “So can you assemble them back at Aintree Manor this afternoon? Grab some technicians from the medical examiner’s office and take care of it there?”

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

  “Because I think it might prove to be very useful.”

  “Hoagy, have you been holding out on me?”

  “Not exactly. I’ve simply been working my side of the street while you work yours.”

  Lamp studied me long and hard from across the seat. “You know what happened, don’t you?”

  “I believe I may.”

  “But you’re not sure?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “You think you will be sure if I get everyone together at the house?”

  “Yes, I believe I will.”

  He stared straight out the window again. “Fine. Consider it done.”