“Pizza?” I said. “What happened to haute and overpriced?”
“Wait till you see the bill.”
He carried the box into the kitchen, slit the tape with his fingernail, lifted the lid, removed a slice from the pie, and ate it standing at the counter. Then he pulled off a second wedge, handed it to me, got another one for himself, and sat at the table.
I looked at the slice in my hand. Molten desert of cheese, landscaped with mushrooms, onions, peppers, anchovies, sausage, and lots of things I couldn’t identify. “What is this—pineapple?”
“And mango. And Canadian bacon and bratwurst and chorizo. What you’ve got there, pal, is authentic Spring Street Pogo-Pogo pizza. The ultimate democratic cuisine—little bit of every ethnicity, a lesson in gastronomic democracy.”
He ate and spoke with his mouth full: “Little Indonesian guy sells it from a stand, near the Center. People line up.”
“People line up to pay parking fines too.”
“Suit yourself,” he said, and dug in again, holding one hand under the slice to catch dripping cheese.
I went to the cupboard, found a couple of paper plates, and put them on the table, along with napkins.
“Whoa, the good china!” He wiped his chin. “Drink?”
I took two cans of Coke from the fridge. “This okay?”
“If it’s cold.”
Finishing his second slice, he popped his can and drank.
I sat and took a bite of pizza. “Not bad.”
“Milo knows grub.” He guzzled more Coke. “Regarding your Ms. Dawn K. Herbert, no wants or warrants. Another virgin.”
He reached into his pocket, took out a piece of paper, and handed it to me. Typewritten on it was:
Dawn Kent Herbert, DOB 12/13/63, 5′5″,
170 lb., brown and brown. Mazda Miata.
Under that was an address on Lindblade Street, in Culver City.
I thanked him and asked him if he’d heard anything new on the Ashmore murder.
He shook his head. “It’s going down as your routine Hollywood mugging.”
“Right guy to mug. He was rich.” I described the house on North Whittier.
“Didn’t know research paid that well,” he said.
“It doesn’t. Ashmore must have had some sort of independent income. That would explain why the hospital hired him at a time when they’re getting rid of doctors and discouraging research grants. He probably brought some kind of endowment with him.”
“Paid his way in?”
“It happens.”
“Let me ask you this,” he said. “In terms of your Ashmore-getting-curious theory. Cassie’s been in and out of the hospital since she was born. Why would he wait until February to start snooping?”
“Good question,” I said. “Hold on for a sec.”
I went to the library and fetched the notes I’d taken on Cassie’s medical history. Milo had sat down at the table and I joined him, turning pages.
“Here we are,” I said. “February 10. Four days before Herbert pulled Chad’s chart. It was Cassie’s second hospitalization for stomach problems. The diagnosis was gastric distress of unknown origin, possible sepsis—the main symptom was bloody diarrhea. Which could have made Ashmore think of some specific kind of poisoning. Maybe his toxicology training overcame his apathy.”
“Not enough for him to talk to Stephanie.”
“True.”
“So maybe he looked and didn’t find anything.”
“Then why not return the chart?” I said.
“Sloppy housekeeping. Herbert was supposed to but didn’t. Knew she was leaving and didn’t give a damn about her paperwork.”
“When I see her I’ll ask her.”
“Yeah. Who knows, maybe she’ll give you a ride in her Miata.”
“Zoom zoom,” I said. “Anything new on Reginald Bottomley?”
“Not yet. Fordebrand—the Foothill guy—is on vacation, so I’ve got a call in to the guy who’s catching for him. Let’s hope he cooperates.”
He put the Coke down. Tension wounded his face and I thought I knew why. He was wondering if the other detective knew who he was. Would bother to return his call.
“Thanks,” I said. “For everything.”
“De nada.” He shook the can. Empty. Leaning on the counter with both elbows, he faced me.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
“You sound low. Beaten down.”
“Guess I am—all this theorizing and Cassie’s no safer.”
“Know what you mean,” he said. “Best thing’s to stay focused, not drift too far afield. It’s a risk on cases with bad solve-prospects—God knows I’ve had plenty of them. You feel powerless, start throwing wild punches and end up no wiser and a helluva lot older.”
He left shortly after that and I called Cassie’s hospital room. It was after nine and direct access to patients had been cut off. I identified myself to the hospital operator and was put through. Vicki answered.
“Hi, it’s Dr. Delaware.”
“Oh … what can I do for you?”
“How’s everything?”
“Fine.”
“Are you in Cassie’s room?”
“No—out here.”
“At the desk?”
“Yes.”
“How’s Cassie doing?”
“Fine.”
“Sleeping?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What about Cindy?”
“Her too.”
“Busy day for everyone, huh?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Has Dr. Eves been by recently?”
“Around eight—you want the exact time?”
“No, thanks. Anything new, in terms of the hypoglycemia?”
“You’d have to ask Dr. Eves that.”
“No new seizures?”
“Nope.”
“All right,” I said. “Tell Cindy I called. I’ll be by tomorrow.”
She hung up. Despite her hostility, I felt a strange—almost corrupt—sense of power. Because I knew about her unhappy past and she was unaware of it. Then I realized that what I knew put me no closer to the truth.
Far afield, Milo said.
I sat there, feeling the power diminish.
13
The next morning I woke up to clean spring light. I jogged a couple of miles, ignoring the pain in my knees and fixing my thoughts on the evening with Robin.
Afterward I showered, fed the fish, and read the paper while eating breakfast. Nothing more on the Ashmore homicide.
I called Information, trying to match a phone number to the address Milo had given me for Dawn Herbert. None was listed and neither of the two other Herberts residing in Culver City knew any Dawn.
I hung up, not sure it made much of a difference. Even if I located her, what explanation would I use to ask her about Chad’s file?
I decided to concentrate on the job I’d been trained to do. Dressing and clipping my hospital badge to my lapel, I left the house, turned east on Sunset, and headed for Hollywood.
I reached Beverly Hills within minutes and passed Whittier Drive without slowing. Something on the opposite side of the boulevard caught my eye:
White Cutlass, coming from the east. It turned onto Whittier and headed up the 900 block.
At the first break in the median, I hung a U. By the time I reached the big Georgian house, the Olds was parked in the same place I’d seen it yesterday and a black woman was stepping out on the driver’s side.
She was young—late twenties or early thirties—short and slim. She had on a gray cotton turtleneck, black ankle-length skirt, and black flats. In one hand was a Bullock’s bag; in the other, a brown leather purse.
Probably the housekeeper. Out doing a department store errand for Ashmore’s grieving widow.
As she turned toward the house she saw me. I smiled. She gave me a quizzical look and began walking over slowly, with a short, light step. As she got closer I saw she was very pretty, her skin so da
rk it was almost blue. Her face was round, bottomed by a square chin; her features clean and broad like those of a Nubian mask. Large, searching eyes focused straight at me.
“Hello. Are you from the hospital?” British accent, public-school refined.
“Yes,” I said, surprised, then realized she was looking at the badge on my lapel.
Her eyes blinked, then opened. Irises in two shades of brown—mahogany in the center, walnut rims.
Pink at the periphery. She’d been crying. Her mouth quivered a bit.
“It’s very kind of you to come,” she said.
“Alex Delaware,” I said, extending my hand out the driver’s window. She put the shopping bag on the grass and took it. Her hand was narrow and dry and very cold.
“Anna Ashmore. I didn’t expect anyone so soon.”
Feeling stupid about my assumptions, I said, “I didn’t know Dr. Ashmore personally, but I did want to pay my respects.”
She let her hand drop. Somewhere in the distance a lawn mower belched. “There’s no formal service. My husband wasn’t religious.” She turned toward the big house. “Would you like to come in?”
The entry hall was two stories of cream plaster floored with black marble. A beautiful brass banister and marble stairs twisted upward to the second story. To the right, a large yellow dining room gleamed with dark, fluid Art Nouveau furniture that the real housekeeper was polishing. Art filled the wall behind the stairs, too—a mix of contemporary paintings and African batiks. Past the staircase, a short foyer led to glass doors that framed a California postcard: green lawn, blue pool sun-splashed silver, white cabanas behind a trellised colonnade, hedges and flower beds under the fluctuating shade of more specimen trees. Scrambling over the tiles of the cabana roof was a splash of scarlet—the bougainvillea I’d seen from the street.
The maid came out of the dining room and took Mrs. Ashmore’s bag. Anna Ashmore thanked her, then pointed left, to a living room twice the size of the dining room, sunk two steps down.
“Please,” she said, descending, and flipping a switch that ignited several floor lamps.
A black grand piano claimed one corner. The east wall was mostly tall, shuttered windows that let in knife-blades of light. The floors were blond planks under black-and-rust Persian rugs. A coffered white ceiling hovered over apricot plaster walls. More art: the same mix of oils and fabric. I thought I spotted a Hockney over the granite mantel.
The room was chilly and filled with furniture that looked straight out of the Design Center. White Italian suede sofas, a black Breuer chair, big, pockmarked post-Neanderthal stone tables, and a few smaller ones fashioned of convoluted brass rods and topped with blue-tinted glass. One of the stone tables fronted the largest of the sofas. Centered on it was a rosewood bowl filled with apples and oranges.
Mrs. Ashmore said, “Please,” again, and I sat down directly behind the fruit.
“Can I offer you something to drink?”
“No, thank you.”
She settled directly in front of me, straight and silent.
In the time it had taken to walk from the entry, her eyes had filled with tears.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.
She wiped her eyes with a finger and sat even straighter. “Thank you for coming.”
Silence filled the room and made it seem even colder. She wiped her eyes again and laced her fingers.
I said, “You have a beautiful home.”
She lifted her hands and made a helpless gesture. “I don’t know what I’ll do with it.”
“Have you lived here long?”
“Just one year. Larry owned it long before that, but we never lived in it together. When we came to California, Larry said this should be our place.”
She shrugged, raised her hands again, and let them drop back to her knees.
“Too big, it’s really ridiculous.… We talked about selling it.…” Shaking her head. “Please—have something.”
I took an apple from the bowl and nibbled. Watching me eat seemed to comfort her.
“Where did you move from?” I said.
“New York.”
“Had Dr. Ashmore ever lived in Los Angeles before?”
“No, but he’d been here on buying trips—he had many houses. All over the country. That was his … thing.”
“Buying real estate?”
“Buying and selling. Investing. He even had a house in France for a short while. Very old—a château. A duke bought it and told everyone it had been in his family for hundreds of years. Larry laughed at that—he hated pretentiousness. But he did love the buying and selling. The freedom it brought him.”
I understood that, having achieved some financial independence myself by riding the land boom of the mid-seventies. But I’d operated on a far less exalted level.
“Upstairs,” she said, “is all empty.”
“Do you live here by yourself?”
“Yes. No children. Please—have an orange. They’re from the tree in back, quite easy to peel.”
I picked up an orange, removed its rind, and ate a segment. The sound of my jaws working seemed deafening.
“Larry and I don’t know many people,” she said, reverting to the present-tense denial of the brand-new mourner.
Remembering her remark about my arriving earlier than expected, I said, “Is someone from the hospital coming out?”
She nodded. “With the gift—the certificate of the donation to UNICEF. They’re having it framed. A man called yesterday, checking to see if that was all right—giving to UNICEF.”
“A man named Plumb?”
“No … I don’t believe so. A long name—something German.”
“Huenengarth?”
“Yes, that’s it. He was very nice, said kind things about Larry.”
Her gaze shifted, distractedly, to the ceiling. “Are you certain I can’t get you something to drink?”
“Water would be fine.”
She nodded and rose. “If we’re lucky, the Sparkletts man has come. Beverly Hills water is disagreeable. The minerals. Larry and I don’t drink it.”
While she was gone, I got up and inspected the paintings. Hockney verified. Watercolor still life in a Plexiglas box frame. Next to that, a small abstract canvas that turned out to be a De Kooning. A Jasper Johns word salad, a Jim Dine bathrobe study, a Picasso satyr-and-nymph gambol in China ink. Lots of others I couldn’t identify, interspersed with the earth-toned batiks. The wax pressings were tribal scenes and geometric designs that could have been talismans.
She returned with an empty glass, a bottle of Perrier, and a folded linen napkin on an oval lacquer tray. “I’m sorry, there’s no spring water. I trust this will be acceptable.”
“Of course. Thank you.”
She poured the water for me and took her seat again.
“Lovely art,” I said.
“Larry bought it in New York, when he worked at Sloan-Kettering.”
“The cancer institute?”
“Yes. We were there for four years. Larry was very interested in cancer—the rise in frequency. Patterns. How the world was being poisoned. He worried about the world.”
She closed her eyes again.
“Did the two of you meet there?”
“No. We met in my country—the Sudan. I’m from a village in the South. My father was the head of our community. I was schooled in Kenya and England because the big universities in Khartoum and Omdurman are Islamic and my family was Christian. The South is Christian and animist—do you know what that is?”
“Ancient tribal religions?”
“Yes. Primitive, but very enduring. The northerners resent that—the endurance. Everyone was supposed to embrace Islam. A hundred years ago they sold the southerners as slaves; now they try to enslave us with religion.”
Her hands tightened. The rest of her remained unchanged.
“Was Dr. Ashmore doing research in the Sudan?”
She nodded. “With the U.N. Studying disease pa
tterns—that’s why Mr. Huenengarth felt the donation to UNICEF would be an appropriate tribute.”
“Disease patterns,” I said. “Epidemiology?”
She nodded. “His training was in toxicology and environmental medicine, but he did that only briefly. Mathematics was his true love, and with epidemiology he could combine mathematics with medicine. In the Sudan he studied the pace of bacterial contagion from village to village. My father admired his work and assigned me to help him take blood from the children—I’d just finished my nursing degree in Nairobi and had returned home.” She smiled. “I became the needle lady—Larry didn’t like hurting the children. We became friends. Then the Muslims came. My father was killed—my entire family.… Larry took me with him on the U.N. plane, to New York City.”
She recounted the tragedy matter-of-factly, as if numbed by repeated insults. I wondered if exposure to suffering would help her deal with her husband’s murder when the pain hit full force, or would make matters worse.
She said, “The children of my village … were slaughtered when the northerners came. The U.N. did nothing, and Larry became angry and disillusioned with them. When we got to New York he wrote letters and tried to talk to bureaucrats. When they wouldn’t receive him, his anger grew and he turned inward. That’s when the buying started.”
“To deal with his anger?”
Hard nod. “Art became a kind of refuge for him, Dr. Delaware. He called it the highest place man could go. He would buy a new piece, hang it, stare at it for hours, and talk about the need to surround ourselves with things that couldn’t hurt us.”
She looked around the room and shook her head.
“Now I’m left with all of it, and most of it doesn’t mean much to me.” She shook her head again. “Pictures and the memory of his anger—he was an angry man. He even earned his money angrily.”
She saw my puzzled look. “Please excuse me—I’m drifting. What I’m referring to is the way he started. Playing blackjack, craps—other games of chance. Though I guess playing isn’t the right word. There was nothing playful about it—when he gambled he was in his own world, didn’t stop to eat or sleep.”
“Where did he gamble?”
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