“Well, we’ve kinda been expecting it, Mad,” Holly said.
“And you do go up and back,” Wes said.
“Not this time,” I answered. And I told them about Honnett. All of it.
“Holy Moley.” Holly looked over at Wes and then back to me. “What about all that junk you always say to me? You always tell me, don’t jump in. You always say, leave a cooling-off period. You always say, take it slow. Oh, Maddie.”
“I know.” I put my hands up to my forehead. “I know. I was looking for something. I…”
“It’s a different thing, Hol,” Wes said. “You always jump into impetuous romantic things. That’s you. You’re the one who needs to cool down. But Madeline’s different. She is usually so sensible. She stays in her relationships too long. I mean, look at how long she’s been taking care of Arlo. Maybe she just needed to be spontaneous.”
As they sat there, talking about me, figuring me out, I wondered what I could say. In the light of day, how could I ever explain what happened? How, the night before, I’d succumbed to the moment, seduced by the luxurious idea of fate. I had a glimpse of myself as I was becoming, on the turning point of my next decade. And I was scared, okay.
“Look,” I said. “My birthday’s coming. I can’t waste any more time with Arlo. I mean, if I ever do discover what my needs are, he sure as hell isn’t the guy who can handle them.”
“Amen to that,” Holly said, sounding impressed.
“So, I’ve had enough. And maybe I got a little too crazy with it all. I felt so free. I stopped thinking about doing the right thing.”
“You are always putting everyone else’s needs before your own,” Wes said.
“I know you both will laugh at me, but I finally thought I could put my cynical old soul to sleep, for a minute there.” I looked from Wesley to Holly. “I mean, I cried last night. Now when have either of you seen me cry?”
“You must have been a wreck after the Arlo thing, and then that car accident thing,” Holly said.
“Yes, but it was okay, Hol. I needed to cry. I felt like I awoke something inside of me that I’ve been missing.”
“Like you awoke your inner child, Madeline.” Holly pro-claimed.
“Yes. Well.” I felt suddenly squirmy. “I was hoping to avoid mentioning that disgusting concept, but maybe so.”
Wesley fought back a smile. He was such a thoughtful soul.
Holly said, matter of fact, “You got in touch with your inner child and let her out. Amazing. But then Honnett was around, and who knew your inner child was starving for affection and had such amazingly poor impulse control?”
“Please. Don’t remind me.” I shivered.
“Well, so what’s everyone so glum about?” Wes asked. “Honnett’s not a terrible guy. I hope.”
I smiled at Wes. “It’s not that, Wesley. There’s more.”
They both looked at me.
“I should have been paying better attention to everyone else’s needs after all. I picked a hell of a night to start getting selfish.”
“Why?”
“Because Quita McBride was asking for help last night. Remember, Wes? At the Wetherbee house? She was going on about being scared, and she asked me to help her. And I said no. I thought she was nuts, which she may have been, but I said no, here’s some money.”
“Everyone asks you to help them, Maddie,” Holly said, dismissing it. “You can’t help everyone.”
“Well, she seemed fine at the party later,” Wes said, looking at me, worried. “Don’t you think she may have been overly dramatic, Mad?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know. Because even though I warned Honnett that Quita was scared and I warned him something might be going on with her, he did nothing to help. He said there was nothing the police could do.”
“So?” Holly looked worried too.
“So she fell down the stairs outside Buster Dubin’s house sometime in the middle of the night.”
“Oh no,” Holly said.
“She’s hurt?” Wes asked, upset.
“She’s dead, actually. She died. Quita McBride, who was begging me to let her stay here at my house. But I didn’t want her here. I thought she was nuts. I gave her a few dollars, and now she’s dead.”
“Maddie, this isn’t your fault. You can’t think that.” Holly reached for a Kleenex and blew her nose. I noticed a tear was wiped as well. “So this is what you were obsessing about when I came in. Oh no.”
I couldn’t get my head around it. I couldn’t. I had been sitting here most of the time since Honnett had left, trying to imagine that Quita McBride was no longer living.
“What happened?” Wes asked.
“Sometime, in the middle of the night, outside of Buster’s house, Quita McBride fell or was pushed down the front steps. No one knows which. Isn’t that horrible?”
“Bizarre and horrible,” Wes said.
“Honnett told me about it this morning, when they called him to go to the scene. There were no witnesses. The only one home at the time seems to have been Buster.”
I thought of Buster with the glint of fun in his eye. Whatever had happened, his life was going to be hell now. Everyone knew he and Quita had not been getting along well.
“You know she might have slipped,” Holly said. “She was drinking a lot. Maybe she slipped.”
“Maybe.” I shook my head. “But I really wish I had listened to her earlier, instead of telling her to go to the party and not to worry. I really wish I had listened.”
“Do they know what time it happened?”
I shook my head. “But I can pretty well guess where I was when she fell. I was pretty much involved with my inner child all last night and on into this morning.”
“Madeline.” Wesley called my name sharply. “Do you think this is somehow your fault, sweetie? Because it isn’t. She was a troubled woman, no doubt, but you tried to help Quita. You gave her good advice. You gave her money. You can’t take care of everyone. Don’t do this to yourself. And anyway, it could have been an accident.”
“It could, Maddie,” Holly said.
“It seems like an obscene coincidence, I know,” Wes said. “But coincidences happen.”
I looked at him sadly.
I knew in my heart that my dear friends meant well. I knew they were worried about me. Anyone could see that I’d had quite an emotional day and night. But I was sure there was more I could do. I had to do it really. Because I was convinced that the death of Quita McBride was tied to the mah-jongg set that had been found and then stolen. Or tied to the missing red book she had wanted so badly.
I was sure whatever had frightened her there at the Wetherbee house was tied to it. Maybe, even, the death of old Dickey McBride was part of what happened to Quita. Perhaps, I was afraid even to think it, Buster Dubin was involved as well.
I knew I would have to find out. I couldn’t help myself. I always needed to know. I needed to know a lot more before I could begin to forgive myself for casually writing off a woman I hadn’t liked very much.
One night of inner child indulgence, and now I was overwhelmed by the sting of consequences. I guess I didn’t feel that hot about what I had been doing with Honnett on the night Quita McBride fell to her death.
Chapter 16
“Was it murder?”
Chuck Honnett sat across from me at a small table at Louise’s on Los Feliz Boulevard. It was Friday at two in the afternoon, late for lunch.
I hadn’t heard from him since he’d left my house early the previous morning, going off to investigate the death of Quita McBride. It was probably a good thing, too, because I’d needed some time to sort it all out and finally settle down.
“Was it murder?” I repeated.
“There weren’t any marks on the body, other than what you’d expect after she tumbled down a steep flight of stairs. She broke her neck, looks like. We’ll get more details after the weekend.”
“Oh.”
“The boyfriend, Buster Dubin,
gave us nothing. He said Quita McBride left the party, and that’s the last he saw of her. The last to leave, he said, were you and Wes and a Mrs. Chen. He said Quita didn’t come back before he went to bed at two. He was alone, so there’s no corroboration. Dubin said he didn’t know where she was going, which I think is bull, but I couldn’t shake anything more out of him. So, basically he saw nothing, and he heard nothing.”
“And so he said nothing.” I finished the old Chinese proverb.
Honnett looked at me.
“Evil, I’m talking about.”
“Yeah, aren’t we both. We’ll work on the neighbors and talk to friends, see if we can catch Dubin lying. Maybe I should write this down, Madeline. You left the house when?”
“Around twelve-forty-five,” I said. “I don’t know if Quita was still there. She’d left the game room about fifteen minutes earlier. And I told you before, she had been acting weird. She told me she was going to spend the night in a hotel.”
“Did she tell you which one?” Honnett asked.
“No.”
“I’ll look into it. If she checked in somewhere and then came back to Dubin’s house, we can trace her through credit cards.”
I shook my head. “I lent her some cash. She would have used cash.”
Honnett looked up. “It’s a long shot anyway,” he said. “She probably never left the house.”
“So you don’t know anything,” I said.
“I’ve talked with several of the party guests already. I’ll talk to the rest of them today and tomorrow, if I can. They haven’t told us much. The neighbors have been a little more helpful. Time of death seems to be near 3:00 A.M. A neighbor heard some noise at five minutes past. Woke him up. Sounded like trash cans falling. Her body was found among four large plastic trash bins down at the end of the driveway by the street. That fits with the time we get from the coroner.”
“How did she die, Honnett? Exactly,” I asked.
“I’d have to guess until the autopsy report comes back.”
“Guess, then.”
He looked at me. “She fell down the steps and hit her head. A lethal head injury. Blunt trauma. They’ll likely find an intracranial bleed, which is bleeding in and around the brain with or without a fracture of the skull. This sort of death happens every day, Maddie. Especially when someone is ‘under the influence.’ Death can be instantaneous or it may take minutes, or hours, or even days.”
“Will the coroner be able to tell you if Quita was pushed?” I asked.
“A shove would not leave any marks that the coroner could identify.”
“I see,” I said, not happy. We didn’t know a thing that would make Quita’s death any clearer, and we probably wouldn’t. “Who found her? Buster?”
“Another neighbor. A jogger who was up at five. He ran by there early, but didn’t see anything. Then he changed clothes and was going out to work at seven-thirty. His driveway was near the knocked-over trash cans and he got out of his car to straighten them out. That’s when he found her. He called it in.”
I thought it over and went back to the thing that was nagging at me. “What was Quita doing on the stairs at three in the morning?” I shook my head trying to put the pieces together.
“You didn’t see her leave,” Honnett repeated.
“No.” I thought back. I remembered standing in the street, talking to Lee Chen in her little silver Acura, saying good-bye. I remembered getting in my big black Grand Wagoneer, on the way to my fateful meeting with Arlo. I remembered starting my car, my headlights coming on, illuminating the yellow Cadillac parked in front of me at the curb. “Honnett, I remember now. Quita’s car was still parked at the curb when I left.”
“You’re sure?”
“My old cooking teacher Lee Chen and I were the last to leave.”
“Can you write down Mrs. Chen’s name and address for me?”
Honnett was taking my statement. Wasn’t that romantic? He and I had skirted around anything more personal, and it felt strange to look at him and remember the last time we were together.
“Did Quita have her purse with her when she was found?”
Honnett checked back a few pages in his notebook. “Yes. The body had become tangled in the shoulder strap. It had her identification.” Honnett looked up at me. “You wondering about that cash you lent her?”
“Was it still in her purse?”
Honnett read his notes quickly. “There was seven dollars and change in her wallet.”
“I wonder what happened to the eight twenties I gave her earlier.”
The waiter came to our table and delivered a pizza, putting it on one of those wire stands that held it up off the table. Honnett served himself three slices, but I wasn’t hungry. I sipped a Diet Coke, wondering what to make of us now.
Honnett was polite, professional, maybe even friendly. But nothing more. I could almost believe our evening together had never happened.
“This must be hard for you, Honnett. Interviewing a woman you’ve been…you know, I don’t know what to call it.”
He met my eyes. “I guess you’re angry with me.”
So he was a good detective, after all. “Maybe.”
Honnett let out a breath slowly. “Because I didn’t call you?”
I let it just hang there.
“Or because I have this job to do? Because I’m a cop? I remember you telling me once that you don’t care for cops, right?”
“How about,” I said, “because you didn’t take me seriously? Quita was scared. I knew she was in trouble, no matter how crazy she was acting. And what did you do about it?”
“Look. I know you feel bad.”
We sat there looking at one another.
“Look, Maddie, no one is happy that a young woman fell down a flight of stairs and died, but things like that are known to happen. Hell, she’d been drinking all night. She was wearing those crazy shoes. The steps were steep. It was late.”
“She was scared,” I said.
“I know. I’m working on it. Neighbors saw lights on upstairs all night, so Dubin was probably awake. Some friends have told us Dubin and Quita were about to break up. That still doesn’t mean the guy pushed her with intent to kill her. If we don’t find a witness or some major forensic evidence, what can we do?”
“I don’t believe this is about Buster at all,” I said. “He could never do something like hurting Quita. There’s something else going on.”
“Tell me what you think.”
“Someone stole that mah-jongg set. That’s got to be the key. Someone wanted that old book that was inside. I think Quita was lying. I’ll bet it wasn’t any novel. But whatever that book was, it’s the key to this thing. When she found out it had disappeared she came unglued.”
Honnett looked at me, and just to appease me he wrote down a few notes.
“You still don’t believe me.”
“First off, this is not about me and you. Okay? This is about logic. Explain what you think it was that was so important about that missing book that it could have gotten Quita killed.”
“I don’t know. Maybe she knew something, and it was dangerous. Or maybe this whole mess has something to do with Dickey McBride.” I grasped at a stray straw. “Quita mentioned Catherine Hill was friends with Dickey McBride.”
“I knew that,” Honnett said, trying to lighten the tone of our meeting. “See, I pay attention to old Hollywood gossip. Are you surprised?”
“In fact, I am,” I said.
“I like to go to the movies. Do you?”
“Of course,” I answered.
“Want to catch a movie with me sometime?”
I had to smile. “Possibly. I don’t know. I’m confused right now.”
“Well, it’s just a movie, Madeline. Think it over.”
“So, are you going to question Catherine Hill?”
“It would make you happy if I did, right?”
“It makes sense to me.”
Honnett sighed.
&n
bsp; “Well, why not?” I asked, getting more frustrated.
“We have nothing to go on here. Hill has about fifty years of experience dealing with people who come at her with questions. She won’t tell me anything, that’s why.”
“You don’t strike me as a guy who lacks confidence in his job skills, Honnett.”
“There are limits to this job.”
“I’ve always said so. But if she knows about Dickey McBride’s red book…”
“Chances are Catherine Hill knows nothing at all about the book or about Mrs. McBride and her unfortunate death. Chances are, even knowing nothing, she’ll shine me on. Because people like her are into privacy. But let’s just suppose for a minute that she does know something that has a bearing on our investigation. And let’s suppose it’s information she considers incriminating, whatever that might be. What are the chances she’s going to tell me that information?”
Following the rules, burdened by the laws, he couldn’t get any real information that way.
“I see.”
He stood up, and said, “I’ll call you when I hear anything.”
“You can call me before that, too, you know.”
“Aren’t you coming?”
“I think I’ll stay and finish my Diet Coke,” I said. And figure out just how I could go about meeting the multi-Oscar-winning leading lady, Catherine Hill.
Chapter 17
The Wetherbee house was a work in progress. Wesley and I sat out on the large grassy lawn in back of the house in the shade of a California live oak. Two workmen walked in and out of the open French doors bringing out a chandelier and other lighting fixtures, bringing in pails and drop cloths. With the demolition nearly finished, they were getting a start on replastering.
The garden table was made of heavy white-painted iron, and its round glass top was covered with blueprints and computer printouts showing the layout of the house. Wes was connected to the Internet by wireless modem, and his laptop computer sat close by, atop the pile of renderings. All this was part of the fun of planning his remodeling project. He’d been working and reworking the plans for the master bathroom as we talked, playing with a pencil, tapping the eraser end against his straight teeth.
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