So, I learned, were most of the residents, aside from those on vacation—sorry and asleep the night in question. Where were insomniacs when you needed them?
I had gone up and down Apollo and Hercules and had backtracked up Venus, then come down again on Achilles, which leads into Vulcan. The street names and their fickleness were losing their charm, and I was losing my sense of direction and optimism. I was sick of Italian cypress trees. I dreaded the climb back up to my car. My headache was back, my clothes were sticking to me. I was tired and thirsty and hungry. I needed a bathroom. I thought of Cyrano—“I press on, I press on”—and did the same, wondering whether I’d find my white plume.
I trudged onward and found myself back on Hercules, then detoured onto Zeus, a short, isolated thunderbolt of a street that comes out of nowhere apparently only to intersect Hercules. I braked my Nikes to a stop in front of a silver Toyota. A girl wearing below-the-navel, low-cut white short shorts and a yellow crop top was sitting on the side of the hood, her caramel-tanned legs and arms scissored around the lean, cut-off jeans-clad torso of the porcupine-black-haired boy whose lips were locked on hers.
“Excuse me?” I called.
They pulled apart and stared at me, unembarrassed. I stared back. She had curly strawberry blond hair, a constellation of freckles splashed across the bridge of her short nose, and a ring in the navel of a midriff as flat as a sheet of wood. He had a row of studs in his left eyebrow and nostril, more on his upper lip. I wondered how it felt to kiss all that metal and remembered that braces had never stopped anyone, including me.
“A woman was injured in a hit-and-run around two o’clock Sunday morning,” I said, beginning my script.
“Are you a cop?” Studs asked.
“Freelance reporter,” I told him.
“Cool,” he said, looking unimpressed. I didn’t take it personally.
“A detective was here, but my parents were out of town that night,” the girl offered. “I was babysitting my sister, but I didn’t hear anything.”
“Were you here that night, too?” I asked Studs.
“He wasn’t,” the girl said, too quickly.
I looked at her, then at him. “Is that right?”
“Yeah.” He concentrated on digging a hole in the ground with the toe of his athletic shoe.
“You’re lying,” I said, as if I were commenting on the weather, which was pretty damn hot.
“I don’t have to talk to you,” he said. “You’re just a writer.” Back to his toe.
How quickly they turn. “No, but Detective Connors—he’s handling this case—is going to ask you the same thing after I talk to him, and he’ll know you’re lying. Why, I can’t figure, unless you were driving the car that hit her.”
His head jerked up. “No way!”
I waited.
He looked at her, eyes flashing panic like a neon sign. She sighed. Birds chirped.
“I was here with Abby, okay?” he said, sullen. “I came around ten, after her sister was asleep. I left around three. But we didn’t see or hear anything. You can believe it or not, I don’t give a shit.”
“My parents’ll kill me if they find out,” Abby said.
“I won’t rat you out to your parents,” I promised. “I’m trying to find out if anyone saw a woman around here that night. She was wearing a cream-colored nightgown.”
They exchanged startled looks. My white plume, I thought with a prickling of excitement.
“Is she the same woman that got hit by the car?” he asked.
I nodded.
“So is she, like, dead?” Studs asked.
Like, “Yes.”
“Jeez.” He blew out a deep breath.
The girl licked her lips.
“Where did you see her?” I asked him.
“Who said I saw her?” Narrowing his eyes, trying to tough it out.
I examined my nails.
“Suppose we did see her,” he said a moment later. “Do we have to, like, talk to the cops?”
“Probably.”
“Shit,” Studs muttered.
I wondered if the metal on his face was stunting his vocabulary.
“Then my parents will know.” The girl was grazing on her upper lip with her teeth as if it were a snow cone.
“So where did you see her?” I repeated.
“She came running out of a house,” Studs said, his tone resigned.
“Which one?” I started to look around me, but he shook his head.
“Not here. Up there.” He pointed in the direction I’d come from. “On Hermes,” he said, rhyming the name with germs. “The wood one with the big windows?”
My dream house, occupied by Jillian and fiancé. Interesting, I thought. Then I frowned. “You can’t see that house from here.”
“We weren’t in my house,” Abby said, her face a becoming shade of pink that hid her freckles. “We went to this new house way up on Apollo. Once my sister’s asleep, she never wakes up,” she added before I could call her on it.
“What were you doing there?” I asked, although I had a pretty good idea.
“Fooling around.” The pink in her face had deepened. “The owners haven’t moved in yet. It’s locked, but there’s a way to get in from the back.”
The single-minded determination of thieves and horny adolescents. “You could’ve fooled around in your own house, with your parents away and your sister asleep.”
“We were getting high,” she admitted. “I was nervous that my sister would smell the stuff and tell my parents. Anyway, it’s way cool being in an empty house.”
I could see that. “So what happened when the woman came out of the house?”
“The guy came out, too,” Studs said. “He grabbed her arm and she yelled at him to get his effing hands off her. She was screaming at him, cussing him out. Eff you, eff you. She said she was going to kill herself, that he’d be sorry.”
“What did the man say?”
“ ‘Make sure you do it right this time.’ Something like that.”
Nice guy, I thought. I turned to Abby. “Does that sound right?”
She nodded.
“Then what happened?” I asked.
“Then she ran off, I guess all the way down to Laurel Canyon,” Studs said. “We didn’t see her again.”
“Did he follow her?”
“Not right away. A few minutes later we heard a car, so it must’ve been his.”
“Which car?”
“No idea.”
“What time was this?”
He shrugged. “I dunno.” Neither did Abby.
“Where were the two of you when this was happening?”
“In the backyard. You could hear every word.”
“We were looking at the stars,” Abby said. “It was totally awesome.”
“It was cool,” Studs agreed.
Not for Lenore, I thought, who would never again see the stars. “Then how did you see him grab her?”
“We heard yelling in the house, so we went there to see what was going down. They didn’t notice us. It was dark, and they were kind of busy.” He allowed himself a smirk.
“Did the woman call him by his name?”
“She called him a couple of names. Asshole, son of a bitch. Bastard.” The kid was off the hook now, grinning and enjoying himself.
“I think she called him Ronnie,” Abby volunteered.
Ronnie, or Robbie? “Did you hear him when he came back?”
“Nope. We didn’t stick around that long. We went back to Abby’s.”
“What about the woman? Do you know when she arrived?”
Both of them shook their heads.
I gave them business cards, asked them to call me if they remembered anything else, and headed back up the hill. When I looked back a moment later, they were back on the hood of the car, revving up their motors.
The gods would be proud.
ten
The fiancé opened the door. “Something else I can do for you?�
�� he asked, smiling, one hand on the doorpost, the other in the pocket of his jeans. Welcome to my neighborhood.
“Leno wasn’t on that night,” I told him.
The smile slipped. The hand came down. “What?”
“You said you fell asleep watching Leno, but Leno isn’t on Saturday night.” Chugging up the hill had jogged my memory and produced this nugget.
He quickly regained his composure. “I didn’t mean Leno specifically,” he chided good-naturedly and chuckled. “I meant whatever was on TV. Are you reporting to Nielsen?”
I smiled to show I appreciated his wit. “It’s Robbie Saunders, correct?” A reasonable assumption, given the argument Studs had heard, and what Lenore had said about Robbie being very angry.
His frown confirmed it. “I’m not interested in being interviewed for your story,” he said, all traces of bonhomie gone from his voice, his body stiff as a plaster cast. “So if you’ll excuse me?” He took a step back and started to shut the door.
“We know Lenore was here that night.”
That stopped him. I’d debated going to Connors, and the we was my insurance in confronting a man who I thought had something serious to hide and might take extreme measures to keep it hidden. I’ll admit I was nervous.
He pulled the door shut behind him and eyed me coolly. “Am I supposed to know what the hell you’re talking about?”
“Your ex-wife?”
“I know my ex-wife’s name,” he said, giving me a steely look that could have razed a building. “I haven’t seen her in weeks.”
“She’s the woman who was injured by a hit-and-run driver on Laurel Canyon near Lookout Mountain. I’m surprised you didn’t know.”
His face was a kaleidoscope of emotions that finally rearranged itself into dark somberness. “Lenore’s mother told me,” he said with what sounded like genuine concern. “I have no idea what Lenore was doing there. I was—am—terribly upset. Lenore and I have our problems, but I’ve never wished her harm.”
“Lenore thinks you’re angry with her. She said that’s why you haven’t visited her in the hospital.”
“I’m not angry with her. Things are—” He glanced behind him at the door, then faced me, his hands raised in helpless surrender before they dropped to his sides. “I’m in touch with her mother. She tells me Lenore is doing well.”
Either he didn’t know Lenore was dead, or he was pretending. I decided telling him would only infuriate Connors, who would want to gauge Saunders’s reaction when he learned the news. I also wondered why Betty Rowan had been evasive when I’d asked her what Lenore was doing near Laurel Canyon.
“I’m puzzled because when I talked to you earlier about the hit-and-run victim, you didn’t tell me it was your ex-wife,” I said. “Neither did your fiancée.”
“Because it’s none of your business,” he snapped, his voice rising along with the color in his face. “It’s not my job to feed the appetites of your voyeuristic readers. Is that it? Are you done prying into my life?”
“Does your fiancée know?”
“Yes, she knows.” He was glaring now. “Leave her out of this.”
“Mr. Saunders, don’t you find it an odd coincidence that Lenore was down the hill from your home when she was struck?”
He sucked in air, and I could see he was fighting for control. “I find it very odd. The police think she may have been disoriented.”
I nodded. “Because she was on antidepressants and sedatives.”
“I see you’ve done your homework.” He was assessing me, trying to figure out how much I knew.
“Why was she depressed?”
Something twitched in his face. “You’d have to ask Lenore.”
“But even if she was disoriented, Mr. Saunders, why would your ex-wife be wandering around in a nightgown near your home?”
“I have no idea.” He shrugged. “Maybe she had a nightmare. Maybe she was sleepwalking. She’s done that before.”
“Witnesses saw her run out of your house early Sunday morning.”
Saunders snorted. “You don’t give up, do you?”
I pulled a notepad from my purse and opened it to a page on which I’d scribbled my grocery list. “You followed and grabbed her arm,” I pretended to read. “She screamed at you, called you names. She told you she was going to kill herself.” I looked up.
“I was sleeping,” he said in a bored voice, a patient man indulging lunacy. “Who are these witnesses?”
I referred to the notepad. “You told her, ‘Make sure you do it right this time.’ ”
He shook his head. “Not a nice thing to say.”
The guy was cool, as Studs would say. “She ran down the hill. You followed minutes later in your car.” I put the notepad away.
“And then?” he prompted, the intensity in his eyes giving him away.
A welcome breeze feathered my face. “And then I think your car hit her.”
He shook his head sadly, my lunacy confirmed.
“Maybe it was an accident,” I said. “Maybe you went looking for her, because you were sorry about the argument, sorry about what you said. Worried about what she’d do to herself. It was a dark night, no moon out. Maybe you didn’t see her.”
“Maybe you’ve been in the sun too much.”
“If it was an accident,” I said, “they’ll take that into account. But you should go to the police before they come to you.”
“I’ve already talked to the police. They’re satisfied. Check my car.” He pointed to the Jeep. “Go ahead. You won’t find a scratch on it.”
“Body shops do good work.” I’d already given the Jeep and Mercedes a quick once-over, but unlike my brother Joey, I’m not an expert.
Saunders sighed and massaged the back of his neck. “Okay. Game’s over.”
“It’s not a game, Mr. Saunders.”
“It never happened. You’re desperate for a story. Who do you write for, The Enquirer?”
“Witnesses saw you with her and heard you arguing. Why don’t you tell me what happened? The police are investigating, they’ll talk to the same people I talked to.”
“This block is deserted, as you’ve probably discovered,” he said. “The people who live in the next three houses down have been on vacation since the beginning of July. Who are your witnesses, owls?”
“They were in the new house on Apollo.”
“No one lives there yet.” Half turning, he opened the door and stepped onto the stone floor of the entry hall, his smile smug. Checkmate.
“That doesn’t mean it was empty that night.”
“Lenore wasn’t here,” he said calmly, not missing a beat. He cocked his head. “How do you know your witnesses aren’t making all this up?”
“I don’t. That’s why I’m here, verifying the facts.”
“Verify this,” he said, and slammed the door in my face.
I was surprised he hadn’t done it sooner.
eleven
Friday, July 18. 8:08 A.M. 2500 block of Silverwood Terrace. A woman became angry at her husband and threw a frozen chicken at him. The suspect is described as a 52-year-old woman standing 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighing 170 pounds. (Northeast)
I’m an early riser, but I had overslept and was in my usual morning-after-the-fast state, sluggish and bloated, like a turkey on the day before Thanksgiving. I always eat too fast and too much. (Last night it had been a bowl of my mom’s to-die-for potato-celery soup, basil and tomato pasta, and Greek salad, followed by a pint of Häagen-Dazs Cookies and Cream from my freezer.) What bothers me is that I don’t seem to learn.
After showering and dressing, I swallowed two Advil tablets with my coffee and toasted English muffin, crunched a Tums for dessert, and after reviewing and e-mailing my Crime Sheet column to my editor, I set about preparing the Friday night Shabbat dinner I’d promised to make for the Birkensteins, the bereaved family my mother had told me about. I’m no Emeril, but I enjoy cooking and entertaining, and I had put my kosher cookbooks to
good use when Ron and I were married. Living alone, it’s hardly worth the effort, so I welcomed the opportunity and couldn’t help wondering who, if anyone, was preparing meals for Betty Rowan.
With the phone receiver wedged between my head and shoulder, something that was beginning to give me a chronic pain, I phoned Connors and plucked chicken hairs while I told him what I’d learned. If my readers could see me now. . . .
“Proud of yourself, are you?” he asked when I’d finished.
“Are you going to talk to Saunders?” The chicken balded and rinsed, I washed two celery stalks, set them on the cutting board, and began slicing.
“For your information, we already did.”
“But that was before I told you what those kids saw.”
“Actually, Saunders came to the station early this morning to clear things up. He told us what happened. We’re satisfied he’s not the hit-and-run driver.”
I stopped slicing. “You’re kidding, right? They had a heated argument, Andy. He said he hoped she did a better job of trying to kill herself, then drove down the hill after her.”
“He told me all that. He realizes he should have told us she was there that night when we first talked to him, but he panicked. He didn’t want to get involved, have his name in the paper.”
I put down the knife and took the receiver in my hand. “But he is involved!”
“He didn’t see it happen. He looked for her because he was worried, but he didn’t see her. He drove about half a mile, then gave up and went home.”
I rolled my eyes though Connors couldn’t see me. “You actually buy that?”
“It was dark, Molly. No moonlight. He thinks she hid when she saw him coming and waited until his car passed her. She’s proud like that, he said.”
“Are you going to check out his car?”
“You keep asking that. What’s with you and cars lately? Are you opening up a dealership?”
Today his humor grated. “Well, are you?”
“We did—both cars, in fact. He’s not the guy, Molly. I know you’re disappointed.”
“There are body shops—”
“The paint is old,” he interrupted me, impatient. “There’s nothing to indicate that either vehicle was involved in an accident.”
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