“Over here, Nikki,” Morales called from somewhere to her left. Reluctantly, she turned to him and Goodman. They had their sport coats on and looked anxious to be going.
“I got here as fast as I could,” she said, joining them.
“No problem,” Goodman said.
“I appreciate your asking me along,” she said as they started for the door.
“Glad to have you.”
“Is Dyana Cooper gonna be there?” she asked.
“That’ll be up to Willins,” Goodman said. “He knows we’re coming.”
At the door Nikki turned just as Virgil left the blackboard. Their eyes met. Then she heard Morales clear this throat. Unexpectedly, he’d been waiting for her to exit. He’d missed their eye play the way Michael Jordan misses a free throw.
“He’s too young for you, Nikki,” he said as they walked away down the hall. “An’ besides, he ain’t a nice guy like we are.”
“Oh?” she said, expecting him to elaborate.
Morales had said all he wanted to on the subject.
THIRTY-TWO
Goodman felt his heart beating faster as their sedan stopped beside the gatehouse at 203 Bonham Road in the Pacific Palisades. The duty guard was expecting them. He glanced at Morales’s ID and waved them through. “The guy in blue’ll show you where to park,” he said.
A black man wearing powder-blue sweats and a communications headset appeared from behind the mansion, double-timing toward them. Goodman saw the heavy object outlined under the sweat jacket at the same time Morales observed, “Guy’s packin’.”
Arriving at their car, the man said, “We’d appreciate your parking in the lot, detectives. We like to keep this area free, in case of emergency.”
“You expectin’ an emergency?” Morales asked.
The man smiled. “Earthquake, flood, fire. Riot. This is Southern California, sir.”
Morales followed his instructions, parking beside a Lexus painted a deep purple color that Goodman didn’t think he’d ever seen before on a car.
The man in blue was waiting for them on the path. “This way, please.”
He led them to the mansion’s front door, which he opened with his left hand, continuing to face them. Not being suspicious, Goodman thought, merely prudent. A pro. Inside, just past the door, a young Latina in a maid’s uniform waited with a look of infinite patience on her placid, pretty face. “Señorita. Señores. Por favor.”
They followed her through the tastefully decorated home to a bright, comfortable room with plaster walls and lots of windows. Dyana Cooper was seated on a couch, a small woman, buffed to an almost muscular finish. Her eyes, too emerald green to be natural, shifted from Morales to Goodman, and finally to Nikki, where they seemed to soften. Goodman decided he’d been wise to invite her.
A tall black man in a subdued Hawaiian sport shirt and tan silk slacks stood just to the left of the couch. Goodman sensed he was keeping his distance because he wasn’t clear on whether or not to shake hands with the police. “I’m John Willins,” he said. “This is my wife, Dyana. The gentleman by the sideboard is a friend of ours, James Doyle.”
As Goodman turned to the plump man who saluted them with a glass of brown liquid, he felt a strange sense of déjà vu with a decidedly negative twist. He filed it away and performed the introductions for his group. “Deputy District Attorney Nikki Hill, Detective Carlos Morales, and I’m Detective Ed Goodman.” He thought his name may have registered with the plump man.
“Sit,” Willins said. “Serena can bring you tea or a soft drink. Or... whatever.”
Celebrities were always difficult to deal with. The wealth and power generated by the entertainment industry had long ago turned Southern California into something of a monarchy with show business luminaries elevated to a royal status. Goodman had done his jester’s dance down hallowed halls in the past, and he did so once again. “Mr. Willins, could we speak with you alone?”
Willins looked genuinely surprised by the request. Then his eyes went not to his wife, but to Doyle. The plump man barely moved his head in a negative gesture, but Goodman caught it.
So did Nikki, apparently.
“Are you a lawyer, by any chance, Mr. Doyle?” she asked.
“Not by any chance,” Doyle said, adding, “though I have nothing but respect for the law and its minions and interpreters. Should Mr. Willins have a lawyer present?”
“I wouldn’t think so,” Nikki said.
“Since our questions are specifically for Mr. Willins,” Goodman said, “perhaps you and Mrs. Wi... Ms. Cooper might find them a bit on the boring side.”
“I’m interested in anything that has to do with my husband,” Dyana Cooper said.
Hell, Goodman thought. However this turns out—in criminal court or divorce court or both—they can’t say he didn’t provide the opportunity for discretion. “Maybe I will have some tea,” he said.
They all sat down.
While Serena provided them with glasses of the amber liquid, Willins asked, “What’s this all about, detective?”
“We’ve come into possession of an object we think may belong to you.”
Willins raised his eyebrows. “You have it here?”
Goodman dug into his shirt pocket. He noticed that Nikki was staring at Doyle, studying him. Morales was gulping his iced tea, lost in the José Jimenez act he did so well it was impossible to tell when he was paying attention or when he wasn’t.
Goodman handed his host the baggie with the ring. Curiosity rarely got the better of him, but his skin was crawling, he was so anxious to see Willins’s reaction. Would he play dumb? Would he break down and confess?
What he did, after shaking the piece of jewelry onto his large palm, was grin. “It’s your ring,” he informed his wife.
“It sure is,” Dyana Cooper said, apparently delighted. She slipped it onto her finger.
Goodman turned to Doyle, who was watching the couple. Was the plump man bored? Vaguely interested? Bemused?
“You recognize the ring then, Ms. Cooper?” Nikki asked, for the record.
“Oh, yes. But please call me Dyana.” She had her hand in front of her face, studying the effects of the gold and platinum ring against her brown skin. “I’ve been looking all over... wherever did you find it?”
“You lost it when?” Nikki asked.
Dyana’s fine brow rumpled in thought. “Sometime last weekend is when I noticed it was gone. I don’t wear it every day. I looked for it in my jewelry box and it wasn’t there.”
“It’s pretty valuable, isn’t it?” Nikki asked.
Dyana shrugged. “I imagine it is.”
“Must be insured, huh?” Nikki wondered.
Dyana looked at her husband, who nodded.
“Then I suppose,” Nikki said, “that you’ve repor—”
“I guess when you have as much jewelry as Dyana,” Doyle interrupted, “it’s hard to realize that a piece may really be missing and not just misplaced.”
Goodman observed Doyle while he asked Dyana Cooper, “Then the insurance company hasn’t been notified that the ring was missing?”
“I wasn’t sure it was missing,” Dyana said.
Goodman turned to face the couple. “Did either of you know Madeleine Gray?”
“We both did,” Willins said. “Most people in our business did. A terrible thing.”
Morales began making sucking noises with the ice in his empty glass and Dyana got the message. She summoned Serena, who did her thing with the tea pitcher.
“Any idea how she might have come into possession of your ring?” Goodman asked.
“ Maddie had the ring?” Willins asked. “When was it you saw her, honey?”
“Last week,” Dyana said. “We were at the Ivy. We dined separately but we met while waiting for our cars. Hers came first and she talked me into going with her to look at gloves at Neiman’s.
“Oh, my God,” she said, her right hand going to her forehead while her face expressed a mixture
of surprise and wonder. “That must have been how it happened. On the drive back from the store, I removed the ring to try on the gloves I’d just... And you found it at her home?”
“I guess she was holdin’ it for you,” Morales said. “Probably waitin’ to surprise you with it, next time you two met up in a restaurant.”
So he’d been paying attention after all.
“Well, it’s wonderful to get it back,” Dyana said. “I just wish Maddie were here today, returning it.”
“I’m afraid we’ll have to hang on to it for a while,” Goodman said.
“Why? It’s mine.”
“It’s also evidence.”
“I don’t understand. Evidence of what?”
“You’ll have to take our word for it.”
Reluctantly, she slipped the ring from her finger and held it out to him.
He opened the baggie for her to drop the ring in. Pocketing the item, he asked Willins when he’d last seen Madeleine Gray.
The big man shrugged. “Oh, Lord, I don’t really know. I remember exchanging a few words with her at the Grammys. Five months ago. Six months.”
“No more recently than that?”
Willins shook his head. “I don’t believe so.”
“Not the night she was murdered?”
“That night I was right here.” He looked at his wife. “I worked hard for a lot of years to get my company to the point where I could spend my evenings with my family.”
Goodman stood. “We’ve taken up enough of your time,” he said. “Thank you all for your cooperation.”
Willins walked them to the front door.
Morales, who was bringing up the rear, paused to glance out of a window that faced the ocean. “Partner, look at that set of wheels. Beauty, no?”
Goodman, Nikki, and Willins all moved to the window.
At the rear of the house several vehicles were parked, among them a Rolls Silver Wraith, a dark blue Range Rover. And a beige Jaguar soft-top.
“Ah, the Rolls,” Willins said. “It is a beauty.”
“I was talkin’ ’bout the Jag.”
“The XKE. I bought it when I got my first job in the music industry,” Willins said wistfully. “Took me six years to pay it off and I suppose I’ve spent more than twice the original cost keeping it working.”
“Looks like it’s in great shape,” Goodman said.
“Come on, I’ll show it to you,” Willins said.
“We’re kinda in a rush right now,” Goodman said. “Another time, maybe.”
As their car moved past the gate and headed out of the Palisades, Goodman asked Nikki for a court order to have
the Jaguar impounded. “ASAP,” he said, “before Willins decides to get it painted a different color.”
“I don’t think Dyana Cooper was lying about the ring being hers,” Nikki said.
“She’s an actress,” Morales said. “They can make you believe anything.”
“Actresses are still women.”
Goodman shrugged. “Might be a marriage of convenience. She finds it convenient for him to stay out of jail. Who knows?”
“Nice alibi the guy’s got,” Morales said. “He was home. I don’t guess the wife or people on his payroll would lie just ’cause he wanted ’em to. And who’s this Doyle? I don’t trust fat men who don’t blink.”
“I think he got Jesse Fallon to free up Deschamps,” Nikki said. She told them about Fallon’s appointment calendar.
“I don’t understand,” Goodman said. “If he’s playing on Willins’s team, and he knows Willins is our boy, wouldn’t he want Deschamps to stay our number one suspect?”
“Maybe Willins didn’t want to see an innocent man pay for his crime,” Nikki said.
Morales rolled his eyes. “More likely this guy ain’t the same guy phoned Fallon. All them Paddy names sound alike.”
“Here’s a thought,” Goodman said. “Maybe Doyle wanted Deschamps off the spot so that Willins would be more in need of his services, whatever they are.”
“Tha’s cold,” Morales said. “You know this guy, Eddie?” “He does seem sorta familiar. But I can’t quite place him.”
“He kept starin’ at you, like he’s got some kinda hard-on for you.”
“I’m not flattered,” Goodman said.
At four-twenty that afternoon, the detectives, along with two uniformed policemen and a forensic expert, seized the Jaguar.
They had little opposition.
The gatekeeper was respectful of the badge. The armed guard in the blue sweats was a bit more truculent, but even he understood the power of a court order. Willins and Doyle were not there at the time, but Dyana Cooper was.
In response to Goodman’s request, conveyed via the blue sweatsuit, she provided them with the keys to the car. She remained inside her home, but as they were carefully preparing the Jag for the trip downtown, Goodman chanced to look at the house and saw her standing at a window, watching. She seemed only mildly curious, if curious at all. Maybe the show of disinterest was another example of her acting skill. Or maybe she had something else on her mind.
THIRTY-THREE
Tell me why I’m not going to regret this forever, Ray,” Joe Walden said.
Wise cleared his throat. “I . . .” he began, faltered, and nodded toward Nikki, who was sitting beside him in the conference room “. . . that is, we both feel Detectives Goodman and Morales had cause to seize the car.”
Nikki chanced a quick look at her watch. Seven-fifty. She’d left a message for Virgil with the receptionist, saying that she’d been called into a last-minute meeting and for him to wait in her office. But their date had been for six-thirty and she doubted—
“What do you think, Nikki?” Walden was staring at her.
Her mind flip-flopped, but she replied smoothly, “Like Ray said, we’re both in sync on this one.”
The big man slumped in his chair. “Christ, I guess we’ve bottomed out anyway. One more newsworthy fuckup won’t matter.”
She could understand the D.A.’s depression. The rush to arraign Jamal Deschamps was a mistake that had assumed monumental proportions. Just that morning, the announcement of Deschamps’ ten-million-dollar lawsuit against the city and county had pushed all other events, including a nuclear bomb test in southern Asia, far into the TV news background.
Nikki and Wise had expected their midday report on the John Willins connection to lift the D.A.’s spirits. It had had just the opposite effect. After a moment of apparently stunned silence, he’d exclaimed, “My God. John Willins? We’re on fifty committees together. The man’s a true civic leader. He’s done as much to keep South Central from disappearing into rubble as any other humanitarian in this city. Dear God, don’t tell me we’re going to be trying John Will-ins for the murder of a white woman?”
Wise and Nikki had exchanged glances and remained silent.
“All right,” Walden had said, after taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. “We’re going to stay in control of this one. I’ll tell Corben at Major Crimes the same thing I’m telling you: Anyone leaking Willins’s name to the press won’t just wind up out on their ass. I’ll see to it personally they never work in this state again. Understand?”
They’d nodded their complete understanding.
Later, when Goodman informed her that the Willinses’ Jaguar had been seized, Nikki, in the new spirit of cooperation, had brought the news directly to Wise. Together they’d carried it to the district attorney, prompting the late-hour meeting.
“We have no hard evidence against John,” he said.
“Except the ring.”
Walden shook his head and looked rueful. “Perfect,” he said. “This damned lawsuit of Deschamps’s. I was hoping to diffuse it a little by disclosing the information that one of the main reasons the media’s new hero was arrested was that he’d stolen a ring from the dead woman’s finger. Now I have to continue to keep the ring from the press.”
“Until Willins is arrested,” Wis
e said.
Walden considered that. Finally, he nodded. “Right. Then Mr. Deschamps’s five minutes of fame will have ended.” He scowled. “But, unfortunately, the discomfort he has caused us will seem like happy days compared to what we’ll be going through trying Willins for murder.”
“The bright side,” Nikki said, “is that we won’t be trying him unless we have a pretty good case against him.”
He gave her a thin smile. “Pretty good?” he said. “My dear Nikki, before I agree to bring John Willins to trial, I will have to have a case so airtight, we could float it clear acros the Pacific without taking on a drop.”
She hoped Virgil would be waiting at her office, but the room was empty.
Disappointed, she sat down at her desk, then saw the folded piece of paper stuck between the rows of her computer keyboard.
“Got tired of staring at your messy office,” the note read. “Going to Baby Doe’s for a drink. Or two. Four’s my limit, so come soon. V.”
She began filling her briefcase. Then stopped. She wasn’t going to be doing any homework that night and she knew it.
The phone rang. She grabbed it merrily and said, “I’ll be right there.”
The voice on the other end said, “I have a collect call for Nikki Hill from Folsom Prison. Prisoner J43205.”
The end of a perfect day. “Yeah. Go ahead,” she said.
“Hi, Nikki.” Mace Durant’s deep, depressing voice filled her ear. “Tried to get you yesterday, but they said you were out.”
“I was.”
“Funny thing, hearing about somebody being ‘out.’ It’s a idea you sorta lose track of when you’re spending your whole life ‘in.’ ”
“You working on some kind of stand-up comedy routine, Mace?”
“Not exactly, Nikki. Nothing funny about bein’ in the joint.”
“What do you want?”
“Hear they gonna arrest somebody for the Maddie Gray murder.”
She frowned. “Who might that be?” she asked.
“Name don’t mean nothing to me. Guy who makes records.”
The Trials of Nikki Hill Page 15