Forty-Two
“Hello, hello, hello.” When the sun came up, Nola threw open her balcony doors and blasted old Nirvana down to the homeschool kids on the beach learning evolution-free oceanography from their moms. Poor kids. They deserved at least one true-blue, angst-filled smell of teen spirit.
The bad dreams and frustrated ambitions of the previous day and night had been Etch A Sketched away when Tony called to say he’d conjured up enough probable cause to get Judge Peña to issue a warrant for Gus’s laptop. If Baz could lock on to anything suspicious about Gus’s speech to the commission, things would finally start to pop.
In celebration, she was treating herself to the rare luxury of basking in the skin-aging sun while she sipped her Obama Blend. It was a whimsical mix of Hawaiian and Indonesian beans from Vices and Spices. She’d been unable to resist the Commander in Chief’s smiling face above the slogan: “Yes, you can have a good cup of coffee.”
Tony was on his way to pick her up. They’d decided to drive to the Gillette estate together to confiscate the laptop and get in whatever other snooping they could.
One of the kids on the beach, grateful for the music, braved a judge-y look from his homeschooling mom and smiled up at Nola just as the refrain kicked in.
“Hello, hello, hello, hello. . . “
Forty-Three
Nola was sitting outside on her condo steps when Tony came to pick her up.
“Hey, you’re on time. Did hell freeze over while I was sleeping?”
“I skipped the lather, rinse, and repeat this morning and went with dry shampoo in a can,” she said as she walked to the car. “Did you call ahead to see if Haven was back from the Biltmore?”
“And let her know we’re on our way over?” he scoffed. “Do ya think I’m new at this?”
Nola removed an empty Taco Bell bag, a golf tee, and a softball jersey from Tony’s passenger seat and hopped in. “I hope she’s not home. It’s so much easier confiscating evidence when the owners aren’t swearing and threatening to sic lawyers on you.”
“Don’t worry, sweetheart, trouble is my business.”
“Thanks, Roland.”
“Nice. See?” he said. “If you were twenty, you wouldn’t know which iconic literary detective I was plagiarizing.”
“Yeah, and my knees wouldn’t creak like a haunted house every time I do a plié in barre class.”
“You know what’ll stop that?”
“Stop taking barre class?”
“Unless you’re still hoping for that shot with the National Ballet.” He swung the Audi back toward the road. “Do female swans even live to be forty?”
“I assume they live just as long as male swans, only with more pain,” she said, popping on her Ray-Bans and settling back in her seat.
As they swung onto Cabrillo, he sniffed the air. “Your dry shampoo smells like baby powder.”
“I know, it totally gives away the fact that I was too lazy to hoist a blow dryer. It’s the smell of shame, baby.”
Pajamas straight out of the dryer had been one of Nola’s favorite feelings as a kid. With a workable theory of Gus’s murder and a warrant on the dashboard for his computer, everything was feeling warm jammies as they pulled up in front of the Gillette estate.
No one answered when Tony buzzed the intercom outside the big gates, but this time he had the combination. Haven had pressed the crinkled piece of paper into his hand before taking off for the Biltmore in the hot little SL. The same SL that was currently parked halfway up the driveway to the house.
“Why would she park there?” Tony wondered aloud.
“And if she’s home, why didn’t she answer when you buzzed at the gate?” Nola’s warm-jammies feeling was quickly turning to soggy flannel. “Something is feeling very wrong here,” she said as they climbed out of the car.
When Tony rang the bell, it echoed inside, then silence. When the same thing happened the second time, Nola looked back toward the yard. “Maybe she’s out roasting marshmallows over the pool.”
“No, you were right the first time,” he said. “Something’s not right here.”
“Well, you’re the guy. Start breaking some glass.”
Tony picked up an antique doorstopper and smashed a hole in the stained glass panel that ran the length of the big, wooden doors. The alarm they were expecting didn’t go off. The house remained silent.
“Uh-oh. Guns-drawn time?” Nola asked.
“Looks like it,” Tony replied, unholstering his Beretta. Gun in hand, he reached through broken glass and opened the door.
They announced themselves loudly in the foyer. When there was no answer, Nola pointed her Glock toward the stairs and whispered, “I’m up, you’re down.”
Tony nodded and crossed toward the great room as Nola started up the stairs. When he found the brutalized remains of Haven’s oil painting on the floor, he guessed what they were going to find next.
He’d finished searching the media room and was headed into the wine cellar when Nola came back downstairs. “No point looking in there, you’re ice cold,” she said. “And you’re not the only one.”
“Dead how?” Tony asked as they walked back to the car to get crime-scene gloves and booties out of the trunk.
“Beauty-product poisoned? Suntan strangled? Bludgeoned? It’s impossible to tell what actually killed her till we call Alex to come examine the body. I think you better see for yourself.”
Nola hadn’t wanted to report the murder till Tony got a look at Haven’s body and they had a chance to talk. Crime-scene guys measuring and taking photos sometimes got in the way of clear thinking. As they climbed the stairs back to Haven’s bathroom, Nola’s Fitbit beeped. Four thousand steps and it wasn’t even noon yet. If she searched the house from top to bottom a couple more times, she could have an extra glass of wine that night.
Tony stopped at the bathroom door and stared in at the gruesome tableau. Haven’s body was lying face up in a Savansana relaxation pose, arms open to the sky. It didn’t look staged, it looked like she just fell that way. The spray-tan splatter suggested she was already lying down when the nozzle was forced down her throat. The blood from the gash in her skull had pooled with the sticky brown tanning liquid on the tile, but a few tiny droplets leading from the door to the body looked clean. Tony read the lipstick message on the mirror out loud. “‘Prepare to die, bitch.’ Seems kind of prosaic for such a poetic crime.”
“Agreed,” Nola said. “Death by spray tan is the sort of thing that lands on Nancy Grace, or at least Greta Van Susteren. Sam’s dream of a crime-free Santa Barbara till after the film festival is about to burst like a sebaceous cyst.”
“Can’t you say ‘shit-filled balloon’ like a normal person?”
“Oh yeah, that’s so much nicer.”
Tony pulled out his phone. “I’ll call the crime-scene unit.”
“Tell ’em to pack overnight bags. Murder in this house seems to be trending.”
“You see anything in here that might have made that gash in her head?”
“No, but the night Gillette died, there was a small bronze sculpture sitting on the tub by the foot scrubs that could have done the trick.” Nola indicated the empty spot where the Bernini had played loofah caddy. “It seemed oddly out of place in a bathroom. It looked more like it belonged in a museum, but the rich be nuts, so I didn’t think much about it at the time.”
“Expensive piece of art. Could explain why the killer didn’t leave it behind. I noticed an Escher in the hallway is missing, too,” Tony said, before turning his attention to the call.
While Tony spoke to dispatch, Nola checked out the expensive cosmetics display on the granite sink. La Prairie Cellular Gold Serum ran around seven hundred dollars an ounce. Seven hundred dollars that could have been donated to a food bank, she thought. Then again, if it really worked. . .
Resisting the urge to see what a couple of hundred-dollar dabs of genuine liquid gold might do for her eye creases, she moved on to the lips
ticks. She found a broken Scarlet Letter in the sink and a Queen of Hearts on the granite counter. The colors matched the ones the killer, or killers, had used to write the two-toned message on the mirror. They’d have to wait till the equipment van arrived to see if there were prints on the tubes, but they didn’t look as if they’d been wiped clean.
Nola looked down at Haven’s bloody, matted hair and silently apologized to the universe for saying she’d like to hit her in the head with a hatchet. Be careful what you wish for, she thought, and call your mother more often, she threw in for good measure.
Tony clicked off his phone and ran his cop’s trained eye over the corpse. “I suppose it’s possible the kids we arrested last night could have come back after we released them, killed her, and then burgled the place. But it seems pretty ballsy for that limp crew. Vandalizing pools and ripping up oil paintings is one thing, but you’d really have to hate her guts to be this brutal.”
“Well,” Nola said. “I know one person who’ll be thrilled to see her rocking a body bag.”
“You think Angry Susan could get this angry?” he asked.
“Please. If that woman were any more toxic, she could shrink a tumor.”
“So after Alex gets here, let’s grab some hazmat suits and go interview her.”
“Just like watching the detectives . . .”
As usual, Nola had to rummage around in her purse to find her phone. When she finally dug it out, the ringtone was on its last downbeat, and she didn’t recognize the caller ID. “MacIntire.”
“Hello, Detective. Major Burnell, ah, Bryan. Hope you don’t mind, your station gave me your number.”
Temporarily gob-smacked, Nola waved to get Tony’s attention and pointed to her phone. “Hello, Major . . . Bryan. No, it’s fine they gave you my number. Do you have some new information about Dr. Waxman?”
“Actually, this is a personal call. I’ll be in Santa Barbara tonight, and I was wondering if you’d like to have dinner?”
“Dinner?” Her voice quivered like a teenager’s. Tony was already aggressively nodding yes.
“Well, I’m standing next to a bloody corpse right now.”
Tony threw up his hands to God, the standard Italian reaction to lost causes, but Bryan just laughed. “Well, I’ll give you credit, that’s the most inventive blow-off I’ve ever received.”
“No, it’s true,” Nola said. “I’m knee-deep in a murder investigation, and well. . . ”
Even cell-phone proximity to a man she was too attracted to for her own good was making her fumble for words. Past experience had proven that the best thing for everyone involved was for her to say, “Thanks, but no thanks” and ring off as quickly as possible.
“. . . I wouldn’t be finished tonight till at least eight-thirty or nine.”
What the hell was she saying? Please say it’s too late. Please say it’s too late. . .
“No problem,” he said. “I eat late.”
She needed another excuse, anything to get out of it. But her mind was a terrified blank. “Oh, well, great, then,” she said, regretting the words as quickly as they came out of her mouth.
“What’s your address?” Bryan asked, like a normal human being.
“Ah, maybe we should just meet at the restaurant, so if I’m stuck at work, you can wait at the bar, or not at the bar, if you were thinking of someplace, you know, more casual.”
“No, something tells me you’re going to need a drink. How ’bout you finish with your bloody corpse, and then tonight I’ll take you to Paradise?”
Well, someone thinks a lot of himself, she thought, before she remembered. . . “Ohhh, the Paradise Cafe. Sorry, took me a minute. Crime scene. Confusion. Great. I’d love to go to Paradise with you. To eat dinner . . . there.”
“Okay, see you between eight-thirty and nine,” Bryan said, still normal.
“Great,” she squeaked. “Bye.”
Tony watched in a state of stupefied amazement as she clicked off.
“I know, I know,” she said hanging her head. “How many times could I say ‘great’ in one conversation?”
“Forget the ‘greats,’ let’s talk about ‘I’m with a bloody corpse, but okay.’ You know I’m no longer baffled that you don’t date more. I’m genuinely shocked you go out at all.”
“He’s just too perfect. I should cancel.”
“No, you should marry this guy and stay married till the day you die. Dating is clearly not your thing anymore.”
“Be fair. You know this only happens with guys I’m way too attracted to. Why does a guy like that want to have dinner with me anyway?”
“A pretty cop rocking a skirt above the legal limit who’s all hot to fire his anti-tank weapons — do I really have to spell it out for you?”
“Thanks for the pretty, but guys like Bryan date women like her.” Nola indicated Haven’s lifeless body on the floor.
Shocked at her momentary lack of situational awareness, she quickly backpedaled. “Please forget I just used a murdered girl’s corpse as a dating example. In fact, let’s just table this whole conversation until after Alex liver-probes the body. Way, way after.”
The crime-scene unit pored over the house with their usual ham-fisted, fine-toothed comb. A male fingerprint expert dusted the Vogue on the nightstand for prints. Not possessing the right set of chromosomes, he wasn’t tempted to flip through it, or he surely would have been drawn to the cardamom trumpet skirt on page thirty-four and the hundred-thousand-dollar check tucked neatly into the seam beside it.
Forty-Four
The crime-scene unit was still processing Haven’s bathroom when Nola and Tony left to question Angry Susan. The killer, or killers, had wiped the spray tanner down. There were trace fibers on the nozzle from one of Haven’s monogrammed hand towels, but no fingerprints. Strangely, however, they’d neglected to wipe down the lipstick cases, which sported a thumb and two partials in mint condition.
“Why wipe down the spray tanner and leave prints on the Queen of Hearts?” Tony wondered aloud as they drove to Montecito.
Nola had no idea, but Queen of Hearts was totally apropos. She’d been feeling like Alice in Wonderland all week. Nothing was making any sense, starting with their meth-smoking caterpillar hearing Charley’s killer fire three gunshots, “click, click, click,” when they’d only found two bullets at the scene. Throw in bio-weapons magically disappearing down rabbit holes, messages in the looking glass, and a major who didn’t mind if she was late to a very important date. It was getting a little surreal.
As they pulled into Susan’s driveway, she warned Tony what to expect. “Believe it or not, the devil actually does wear Prada.”
“As long as she has a big, bloody scrape somewhere visible,” he said with a heart full of hope.
They’d found blood on the clasp of Havens’s Birkin bag, and it wasn’t her blood type. If she’d hit her assailant with the pricey purse, they could match the clasp to the wound and test the DNA. Juries ate that stuff up.
Marta left them standing on the doorstep while she went to tell “Mrs. Susan” that the police would like a word. A moment later she ushered them into Susan’s opulent living room and politely asked them to wait. They’d been cooling their heels for twenty minutes on an overstuffed sofa even your average storybook giant would find a scooch too deep when Susan finally made her entrance. She hadn’t bothered to bandage the gash on her cheek. It was raw and red, and it practically screamed, “Arrest me!”
So that’s what a fifty-thousand-dollar cut looks like, Nola thought, imagining Haven’s gorgeous bag being evidence-raped back in the lab.
The soft, mossy greens Susan had worn when Nola met her in the garden had given way to mossy browns with just a hint of ecru. The woman was a study in earth tones. Decidedly an autumn.
“I see you didn’t come alone this time, Detective,” Susan said, casting a bored glance at Tony. “Must be a slow police day. No parking disputes at Whole Foods or slap fights over the last zucchini blossom
at the farmers’ market?”
Ignoring the caustic greeting, Nola made introductions. Tony didn’t bother getting up. There was nothing about the woman that engendered politeness, but the cut on her face was doing wonders for his morale. When Nola politely inquired about it, Susan laughed.
“I’ll save you the trouble of trying to be cagey, Ms. MacIntire. I know why you’re here, and I freely admit I did it. What’s more, I enjoyed every minute of it. Most fun I’ve had in years.”
Tony kick-started himself up from the cavernous sofa. “Awesome confession, lady. And here I’d heard you were difficult.”
“Difficult?” She laughed. “I’m sure Ms. MacIntire used more colorful language than that. Even my friends call me a first-class cuntessa.”
Class, first or otherwise, was the last word Nola would ever use in a sentence describing Susan, but she held her tongue. Why poke the suspect in the middle of a confession?
Susan didn’t seem to give a fig if they stayed silent as stones. She went blithely on like it was just another murder-mystery game night at the yacht club. “Arrest me if you like, but you’ll be wasting your time. I have a phalanx of lawyers already working to prove everything I took from that house was mine.”
Nola and Tony exchanged a look. Susan was copping to the theft, but not the murder. Prints on the lipstick cases but not on the tanning machine. Curiouser and curiouser.
“Even the life you took?” Nola asked to gauge her reaction.
Susan froze like a snapshot. “She’s dead?”
“As disco,” Tony replied. “What exactly did you hit her with anyway?”
“My Bernini. But it wasn’t my fault. She attacked me first,” Susan cried, pointing to the cut on her cheek. “I only hit her back in self-defense!”
Tony played along. “Uh-huh. So you cracked her in the head for hitting you, then you poisoned her in self-defense?”
A fly zapped out of the air by the tongue of a toad couldn’t have looked more surprised. Susan’s haughty attitude deserted her. Insisting she knew nothing of poison, she related her story from beginning to end without a hint of nastiness. “Would I have bothered to finish writing ‘bitch’ in the mirror if she was dead?” she argued. “She was unconscious on the floor when I left, but I know she was still breathing. I checked.”
Marry, Kiss, Kill Page 17