Nola saw the look of abject panic in Chris’s eyes as she ran down the row toward him, but she didn’t have time for long-winded explanations. “Stay in your seat — just let me by!”
Adrenaline pumping overtime, Chris, who’d never liked taking direction, as Jameson could attest, took her admonition to remain still as his cue to cut and run. In his desperation to get away, he plowed over delicate Laura, knocking her back in her seat and leaving python-leather footprints on the train of her lovely Lanvin gown. Escaping by trampling his waifish costar/girlfriend might come back to bite him in the ass on YouTube, but this was freaking life and death.
Accustomed to keeping his head when all around him were losing theirs, Jameson Lyons saw his chance for revenge. As Chris pushed past him, a strategically aimed kick to the back of the knee sent the handsome movie star crashing to the floor in front of Monica’s empty seat. Sure, there’d be bad blood between them, but Chris would have to suck it up if he didn’t want Jameson spreading the story of his co-star-crushing cowardliness until it became the main topic of every agent-client lunch meeting at the Grill.
Seeing Chris tumble to the ground, Nola shouted that she was police and to get out of the way. Stunned by his fall and deafened by the crowd noise and the movie, he rolled over and started kicking and punching at her instead. Fending off his blows, Nola dove on top of him and thrust her arm under the seat to try to reach the bomb. She felt the tape and was about to pull it loose when Chris’s fist connected with her eye, and she lost her grip. Slamming a forearm over his throat to choke some of the fight out of him, she reached under the seat again. This time she was able to wrench the device loose, but it was too late. She could already smell gas. As she tried to wrestle the valve shut, Nola MacIntire and Christopher Marcil slid down together into a dense black hole of Euclidian proportions.
Fifty-Four
When Nola started coming to, she was lying outside the theater by the fountain: Charley’s favorite spot on hot summer days to chill and smoke a fatty. The commotion had abated, and aside from a few cuts and bruises, no one had been seriously hurt. Only Nola and Chris had succumbed to the gas, and Chris was already awake in an ambulance on his way to Cottage Hospital.
The gas wasn’t deadly, just a highly vaporized knockout drop. Its purpose had been to send a few movie stars and VIPs into death-mimicking sleep, causing mass panic in the theater and a lot of national publicity for ROTC70. On that last score, the plot had been a resounding success. In the back seat of a patrol car, Malcolm was already rehearsing his prison interviews. Nothing local — he’d hold out for Sawyer, maybe Blitzer if he landed a choice time slot.
As the cobwebs-in-Jell-O feeling started to lift, Nola became aware of Tony kneeling by her side. “Am I dead?”
“Nope. But your right eye is turning a wicked shade of purple.”
“Heliotrope or aubergine?”
“You must still be groggy,” he said. “You’re saying words that have no meaning.”
The deadness in her limbs was turning to pins and needles. It wasn’t an improvement. “Did we catch ’em?”
“Yep. The three stooges are on their way in to be booked, and Monica’s in the theater office catching hell from Mom and Dad. You feel up to making some arrests?”
“Sure, I’m in mint condition,” she replied, making a herculean effort to raise herself up into a sitting position. She made it as far as her elbows before she had to stop and lean back on them for support.
“Yeah, if the mint’s been crushed in a mojito,” Tony said, putting his hands on her back to steady her.
“No, I’m really okay,” she lied. “I’m ready to stand up.”
“Okay,” he said. “But lean on me.”
“Always do,” she replied, smiling.
With Tony’s help she struggled to her feet. She was stumbling like a newborn colt after a couple of martinis, but at least she was upright. The pins-and-needles sensation was agony, but she could feel life seeping back into her nervous system. “Thanks for not confronting the suspects without me,” she said, genuinely grateful not to have missed the fun.
“Agatha Christie summations are your thing. If it were up to me, we’d just read them their rights and let the lawyers sort it out,” he said, taking hold of her waist to make sure she didn’t fall. “Once we’re past this protective ring of cops, we’re going to have to battle our way through reporters to get to the theater office. You ready?”
“Sure, I’ve always wanted a picture of me with a big purple eye plastered all over the news.”
“How about on the front page of tomorrow’s L.A. Times unconscious on top of Chris Marcil?”
“Oh no! Why didn’t you confiscate the camera?!”
“No grounds. And before you ask — yes, your butt does look big lying on top of a movie star.”
“Where’s that gas bomb?” she said wearily. “I want another sniff.”
Fifty-Five
Nola and Tony fought their way through a throng of reporters who were all shouting at once and angling for video. There were police officers posted outside the office door to keep the press away, but there was more shouting going on inside. Larry and Jillian were letting Monica know, in very loud terms, exactly what they thought of her insane behavior.
“Your boyfriend was five seats away from your mom and me! Were you trying to kill us?! Was that the plan?!” Larry shouted.
“Please. Do you see anybody dead?” Monica answered airily. “It was just a little guerrilla theater. Protest art.”
“And that was worth dying your hair poor-person red?” Jillian screeched, seeming to have missed the bigger picture. “You can’t just dye it back, you know — it’ll ruin the texture!”
“The press is already dragging me into this with you,” Larry said. “‘Dr. McDorable’s Dangerous Daughter.’ My fan sites are blowing up!”
“Oh, Larry, you love it,” Monica scoffed. “Your whole life’s a selfie.”
“You think this is funny?” Jillian scolded. “You think that hair growing out in prison will be funny? It could take months, maybe years!” Once again, she was sidestepping the deeper issue.
“Christ,” Larry barked. “TMZ’s using that Enquirer shot where my robe’s half open and my junk’s hanging out!”
Nola was incredulous as she stood outside the door with Tony. “Seriously, what is wrong with this family?”
“Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll invoke their right to remain silent.” He grinned. “So, ready to go shoot some angry birds?”
Nola was still shaky, and her eye was throbbing, but climbing into bed and slipping away to the enchanted lake house in her imagination would have to wait. Getting to the end of an investigation and skipping the fun bit where you hit the suspects with the evidence bomb was like getting to the last round of American Idol and leaving the stage without opening your mouth.
“Locked and loaded,” she replied with a smile.
Tony pushed open the door and stood back to let her go in first. She was still a little wobbly, but she tried to make a strong entrance. “Hi, everybody, I’m fine, in case you were wondering.”
The sight of Nola up and mobile with her swollen and decidedly aubergine eye brought the family squabbling to an abrupt halt.
The tiny office was packed with boxes of movie tickets, posters, and binders full of schedules. Redheaded Monica was sitting straight-backed and defiant on an ancient rolling office chair. Larry and Jillian flanked her on either side. Jillian’s surgical neck wrap was camouflaged by a pashmina. Larry’s angry face was the color of chum. If Monica had been wearing the pashmina, Nola was pretty sure Larry would have strangled her with it by now.
Tony followed Nola in and shut the door behind him. “Sorry to interrupt, but you know how it is, things to do, arrests to make, so we’d kinda like to move things along.”
“Then let’s cut to the chase,” Larry said, bluntly. “Obviously my stepdaughter is part of this stupidity. What do we need to do to make as much
of this as possible go away?”
Jillian took the opportunity to show off her knowledge of TV law. “If she turns state’s evidence or whatever you call it on the boys who planned this, can you promise us she won’t go to jail?”
“Okay, I know you people are new to this,” Tony said, “but it’s a bust, not a negotiation. And I’m not sure my partner here’s in much of a forgiving mood.” He moved a stack of folders off a filing cabinet so Nola could sit down. She shot him a wink of gratitude as she plopped her still-rubbery bones down on the anachronistic filing system.
Monica stared at Nola’s eye. “Hurt much?”
“No more than your average cavity search,” Nola answered, dripping honey.
Monica sighed. “Is that your not-so-clever way of saying I’m going to jail?”
“Does a kitten look cute in a bow tie?” Nola didn’t care how snarky Monica got this time around. The fight was in the bag, and Monica was going down.
“Shut up, Monica,” Larry snapped.
Jillian turned desperately to Tony. “Please, Detective, Monica isn’t an anarchist. She isn’t even a Democrat. She’s just a very foolish girl who fell in with the wrong boy.”
“Must run in the family,” Tony said flippantly.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Larry growled.
“It means we know you had Monica offer Gus Gillette a bribe to push your real estate deal through,” Tony answered matter-of-factly.
Jillian turned her neck around to look at Larry and winced in pain. “Larry. . . ?” The rest of her question hung in the air unspoken.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Jillian, he’s fishing.” Hackles up, Larry turned to Tony. “It’s absurd on the face of it. Monica and her jackass friends are against my project. They attacked my damn commission hearing.”
Tony mimed hitting a tennis ball over to Nola’s court. This was the part she loved, and he knew it. She took the imaginary ball and ran with it.
“Well, the whole eco-girl-terrorist thing was really just a cover, wasn’t it? Plausible deniability in case a situation arose strikingly similar to this one. As an avowed environmentalist, Monica could be seen talking to Gillette, and no one would suspect she was your emissary. And getting her grunge band of brothers to attack the commission meeting actually swung the vote your way. Am I right?”
Larry was slick as wet pavement. “Not even close.”
“Come on, Lar,” she said, growing tired of his bullshit. “We have video of Monica arguing with Gillette when he refused your offer at the Batman premiere. You can even hear poor Charley making up a song about it in the background. Monica got real mad about that, didn’t you, Mon?”
“Who’s Charley?” Monica replied like the petulant brat she was.
“You remember the sweet street singer with the beautiful smile,” Nola said. “We pulled two slugs out of him that match your stepdad’s .38 Colt auto.”
Nola counted two Mississippis in her head. It was the standard length of stunned silence before a suspect would come back with an outraged response, usually in the form of a question.
“My gun? What the hell are you talking about?!” Larry said, looking genuinely surprised.
“I’m talking about murder, Mr. Wilson,” Nola snapped back. “Charley overheard the fight about the bribe, made a song up about it, and ended up dead on the courthouse lawn. Our ballistics lab matched the slugs in his chest to the gun we took from your home today.”
Larry had the same stunned look on his face that Dr. McDorable had worn in his season-five cliffhanger when, in the middle of a delicate brain surgery, his sexy nurse announced she was pregnant with his baby.
“Are you seriously trying to say that the homeless man they found dead the other morning was shot with my gun?!” he asked, incredulous.
Jillian looked like she was about to faint. She pushed her hair back from her head in a gesture of disbelief, inadvertently exposing her surgery stitches. It was a move the Frankenstein ladies who lunched at Intermezzo knew all too well to avoid. “This is crazy,” she said. “Larry didn’t shoot anyone. He’s a TV star for God’s sake!”
Monica grimaced at her mother’s exposed sutures. “Don’t look now, Mom, but your stitches are showing.”
Tony grabbed Monica’s arm and lifted her up off her chair. “I think your mom needs to sit down,” he said sharply.
He wasn’t lying. Jillian’s face, under her thick layer of foundation, was turning the color of raw squid. She sank into the vacant chair without a word.
“Putting poor Charley aside for a moment,” Nola continued, “we need to know where each of you were after midnight on the night Haven Gillette was killed.”
Nola didn’t even get to one Mississippi before Larry lost it. “Look,” he snarled, “I don’t know what tricks you’re trying to play with my gun, or if this is just your clumsy attempt at a bluff, but I didn’t kill the homeless guy and I sure as hell wouldn’t have killed Haven!” The last bit he said with just a little too much emphasis for Jillian’s liking. Nola saw a flicker of jealousy in her eyes, but she remained mute.
Tony turned to Monica and Jillian. “Can either of you verify that Larry was in bed like he says?”
“I was in the guest house with Malcolm,” Monica piped up. “The maid brought us grilled brie sandwiches, so I’ve got two alibi witnesses.”
“Not what I asked,” Tony said. “But okay.”
“How ’bout you, Jillian?” Nola asked. “Were you in bed with Larry at that time?”
“Yes,” Jillian said defiantly.
Nola shook her head no. “I asked your servants the same question this afternoon. Any chance you might want to rethink that answer?”
A heavy sigh escaped Larry’s lips as he sensed his alibi slipping away.
“Yes, all right, I was sleeping alone on the other side of the house,” Jillian admitted. “I was still bruised and bloody from the surgery and I didn’t want anyone to see me.”
“Right,” Nola said. “So you don’t have an alibi witness either?”
“Why on earth would I need an alibi?” Jillian sputtered.
Quicker than you can say spoiler alert, Tony jumped to the denouement. “Because you killed Haven Gillette.”
The words hit Jillian like the jab of a collagen needle; her whole body flinched.
Nola threw up her arms, amazed. “What the hell, Tone? I had a whole build going!”
“Sorry, knee-jerk reaction. She just lobbed it up and I slammed it back.”
Monica and Larry couldn’t have looked more shocked if The Euclidian Variation had suddenly dropped them on their ass in an alternate universe.
“Now you’re accusing me?” Jillian said contemptuously. “Tell me, Detective MacIntire, is there anyone in this town our family didn’t shoot?”
“Well, there’s Gus,” Nola said. “Haven shot him. And just for the record, you didn’t shoot Haven, you shoved a spray-tan nozzle down her throat. Your blood type’s AB, just like the blood drops we found by the body. Sadly for you, those bloody mucus drains never quite stopped leaking. Juries just love biological evidence.”
Tony held up his phone. “Shall I call the lab guys to swab your mouth and match the DNA, or would you rather just confess and save us all the trouble?”
“Oh, for God’s sake. Yes, I admit I was there,” Jillian said, her hands starting to tremble. “Monica told me Haven and Larry were having an affair, so I went over to confront her.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Larry objected. “Why didn’t you come to me? I would have told you it’s a lie.”
“Of course you would,” she said dryly. “That’s exactly why I didn’t come to you. Anyway, when I got to the estate, the gates were open, and Susan Gillette was leaving in her car. The gates didn’t close after she drove out, so I went up to the house and found the front door standing wide open. When I called inside, Haven didn’t answer, so I went in to look for her. She was already dead when I found her lying on the bathroom floor. I may have leaked
a few drops of blood when I checked to make sure, but Susan Gillette is your killer, not me.”
“And you didn’t bother calling the police because . . . ?” Tony asked.
“Because I’d prefer that not all of Santa Barbara know my husband cheats on me. You’re a man, maybe you don’t understand that sort of thing, but I’m sure Miss MacIntire gets it.”
“I do,” Nola said. “But you’re still lying. We already know Susan was there, and we know she conked Haven on the head with some heavy-duty art, but you’re the one who polished her off with the tanning spray. Susan was home at the time of death, and there was no spray-tan spatter on her clothing. But there was on yours. I called your maid after our search. She told me you gave her a bag of clothes to take to the Salvation Army. Unfortunately for you, they were still in the trunk of her car. It’s so hard to get good aiding-and-abetting help these days, isn’t it?”
Jillian’s voice was dry and metallic. “Larry, call Howard Anderson. I’m not going to listen to one more word of this.”
“When you call your lawyer, or fixer, or whoever Anderson is,” Nola said, “you can tell him the pattern the spray tan left behind on your pants is called blowback. It couldn’t have happened unless the machine was on and you were operating it. It’ll probably be Exhibit D, maybe E, at your trial. Funny sidebar, it was your wardrobe that gave you away on Charley’s murder, too.”
Larry came out of his shock coma long enough to choke out a question. “Wait, you’re saying Jillian killed the singer too?”
“Well she does get consistently high scores for marks-manship at your gun club,” Nola said brightly. “And the maid says she takes the .38 in her purse when she’s going to be out late. But, like I said, it was really those gorgeous Louboutins she wore to the premiere that gave her away.”
“Did the Louboutins confess? Or did you have to beat it out of them?” Monica said derisively.
Keep it up, Nola thought. I’m sure the nice judge will find you just as contemptible as I do. The pins-and-needles feeling in her limbs was dying away, and evidence summations were so much cooler standing up, so she decided to end on a high note.
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