Fourth Wall

by Jason Blacker

  I was headed up to Britain’s Best on Rodeo Drive. If I had to guess, I figured that next to Hollywood’s Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard, Rodeo Drive had to be the next most popular destination in LA. But I could be wrong. What I did know for sure was that you wouldn’t find me up on Rodeo Drive at the kinds of prices that’d make a sultan blush. Now Britain’s Best was not actually on Rodeo Drive which I’d been led to believe which meant it wasn’t with the Guccis and Versaces and Porsches. As such, I was expecting it to be a little more affordable. At least for some.

  Now why they told their customers they were on Rodeo Drive was probably obvious. That’s the landmark folks knew. They were actually on Beverly Drive which I’d found out having called them first.

  I pulled up into a parking spot not far from the business. It was a small space with glass windows out front and an awning made up like the Union Jack which had their name on it. The glass doors were heavy and solid and there were a few customers inside perusing all sorts of British biscuits, jams and other authentic trinkets. A woman younger than me was up front at the till. She looked British. How could I tell? She had a horse’s mouth with teeth that reminded me of an old picket fence left to disrepair. I approached her smiling, for she wasn’t busy.

  “How may I help you?” she asked. I put her in her thirties. Mid to late, I couldn’t be sure and I didn’t want to be unkind. What caught me by surprise was her American accent.

  “Ah yes,” I said, “I’m with the LAPD and I’d like to speak to the owner if he’s in.”

  I flashed her my badge which I still had and used when it suited me. I didn’t let her take a particularly good look because what I was doing was illegal.

  “What’s it about?” she asked, now more concerned than suspicious.

  “Not to worry, it’s not to do with you but rather how you may help in a murder investigation,” I said, trying to assuage her nerves.

  “Oh, I see,” she said. “Just give me a moment.”

  I watched her leave the till and head into the back of the store through a door. I looked around for a while. My heritage might be Irish, but I felt no particular pull to any of the items in this place. Marmalades and jams and biscuits and English chocolates. I’d tasted a lot of their products, just probably not authentically.

  In another section of the store were tartans, kilts, berets, scarves and flags and trinkets like red English telephone booths, a TARDIS, British postcards, and DVDs of British TV shows. I didn’t realize people still bought DVDs. Strolling around, I noticed two cameras. One was up front pointed at the door and the other was pointed towards the back of the store, placed about midway.

  They were probably gonna be useless. First of all they were too high up on the ceiling. Anyone worth their thieving salt would wear a cap or hoodie thus obscuring their face, and with only the two cameras it looked like there was enough dead space to fit an abattoir.

  The door to the back opened and two women walked towards me. The one I’d met was pointing at me and saying something to the older woman with her. There was a familial resemblance as they got closer. They were of similar height and the pair of them had horses faces, though the older woman had better teeth. The older woman offered me her hand. I took it. It was a damp, soft English hand.

  “Hello, Detective…”

  “Anthony Carrick,” I said, letting her believe what she must.

  “My daughter Beverly tells me you’re here about a murder.”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so,” I said in hushed tones. “Is there somewhere better suited to our conversation?”

  She nodded.

  “My office in the back,” she said.

  As we left, I turned to thank Beverly for her troubles. When you needed the help of others and you didn’t have a warrant, I found that pleasantries, manners and generally ingratiating yourself was usually as good.

  We entered into the back area of the store which was a small storeroom or warehouse if you wanted to be so bold as to call it that. Open shelves were lined out towards the back and stacked with boxes and open containers of Britain’s Best’s goods, I imagined. To the left was a small area partitioned off with a desk and a couple of chairs. There was a computer monitor on the desk and a keyboard and I imagined a computer tower somewhere on the floor I couldn’t see. The desk was in an L shape. The older woman went and sat behind the desk. I sat in front of it.

  “This is a wonderful shop you have, Ms.?” I said.

  She put her hand to her chest and flushed a little red.

  “Please forgive me, I’ve forgotten my manners. I’m Mrs. Kathleen Styles, Kathy. My husband Gordon and I own the store. Beverly whom you met earlier is our daughter and helps us out.”

  “A family dynasty then that you’re creating,” I said genuinely.

  She smiled at it. Her accent was thick but easy to understand. I put her from Northern England, but that was a guess more than anything. But I wanted to find out.

  “Whereabouts in the old country are you from?” I asked.

  “Hull,” she said. “Kingston upon Hull.”

  She looked at me for any sign of knowledge. I had none.

  “It’s in Yorkshire, opposite side of Liverpool, in the neck of the country. If you cut Ireland in half and carry that line through to the East end of Britain, that’s about where Hull is.”

  She smiled at me. It helped. I had a general idea of where she was from.

  “But that was over twenty-five years ago now, when Beverly was just little.”

  She sorted some papers on her desk and then looked back up at me.

  “Carrick, now that sounds to me like an Irish name,” she said.

  “It is,” I said. “My great grandparents on my father’s side came over in 1921. My grandfather was just a young boy then. Both my father and I were born here.”

  “Where here exactly?”

  “Oklahoma, Stillwater, Oklahoma,” I said.

  She was still shuffling papers, but I didn’t mind the distraction.

  “So are you a fan of Merle Haggard then?” she asked.

  “‘Okie from Muskogee’,” I said. “I like the song well enough. Haggard’s not from Oklahoma though.”

  “Oh,” she said, “I just assumed on account of the song.”

  “A lot of people make that mistake. Though I take the term Okie as a slur. A lot of us Oklahomans do,” I said, trying to manage any direction she might have thought to take the conversation concerning my whereabouts.

  “I’m sorry, Detective,” she said, “I just get a bit carried away when I meet someone who might have a connection to the old country. And what with your last name being Irish, I, well, I just got to asking you some questions. But you’re here about more pressing matters.”

  “Sadly yes,” I said. “Late last night an actress was poisoned to death during a performance at the Los Angeles Theatre.”

  I had her full attention now. The papers were neatly stacked in a couple of low piles on either side of her.

  “That’s awful.”

  I nodded.

  “The reason I’m here, is because she was poisoned with Pommie brand pomegranate juice. And I’ve been led to believe you’re one of the few places to get Pommie.”

  Styles nodded her head.

  “Yes. Actually, I think we’re the only place in LA where you can get that brand. It’s quite popular. We can hardly keep it in stock. How can I help you?”

  “Well, there’re a couple of things I’d like to ask to see if we can’t figure out who bought the juice that was used to poison her.”

  “You don’t think, that, um, it was poisoned here, do you?”

  “No, we’ve determined that the seal was broken and the poison was added that way.”

  She nodded gratefully.

  “Now I noticed that you have a couple of cameras in the store. Do they work?”

  She nodded.

  “They do, though they record on a seventy-two hour loop.”

  I pinched my lips together.
It might have looked like I was either constipated or just punched in the gut. I was neither. But what she had just told me wasn’t going to be of any help.

  “Hmm,” I said. “I’ve got a feeling the juice was likely bought before then. Though perhaps you can help me with that.”

  “How?” she asked.

  “Well, we’re looking for anyone who might have brought at least six bottles of Pommie, maybe more. And if you could, perhaps we can go back a month just to be sure.”

  I was probably pushing my luck, but I felt lucky. I felt the luck of the Irish in Britain’s Best.

  “You’re in luck, Detective,” she said, and I thought about how it’d been since I’d actually held that title. “We just got a new software sales database that helps to track all sorts of sales. I can just input your criteria and if it happened it’ll spit it out. If you’d come by just last year I wouldn’t have been able to do this for you.”

  She was smiling at me. I smiled back.

  “Thank God for small mercies,” I said. She went to pecking away at the keyboard like they were precious kernels of black corn, and her fingers the beaks of hens.

  “Six or more in the quantity. The product is Pommie pomegranate juice and the date is, shall we say first of May until today.”

  I nodded, though I didn’t think she was talking to me.

  “Enter,” she said, hitting the return key with a flourish. She looked at me.

  “I usually order a box of the juice which contains six cases and each case contains twelve juice bottles.”

  “That’s not very much,” I said, trying to sound like I gave a shit.

  “Well, it’s expensive, Detective. I have to charge almost ten dollars a bottle. Though for flats I sell them at ninety-nine dollars. I have a few customers who always buy a flat every month. I might have to increase my order to two boxes. Though it’s only at ten boxes that I get any reasonable discount, and I can’t imagine selling that many of them. Have you ever tried pomegranate juice?”

  I nodded.

  “Did you like it?”

  I shook my head.

  “Exactly, it’s not for everyone. I think it’s an acquired taste. I don’t care for it much myself, but I think part of the allure is the apparent health benefits of the juice. Though after POM got into trouble for exaggerating those claims, sales dipped a little, though they’ve since come back. And there’s so much competition for pomegranate juice now that it’s hard to sell a premium brand. You’ve got POM as mentioned, and then there’s Welch’s who’ve gotten into it along with Minute Maid, Ocean Spray, Langers. It seems like everyone has a pom juice now. Tom’s Pom is very popular and half the price of Pommie. Pommie, I fear, will always remain an upscale niche brand.”

  I thought about closing my eyes for a moment to catch a few winks while this woman droned on about juices I didn’t particularly care about. But I didn’t have a warrant and I was surfing on the temperamental froth of human kindness. So I nodded and smiled and grinned and bore it.

  “And part of the problem is that they all have too much sugar. And we know how sugar has become enemy number one nowadays. Though I’m not sure that’s fair or accurate. It certainly hasn’t hampered the sales of our Cadbury chocolates, though I suppose they don’t have a health halo on them like the pomegranate juice has. And then of course there’s the British arrogance, if you don’t mind me saying so. At least in the case of Pommie. Seems the company is quite happy to continue charging a premium as their sales shrink.”

  The door to the storeroom opened and Beverly stepped in. She looked like a vision, an angel sent to save me from Styles’ infernos.

  “Mum,” she said, looking at Kathleen. “Do you know if we have any more of the Keep Calm posters?”

  “Yes, darling, they should be in the back aisle on the right side. Are there none out front?”

  Beverly shook her head and quickly walked towards the aisle that her mother had mentioned. I took my opening.

  “Do we have any results?” I asked.

  Kathy looked at the computer screen.

  “Oh yes,” she nodded. “I see my regulars each bought a case. Seems that a new box of Pommie arrived on Monday May sixteenth. There’s nothing unusual until Friday the twenty-seventh of May. Someone brought exactly six Pommie’s.”

  “Who?” I said, thinking Bingo to myself.

  “Uh, a Mr. Lavan Emmett,” she said.

  I frowned at her.

  “Are you sure?”

  “That’s what it says, come and have a look.”

  I got up out of my chair and went over and leaned in from behind her. She was right, six Pommies at nine ninety-five each plus tax came to sixty-five oh seven. The name on the card was Lavan Emmett and the time of the transaction was at four twenty in the afternoon.

  “Do you have the actual receipt?” I asked.

  “We should do,” she said.

  She turned towards the filing cabinets behind her and pulled out one of the drawers and started leafing through folders and files. I couldn’t figure out why Emmett would want to buy pomegranate juice to poison his wife. And if he did, surely he’d use cash. This made no sense. Styles turned around.

  “I have it here,” she said.

  She showed me the thin receipt with the signature in blue ink. It looked tentative, a little unsteady but it could have been Emmett’s signature. Problem was, I didn’t know what his signature looked like. I pulled out my phone and took a picture of it.

  Beverly walked out with a few posters.

  “Can you tell who was working that afternoon?” I asked.

  She nodded and went back to her computer.

  “Um, it was me,” she said.

  “Listen,” I said, leaning across the table as I had gone and sat back down when she’d rifled through the filing cabinet. “There’s no video right, because it’s too long ago?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So I need you to really do your best and to try and think back to that day and tell me if you can remember anything about who bought those juice bottles. It’s extremely important.”

  Styles looked back at her computer, and nodded at it.

  “Yes, I do remember a little bit about it now. I see that one of my favorite customers, Mrs. Bisniak came in at three thirty and bought a case of Pommie. Yes, that’s right, and then less than an hour later this Lavan Emmett came in. I felt as if I’d seen him before, but I don’t think he was a customer. I usually remember my customers if they’ve been in more than once. And I remember him going straight to the cooler and picking out six bottles and struggling to juggle them in his hands as he came back to the till. I told him that it was cheaper if he bought the case but he wasn’t interested. Didn’t say much and wasn’t very personable.”

  I brought up a picture of Lavan Emmett that I’d found by searching on the internet for him. I showed it to Styles on my phone.

  “Is this what he looked like?”

  She shook her head.

  “No. Oh, that Mr. Emmett. I thought I knew the name. No, it definitely wasn’t him. Though this man was of a similar age I think. Now that I think about it, he might be one of the local homeless men that wander around picking out bottles from the trash, but he looked different. It looked as if he’d been cleaned up.”

  “Have you seen him around today?” I asked.

  She looked up and away towards the back of the storeroom.

  “No, I can’t say I have. Sometimes he’s out front picking through the garbage bins, other times he’s out back in the big dumpster bins.”

  “And you’re sure it’s him?”

  “Well, I probably wouldn’t swear under oath it’s him, but I’m pretty sure. I bet if I get another good look at him I’ll be able to confirm it.”

  I nodded and put my phone back in my pocket.

  “Let me give you my number, and if you see him again, please call right away.”

  She nodded.

  “Okay. You don’t really think he’s a murderer,
do you?” She sounded concerned. I shook my head.

  “No, but he was obviously used by the murderer to cover their identity.”

  She nodded. I gave her my phone number and she wrote it down. I got up and thanked her for her time. I left the way I’d come in. Outside I looked up and down the street. There wasn’t a homeless person for miles. Usually you can’t put on a jacket without hitting one of them. I didn’t have time to lollygag. I had to get Aibhilin back to her mother’s and I had to meet up with Johnny Rotten to interview the two girls who were at the Ancher party on Friday night.

  FIFTEEN

  Smelting the Truth

  I made it to LAPD’s Hollywood Station just off Wilcox Avenue in time for the four pm meeting with Miki Smelter and Patricia Kordel. Seemed that maybe those two could never be seen independently of each other. Roberts greeted me and we went upstairs to hang out in the member’s lounge until they were called. I took a bottle of water. Just as we’d sat down to rest our dogs Roberts got the call that our guests were here. It was only five after.

  The nice thing about the Hollywood Station is that they have both interrogation rooms and interview rooms. There is a difference. Interview rooms are often used with kids to put them at ease as well as adults who aren’t associated with any crime but with whom we need to talk privately. Think of them like a shrink’s office. Nice couch, some comfy chairs, a table. But small. The shrink is poor and he’s doing pro bono work.

  These interview rooms are comfy for four, crowded with five, and we were five. Smelter and Kordel sat on the couch. I let Beeves and Roberts take the chairs across from them and I leaned up against the wall near the window that was frosted but let in a warm light.

  Smelter and Kordel could have been sisters. They were both around five six and blonde bombshells, though I figured it took much of the morning to make them look as good as they did. I wasn’t sure how they’d look the next morning after a tumble in the sack. Maybe they’d get up early and make themselves up before you awoke. I got the feeling that these two women, likely in their early thirties were clinging onto the last memories of their twenties like a free climber on his last toehold.