Her thin eyebrows lifted a few millimeters. "Do you have any idea what this thing looks like? The press has already caught wind of Keith Conner's demise, and comparisons are being drawn to River Phoenix and--I shit you not--James Dean. The DA called me twice on my drive over here. That's the DA herself. This is a dead movie star. Valentine and I haven't worked a movie-star murder since . . . well, that'd be, uh, never. You bet your ass this thing is going upstairs, and upstairs from there. So if you have something you want us to hear, you'd better talk fast."
I did. Though my thoughts were scattered and my voice quavered, I forced myself to pull it together and lay out for them everything that had transpired. Valentine stayed with his arms crossed, expressionless, the only sounds the occasional thwick of him sucking his teeth, Sally's pen scratching at her pad, and helicopters chopping the night sky, circling like hawks, their beams livening the curtains at intervals.
Sally looked at me blankly once I'd finished. "You're serious."
It didn't seem like a question, but I said, "If I could make something like that up, I'd still be a screenwriter."
She said, "The cops were tipped by an anonymous call, made from a courtesy hotel phone. A man claimed to have spied someone matching your description forcing Keith Conner into Room 1407."
"That's the killer. For a frame-up to work, he had to plan the time of death for right before I got there. Keith had just been killed when I--"
She held up her hand. Stop. I waited, desperate and hopeful, trying to read her face. She looked back, mad at herself, or maybe me.
"You have to believe me," I said. "Because no one else will."
She chewed her cheek for what seemed a very long time. "With innocent suspects, the more you sweat 'em, the angrier they get. It's a great rule. Half the time."
A chill moved through me. Had I been angry? Angry enough?
"The other half?" I asked.
"They don't get angrier."
Valentine said, "That is a problem."
"Isn't it?" Sally cracked her knuckles by squeezing her fist, as close to worked up as I'd seen her. "I don't like generalizations. I put stock in global warming and the Second Amendment. I think war is sometimes the answer. I believe in Yoda, Gandalf, and Jesus. I like veal and porn--not in that order and not together. It's a complicated damn world, and I think this thing stinks to high heaven. So I'm gonna do something alarming. I'm gonna take you seriously."
I blew out a shaky breath.
She pointed a finger at my chest. "But for us to be able to have a chance to help you, here's what you have to say--"
The door banged open, and a tall, lean man in a suit ambled in.
Sally kept her eyes locked on mine, even as she said, "You're five minutes early."
"Kent Gable, RHD."
"I'm Sally Richards. This is Detective Valentine. He'll give you his first name if he's feeling social."
"My partner's up the hall in 1407," Gable said. "Thanks for holding down the fort. We got it from here."
Sally kept staring at me expectantly. A loaded look, as if it could convey what she'd been about to tell me. Valentine's gaze was on me, too. My brain lurched through possibilities.
"We set up a cordon outside, but the area's thick with media." Gable swiped a hand across his clean-shaven jaw and finally looked at me directly. "Why isn't this man in cuffs?"
I placed my hands on my knees. "I'll cooperate fully with Detective Richards and Detective Valentine. But only with them. Anyone else, I'll lawyer up." I didn't sound confident, not at all, but it was the best guess I could muster about the move Sally needed me to make.
Valentine's nostrils quivered ever so slightly, and Sally exhaled with quiet relief, a vein standing out in her forehead. She blinked once, long, then turned to face Gable, who was staring at me, slack-jawed. "We've had some interaction with the suspect over the past week," she said. "He had a note requesting us should he wind up in troub--"
Gable said crisply, "I know about the note, sweetheart--"
Valentine made a pained face.
"--but I don't think that means the suspect writes his own ticket."
A standoff. All of us staring at one another, the three of them standing, me seated on the bed like a schoolboy watching grown-ups argue. Totally at their mercy.
Valentine cleared his throat. His mustache twitched. "You know whose ass is on the line with this one? Even more than ours? The DA's. You might know from the newspapers that her office's performance on celebrity trials hasn't exactly been stellar, not even with you boys taking point on those investigations. Now, if we have the key suspect in the Keith Conner murder talking, my guess is the DA's gonna want that suspect to keep talking instead of getting busy building a legal dream team."
The Barney theme song chimed out. Sally palmed her cell phone. "Speak of the devil." She offered Gable a sugary smile. "Excuse me a minute, dear heart." She walked past him and out the door, and he followed, a fresh urgency in his step.
Valentine walked over and crouched before me, his mouth set in a sour curl. Behind him, early-morning light seeped around the curtain, edging his notchless rise of hair with copper. "I worked a lot of years with a lot of cops. And lemme tell you, that woman has the best gut instinct on the force. Don't underestimate her. Her and I, we play this front. That I don't like her, I'm a bigot, whatever. Works well for us, gives us some angles. But lemme tell you: That's out the window now, along with everything else. I know how you feel right now. The fear. I can see it in your eyes, smell it out your pores. But you still can't know, not yet, how bad this is. Sally and I, we don't have to play no good-cop/bad-cop. If we get a chance, you tell us everything you know and we will do what we can to save your life. That's the only play here. The only play. You got it?"
I said, "I got it."
The door handle jangled, and Valentine and I looked tensely to see which detective would reenter.
Sally leaned in, one hand riding the lever. "Better get the handcuffs on. We need 'em for the cameras."
Light-headed, I stood. Static dotted my vision, then cleared. Valentine cinched metal around my wrists and steered me forward. My feet felt dead, like blocks of wood.
Sally took a deep breath, and I could see, beneath her unflappable facade, that she was rattled. As I approached, those flat eyes appraised me. "Ready for your close-up, Mr. DeMille?"
Chapter 34
"Let's start putting this thing together," Sally said.
After being assailed by news crews and camera flashes, I'd had the relative calm of the sedan ride to try to settle down and focus. The helicopters tracked us, compounding my headache until the bullet-proof door of the station sucked closed behind us, silencing the thumping. I never thought I'd be relieved to be taken into custody. I was now backstage in a tiny office overlooking the interrogation room, on the cop side of the two-way mirror. It was private, unoccupied, and--aside from the various recording decks and closed-circuit units--as sparse as my shared Northridge office. Swivel chair, cup of coffee, TV on a mount--a casual, just-friends approach to keep the information flowing. The view into the interrogation room with its foreboding wooden chair, sporting rings for handcuffs, was a reminder of where I would wind up the minute I stopped being useful.
Pay It Forward was a distant memory; I'd wound up playing the wrong role in Body Heat.
Sally clicked on a digital camera and swung it from its usual angle through the two-way so it pointed at the three of us, sitting like colleagues spitballing a case.
I was still winded from being hustled upstairs, past the too-long stares of the other cops. "Has someone reached Ari?"
"We believe so," Valentine said.
"Where is she? What'd they tell her? Is she all right?"
"I don't know," Sally said, "and you have other concerns at the moment."
"I need to know that my wife is--"
"You don't have that luxury," she said sharply. "The captain of Robbery-Homicide is bending the chief's ear as we speak, and unless w
e find a crack in this case and turn it into a fissure, Detective Sweetheart will be back to arrest your skinny ass and throw it in Men's Central. So fucking focus."
Valentine caught me numbly staring at the news crawl beneath the live helicopter footage of Hotel Angeleno, and he reached up and slapped the muted TV, which clicked over to a soap. "Where were you at nine P.M. on February fifteenth?" he asked.
I closed my eyes, fought for clarity. Monday, two days ago . . . "Driving out to Indio to meet Elisabeta. Why?"
"Do you have anyone who can corroborate that?"
"Of course not. They told me not to . . ." Dread formed a lump in my throat to match the one in my gut. "Why? What happened?"
"We responded to a vandalism report at Keith Conner's house. Someone spray-painted 'LIAR' across his fence, then scaled the gates and left a dead rat on the windshield of one of his cars. A security camera picked up some footage of the intruder on the grounds, in the shadows. The guy was about your build, but his face was obscured because he was wearing--"
I said quietly, "A Red Sox cap."
"Right. It's not our jurisdiction, but we got pulled in because--"
"Conner assumed it was me. Of course. I'd gone to see him a few days before."
"Not a friendly visit, we heard." Valentine flipped through his notepad. "Left a bad taste in Conner's mouth. He filed a complaint the morning before the break-in at his house."
"So he and I did exactly the dance they hoped we would. Me charging over there, him documenting my erratic, aggressive behavior."
"Yeah, and his counsel advised him to start a paper trail."
"That's why you came to see me at work. To follow up on the complaint."
Sally said, "Given your and Conner's grudge, we had to do some prying, see if you were keeping both oars in the water. At first we considered that Conner had invented your visit just to smear you, but then we found a paparazzi guy who confirmed you were there. Pictures, even."
Joe Vente.
"And afterward we spoke to the head of security at Summit, your boy Jerry Donovan, who told us how you were trying to get Keith Conner's address. The bartender at the Formosa has you drinking the brown stuff at breakfast time."
"Great," I said. "Unstable, drinking, obsessive." I drew in a breath. "Here's what's gonna come out next. The murder weapon? It belongs to me. It'll be the same club I threw at the intruder in my backyard. Also, I've been having problems at school--missing classes, conflicts with students. I have a paranoid view of government agents, as evidenced by my screenplay. I even tore my house apart in a delusional fit, looking for imaginary planted bugs."
"Your wife can confirm that they were there," Sally said. "The bugs."
"Right," I said, "an unbiased witness."
"After we filled Jerry Donovan in about the break-in at Conner's, he told us about the surveillance equipment he inspected at your place and about the transmitters he found in some of your clothes. So there's one independent confirmation."
Jerry must've really thought I'd posed a threat to Conner if he'd come clean about his clandestine visit to our house. I said, "But for all he knows, I could've planted all that stuff myself as part of some elaborate cover story."
"Okay . . ." Sally's cheeks were flushed. "If you clubbed Keith Conner to death, why was there no spatter on your hands or clothes?"
"That's angle-dependent, and two out of four expert witnesses will get the math right. Or wrong. Plus, did the crime-scene guys check the U-pipe under the hotel-room sink?"
Sally and Valentine looked at each other. "Yes," she said slowly. "Traces of blood."
"Which will prove to be Keith's. Which shows I washed off what spatter there was after killing him."
"Which side are you arguing here?" Valentine asked.
"I'm arguing the facts. I've got no copies of the discs or e-mails, and the Web sites have vanished, leaving me with only ten-second cell-phone-recorded bursts of secondary footage I could've generated myself. Then I steal out of bed late at night, having lied to my wife, to break in to Hotel Angeleno. I even ducked past a staff member, making sure to look conspicuously furtive."
"You build a convincing case," Valentine said.
"I'm the perfect fall guy. Angry, discontented. All they had to do was push the blinking buttons and I charged right down that road."
A news flash cut in over the soap opera, a picture of Keith Conner with the dates bookending his life, then footage of me being led from the hotel, anguish written across my gray features, my teeth bared like a chimpanzee simulating a human grin. I didn't remember anything of that walk but flashbulbs and photographers shouting my name to draw my focus. My name, my face, out over the morning airwaves. The East Coast was already reading about the whole sordid affair. My parents, over their Maxwell House. I was now one of those creepy, unhinged assassins, men with vacant stares and odd fixations and grievances lovingly nursed to bloody fruition. It hit me powerfully, devastatingly, that nothing in my life could ever get back to normal again.
But Valentine gave me scant room for self-pity. "Since you have all the answers, why don't you tell us why anyone would bother to frame you."
"This isn't about me. It was about killing Keith."
"Or having you go down," Valentine said.
"There are easier ways to take down someone like me than killing a movie star."
"Yes," Sally said, "but maybe none this nasty."
Valentine said to me, "Explain."
My head was lowered, but I could feel them studying me. Through the muddle of my terror, I'd forced myself to work out at least this. "They wanted Conner dead, so they looked around for someone with a good motive. They didn't have to look far. He and I had a well-publicized dispute, not to mention the outstanding lawsuit and battery charge."
Anyway, I figured the lawsuit was still outstanding; to my knowledge, my attorney had never received the settlement offer from the studio. Had a resolution ever been close, or was that just another way I'd been strung along? Was the legal back-and-forth even related to all this? Given the barrel I was currently staring down, I didn't want to sidetrack Sally and Valentine for something so vague, at least unless my lawyer could wrangle some concrete information out of the studio.
Valentine broke me from my thoughts. "If this whole thing wasn't about you, why go to these lengths? Why have you jump through all these hoops?"
"Think about it," I said. "Does any case anywhere in the world get the kind of attention that a Hollywood murder trial does? Every footprint, every timeline, every scrap of expert testimony is laid bare for public consumption. And with a star as the victim? This is going to be the most closely scrutinized case since the one that invented the genre. Every base has to be covered. Even then you guys usually can't get a conviction."
"So you're saying they needed more than a fall guy," Sally said. "They needed a fall guy they could operate, who they could steer into the ideal frame-up." She chewed the cap of her pen. "Robbery-Homicide's been known to get tunnel vision when they lock on to a suspect. The guys framing you knew if they could make the case look like an open-and-shut, that would prevent a thorough investigation."
I said, "So the question is, what would a thorough investigation lead to?"
"Someone else with motive. Who else has motive to kill Keith Conner?"
"Movie critics," Valentine said. He weathered Sally's look. "What's it always come down to? Money. Sex. Revenge." A nod in my direction. "Your spat with him involved all three."
That tripped a memory. I snapped my fingers, excited. "That paparazzi guy, Vente, told me that Keith got some club girl pregnant and that there's a pending paternity suit. If Keith winds up dead, his money might go to that woman and the baby."
Sally flipped the page in her notebook, kept scribbling.
"A guy like Keith," Valentine said, "there's gotta be more stuff like that."
"Yes," I said. "Plenty. Someone's got to look into his business dealings, if he owed the wrong people money, fucked the wrong w
ife, whatever. Whoever did this is still out there. You have to make sure the DA doesn't treat this as a closed case. You've got to help me."
Sally and Valentine just looked at me, their faces tense and, I feared, helpless.
A door slammed somewhere in the building. A muffled shout grew louder--"I know he's here"--and then Ariana lunged into the interrogation room through the looking glass, flinging her arm as if she'd just twisted free of someone's grasp. "Where is he? Where?"
Two beat cops followed her in, the scene unfolding as if the two-way mirror were a big-screen TV. Ari's sudden appearance in this context was disorienting; the whole thing felt somehow removed in time and space, a vision of Christmas present.
Her face was flushed, her fists clenched. She got the table between her and the cops, and they squared off over the surface. "I want to see him. I want to see that he's okay."
Reality slammed me, and I heard myself shouting, "Ari! Ari! I'm right here."
Soundproofed.
I scrambled to my feet, but Sally placed a surprisingly powerful hand on my shoulder. "No," she said. "Not until we get separate statements."
We stood there an instant, watching my wife despair, me and two cops. I grabbed for the intercom. "I'm not gonna let her--"
Valentine had my arm twisted back across itself so hard I let out a grunt. "We haven't filed on you yet, but if you push it, we will. You want to keep chatting or take out a third mortgage to cover a bail bond?" He set me firmly back into my chair. "You will listen to what you're told."
Inside the interrogation room, Ariana's shoulders curled forward and then she shuddered, and I realized she was on the verge of weeping. The resolve had drained out of her. One of the cops circled the table and took her by the arm. "Ma'am, you'll come with me now."
The other cop was casting nervous glances at the mirror, at us. Ari, of course, picked up on it immediately. "Patrick? He's there? He's back there?"
She moved toward the mirror, the cop letting her arm slide through his grasp. "Patrick, why are you back there? Are you okay?"
They're Watching (2010) Page 18