“Oh, really?” Reba said, sounding a little cagey. “Still, I’d like to have them for sentimental value. Perhaps I can salvage a square foot or two and make a patchwork rug to remind me of Lenore.”
Ha! A patchwork Persian. Let him try to wriggle out of that one. If Reba was willing to take rugs that were trashed, it’d be no business of Binion’s to withhold them.
“They’ve already been disposed of,” he said, puckering his lips as if tasting something rancid. “They were utterly destroyed, I doubt you would have found any use for them.”
“You’re quite sure?” she said to Binion, her words clipped.
He gave her a regretful nod. “I’m so sorry.”
Reba was getting hot under her linen collar, I could tell. Those rugs were worth tens of thousands of dollars, and she was choking on an upsurge of anger. The righteous anger of the ripped-off.
“Well, I don’t want to sound greedy or anything,” Reba said with a tight little smile, “but was there anything worth having in the whole stinking mess?”
Binion’s eyes widened a hair, but he maintained his lawyerly aplomb. “I’m afraid not. That was the bad news I had to impart.”
“Oh really? Well, what about her Francis Bacon painting?” Reba blurted out.
Three jaws dropped simultaneously. Binion’s, Terry’s, and mine.
“What painting?” Binion said, sounding genuinely perplexed.
Reba jumped up and pointed a brick-colored fingernail directly at his nose. “I’m on to you, Mr. Slick! Don’t you tell me those rugs were ruined! I know what you’ve been doing!”
I grabbed Reba by the arm and started dragging her from the office. “I’m sorry, Mr. Binion. She’s been under a lot of stress—”
“You stabbed Suzie Magnuson, didn’t you?” Reba shouted as Terry seized her other arm. Reba wrestled against our grip, trying desperately to break free and rip Binion’s face off. Her own face was purple, the muscles of her neck straining through her mottled skin.
“She doesn’t know what she’s saying,” Terry assured Binion. “She’s on medication . . . for Alzheimer’s!”
A crowd was gathering in the hallway outside Binion’s office, a wall of gray silk and striped ties and curious faces. Binion’s pert secretary had just arrived with a tray full of water glasses, frowning in confusion.
“Killer of defenseless women!” Reba screamed, spittle spraying from her mouth. “Rug stealer! Art thief!”
I grabbed one of the glasses of water from the secretary’s tray and jerked it in Reba’s direction, sloshing its entire contents in her face.
She sputtered and spat, blinking her eyes and wiping the water from the front of her blouse in stunned silence. Then she looked up at Terry and me with a shit-eating grin.
“Oh my,” she said.
“Oh yeah,” I said, reaching over to grab her purse from the chair.
“I guess we’ll be going now,” Terry said. “Thanks, ’bye!”
We hustled our way through the throng of stunned onlookers, who parted like the Red Sea to let the psychotic woman pass unimpeded. I looked back over my shoulder at Binion, who had stood to watch us go. His hands were clenched at his side and he was shaking with rage.
And the look in his eyes made me want to run and hide.
Terry drove, while Reba repaired her makeup in the backseat of the Mercedes. As soon as we were out of the garage, I called Eli Weintraub on our cell phone. Eli was my mentor in the PI business and surrogate daddy. He was also a lawyer of great renown, at least among the criminal classes.
I was put through immediately.
“Eli, it’s Kerry. You busy?”
“Never too busy for you, doll.”
“Listen, I need a little help with something. Could we come by? We’re in the neighborhood.”
“Who’s we?”
“Me, Terry, and Aunt Reba.”
“I’m finally gonna meet the famous Aunt Reba?”
“Yeah,” I said, “she’s really looking forward to it.”
The truth is, I had avoided putting the two of them together for years. I was sure that Reba would think Eli a total slob, with his decades-old polyester suits, scuffed wingtips and perpetual five-o’clock shadow, and I didn’t want to risk hurting his feelings when she looked down her delicate nose at him. But the times had changed. Reba had just made slanderous accusations against a Beverly Hills bigwig, and she was hardly in a position to be choosy about who rode in to her rescue.
“I’m with a scumbag,” Eli said matter-of-factly, “be free in ten minutes.” He hung up.
A “scumbag” meant a client who was a criminal defendant. Similarly, Eli referred to his divorce clients as “idiots.” The names were apt, since the scumbags usually were guilty of whatever they’d been charged with, and the idiots usually had been totally blind to the faults of their spouses. But it never ceased to amaze me that Eli got away with essentially insulting his clients to their faces. The truth was that his was such a naturally foul mouth, and the names and imprecations sounded so much like his normal speech, that no one ever appeared to notice.
We pulled up to Eli’s office building and I could tell right away that Reba was unimpressed. It was a utilitarian sixties high-rise, the planters beside the entrance full of dead stalks, with no doorman, not even a parking valet. This wasn’t the skeeviest of Los Angeles neighborhoods—they certainly came more rundown and past-their-prime than this—but the “Mid-Wilshire” district was one of the more nondescript. There was absolutely nothing Hollywoody or beachy or rustic or postmodern about it, nothing to distinguish it like other areas of LA.
We opened the door on the tenth floor office and Priscilla jumped up from her desk to greet us. “Honey, how are you?” she said, grabbing Terry in a bear hug. “It’s been too long.”
“Hey, Priss. Over here,” I said.
“Oh, sorry,” she said, blushing. “I can never tell you two apart.”
Priscilla was one of those extremely capable people who juggle work duties like dinner plates, never letting one crash to the floor. Now in her mid-thirties, she served as receptionist, legal secretary, office manager, and cook—the backbone of Eli’s one-man firm. I had worked with her for three years, and she’d become a good friend and confidante during the rough years after our dad died, when Terry hit the skids. I didn’t see Priss that much since I’d gone out on my own, but whenever we did get together it felt just like old times.
She hugged me, then shook Reba’s hand.
“So nice to meet you,” Priscilla said to Reba, her plastic Mardi Gras bracelets clattering.
“And you, dear.” Reba’s lips pursed as she took in Priscilla’s white vinyl hip-hugging miniskirt, hot pink pumps, and long platinum hair extensions with purple stripes. The nose ring didn’t seem to be doing much for Reba, either.
“Eli’s on the phone right now,” Priscilla said, kneeling on an ergonomic chair that looked like a torture device for joints. “But you can go on in.”
I led the way to Eli’s office. He jumped up, phone to his ear, and leaned over the cluttered desk to plant a kiss on my cheek, simultaneously waving at Terry. Then he turned his attention to Reba.
“Reba, at last,” he said, taking her hand to kiss it.
She looked pleased, if a little conflicted, at his gallantry.
“Have a seat, ladies. I’ll be right with you.”
Reba peered into the threadbare seat of a chair as if checking it for dirt or lice, then gave it a little brush and sat down, straightening her skirt.
I looked at Eli as he spoke on the phone, trying to see him as Reba must be seeing him—objectively, without the smoky lens of my affection. He was like a sixty-five-year-old human tuber, a big round middle tapering up to sloped shoulders and a pointed head with thinning black hair. His big nose was cratered with pockmarks, his green and red suspenders clashed with his pink Oxford shirt and navy suit, and he reeked of expensive stogies and cheap cologne.
All in all, Eli Weintraub was
one of the least glamorous guys you could ever meet. But without a doubt one of the best and the smartest.
He finished up his conversation. “Yeah, yeah. I know,” he said into the phone. “These things happen . . . Now take care of that cold, and don’t kill anybody else, okay? Later.”
He hung up and smiled at us, hands open wide. “Now, what can I do for you lovely ladies?”
Where to begin?
I gave him the short version.
We were working for Lenore Richling. We’d seen a valuable painting in her house before she died. We suspected her executor, Hugh Binion, of taking the painting. We went to Binion’s office and Reba had accused him outright of stealing it.
I toned down Reba’s outburst to leave her a little dignity, not mentioning the water in the face, for example, or the banshee screeching. I did say that she’d raised her voice while making pointed accusations and that there was quite an assemblage of witnesses outside the office by the time we left.
Eli slapped his thigh and congratulated Reba. “Good for you! I only wish I coulda seen the motherfucker’s face when you lit into him!”
Reba smiled and blushed, apparently reveling in her new role: muckraker of motherfuckers. She even seemed to be enjoying Eli’s colorful use of language. As seen on TV!
“Binion seemed furious when we left,” I said. “Mad enough to kill.”
“Nah,” Eli said. “He’s highly unethical, but he doesn’t kill people. He couldn’t bleed ’em dry with his fees if he did.”
“He represented two of Reba’s friends,” Terry chimed in, “and both women ended up dead.”
“Who’s the other woman?”
“Suzie Magnuson,” I said. “Another—sorry Reba—rich Beverly Hills widow. We have it from a source on the BHPD that she was murdered.”
“Listen, don’t get me wrong,” Eli said, leaning back in his chair. “I detest Binion, and I have no trouble believing he stole your painting. But you’re gonna have to look someplace else for your widow killer. It’s just not his style.”
Reba made a disappointed face.
“I’m assuming this painting is worth a lot,” Eli said, “if he bothered to steal it.”
“Millions,” I confirmed.
“The guy who painted it is dead?” I nodded. “Say no more. Now, let me get the chronology straight here. You girls were initially hired by the lady who had the painting in her house, right?”
Terry nodded. “Lenore Richling. She originally wanted us to retrieve some money her new husband had run away with.”
“Which you did?”
“Right,” I said.
“And what happened to the husband?”
“Oh, uh. He’s . . . gone.”
Eli scrunched up his brow. “Who sent him packing?”
“We don’t know,” I said, glancing at Reba—signaling to Eli that she didn’t know about Mario’s death.
Eli looked at Reba and cleared his throat. “Well, what about Richling? Did she . . . stamp his ticket?”
Reba was openly staring at me now.
“Uh, no,” I said. “Not personally. She couldn’t have. She was recuperating from a face-lift with her Pomeranian in a hotel room at the time.”
“What the fuck’s a Pomeranian?” Eli said.
“It’s like a Chihuahua,” Terry told him. “Only hairier.”
Eli’s eyes popped, then he exploded with laughter. “Ah-haaaaaa-haa-ha! Recuperating from a face-lift in a hotel room with a hairy Chihuahua? Forty years in the business, and that’s the absolute best alibi I ever heard!”
Just then Priscilla buzzed him on the phone. “’Scuse me, I gotta take this,” he said to us, still guffawing. He punched a button. “Hey, Jerry!” he said into the receiver. “By any chance, were you recuperating from a face-lift with a hairy Chihuahua in a hotel room when your wife’s head got bashed in? Ha ha. Didn’t think so. Just kidding. Call you back in ten.”
He slammed down the phone and honked into a handkerchief, wiped his eyes, and then attempted to pull a straight face.
“Forgive me,” he said. “Please continue.”
“Just a moment,” Reba snapped. “I’m not completely thick. Obviously, Mario’s dead. Why the devil didn’t you girls tell me?”
“Sorry,” Terry said. “You’ve been on a need-to-know basis on some of this.”
“Well, thanks for the vote of confidence!”
This from the woman who’d virtually blown our whole investigation in the past hour with her flapping gums.
“You weren’t on the team when Mario got killed,” I explained.
“Oh.” She looked somewhat appeased. “But if he’s dead, who killed him?”
I sighed. “We have no idea.”
“So how’d you find out about it?” Eli said.
“Someone was shot as we were leaving the apartment he was in. We saw on the news that a young unidentified Latino had been shot and killed there.”
Eli gave us a wise look. “So you don’t even really know that it was Mario. I mean, if he was unidentified.”
I frowned. “Not . . . a hundred percent, I guess.”
“Has anybody contacted you about it,” Eli asked. “The police?”
“Not yet. I thought we should go to them and make a report—” I gave Terry an accusatory look, “but we didn’t.”
“Why not?”
Terry glared back at me. “Because we broke into the apartment and took Lenore’s ten thousand dollars, which could be construed as theft,” she said. “And we could also be pegged as suspects in his murder.”
“Excellent thinking! I guess I taught you something.” Eli beamed at me. I saw Terry smirking in my peripheral vision.
Reba blinked in our direction. “Did you say you have ten thousand dollars of Lenore’s money?”
Busted.
I shrank down in my seat. “Well, technically, we only have around eight thousand of hers. She owed us the other two as a recovery fee.”
“Yeah,” Terry said, “we were only keeping the rest for her while she was in the hospital, but I guess the proper thing would be to turn it over to the estate, to that nice Mr. Binion—”
“You’ll do no such thing!” Reba said.
“Or we could give it to Lenore’s favorite charity . . .” I put in.
Reba made a disdainful face. “Lenore was Lenore’s favorite charity. You girls keep that money and buy yourselves some decent clothes. I won’t have you going around in rags.”
Whew. We were safe from the county comptroller, and with an almost clear conscience, too.
I then told Eli about seeing Lenore in the hospital, and her desperate plea that we pass a message to Hattrick’s former assistant, who was a Russian immigrant. I explained that when we gave her the message, the Russian woman claimed to have no idea what we were talking about.
“We think we’ve stumbled onto a massive conspiracy, involving blackmail and prescription drugs and these dead widows,” Terry said.
Eli frowned and sat forward, planting his forearms on the desk.
“Lenore may have been blackmailing Dr. Hattrick, the plastic surgeon,” she continued. “And we think the plastic surgeon might be involved in a drug ring that operates out of the Dauphine Hotel.”
“Wait, hold on,” Eli said. “A drug ring in a hotel?”
Terry nodded. “It’s a kind of halfway house for Beverly Hills broads who’ve had plastic surgery. We saw Suzie Magnuson leaving the hotel with a gift basket, and then later when we found her body, she was surrounded by painkillers. They were spilling out of these plastic vials—”
“Hold it hold it hold it! What does all of this have to do with Binion?”
Binion. He said it with such venom. I wondered if there was more to Eli’s dislike of the man than simple resentment of his pricey law practice, his fancy clients, his European suits.
“Well, nothing yet,” I said. “But he may be tied in.”
Reba spoke up. “As we said, he represented both Suzie Magnuson an
d Lenore Richling. We think the painting in question may have actually belonged to Suzie. I’d seen it on several occasions at her house, and made the connection to the one the girls saw at Lenore’s.”
Eli gave Reba an approving nod. “Excellent.”
She smiled and brushed the hair back from her forehead coquettishly.
“So maybe Lenore was also blackmailing Suzie, and took the Bacon as payment,” I said. “And Binion was in on it all somehow, and—”
“Whoa whoa whoa!” Eli said, waving a pudgy hand in the air. He shook his head, jowls flapping violently. “What proof do you have of any of this?”
Proof?
I swallowed hard. “Um. None, really.”
“You girls are all over the place. You got Binion drug dealing and blackmailing and stealing paintings from dead women, and you’ve got your auntie believing all this and making accusations, without even a shred of evidence?”
He stared directly at me. I looked down at my khakis, brushing off some imaginary dust.
“Well, it kinda makes sense . . .” I started to say.
“Okay, but you don’t go accusing politically connected Beverly Hills lawyers of theft, and you don’t go finding monsters under the beds of hotshot plastic surgeons until you got the goods! Jeez. What did I teach you?”
We sat in silence for a while, lambasted and completely humiliated in front of our employer, who also happened to be our great-aunt. I felt like a boob and a loser. A loser boob.
I decided to take the focus off me.
“Why do you hate Binion so much?” I asked Eli. “What did he ever do to you?”
He swiveled in his chair, hoisting up his legs and plopping the worn heels of his wingtips on the desk. His pants hiked up to his calves and we were treated to a glimpse of what looked like rolled dough sprouting bristly black hairs.
“Well, I hate him on principle ’cause he makes much more money than I do. But also, he stole a client from me a few months ago, which is a big ethical no-no. I thought it was funny—Binion’s business is strictly white-collar scumbags, know what I mean? What did he want with my creep from the streets? But he goes in and makes a pitch to the guy that he won’t have to do time if Binion takes his case, right when I was in the middle of negotiating a plea bargain.”
The Butcher of Beverly Hills Page 16