Someone was going to be knocking on Louie’s door at any moment. Sure, I could pretend no one was home, but with a dead body next door, there was going to be no shortage of policemen for quite some time.
I knew enough about real police investigations, as opposed to filmed ones, to know that a crime scene was sequestered for far longer than it took to deliver a few snappy, cynical lines of dialogue. The cops could be next door for days, a week even, and I would have to leave at some point during that time.
My sudden appearance and emergence from an “empty” apartment would not make me look innocent.
If any of my interior brain mentors had an idea…any idea… this would be an excellent time to bring it up.
Anyone?
I think your best course of action would be to come clean, Dick Powell offered.
Did he mean give myself up? That hardly seemed helpful. Then a moment later I got it.
Rushing to the bathroom, I turned on Louie’s shower and stripped off all my clothes, then jumped in, unfortunately before the water was fully warm.
That, however, was not as bad as the fact that the water from the shower felt like buckshot on my aching head.
After wetting myself, I stepped back out and listened for the front door. The knock came about three minutes later, by which time I had to re-immerse myself under the water.
At the second knock I called, “Just a minute!” and then turned the shower off and wrapped a towel around my waist. I put another one on my head, wincing as the weight of the towel came down on the bump on my head.
Dripping my way to the front door, I unlocked it and cracked it open, just enough to let the officer, a policewoman, outside see that I had just gotten out of the shower.
“What is it?” I demanded.
“Oh, sorry, sir,” the policewoman said. “There’s a situation next door and we’re talking to the neighbors.”
“Next door, with Avery? What’s going on.”
“Well, sir, we need to ask if you’ve seen or heard anything unusual this morning.”
“Um…could you come back in a few minutes, maybe? I was in the shower.”
“Yes sir, take your time, Mr…” she said, fishing for my name.
“Sandoval,” I said, “Louie Sandoval. Thanks.”
Then I closed the door.
Drying off as I ran back to the bathroom, including drying my hair as much as my bump would allow comfortably, I put my clothes back on and waited.
If only Louie’s tomato outfit were here somewhere, I could have put it on and run out, and if anyone happened to see me, all they’d report to the police was the suspect was about five-eleven, very round, and red ripe. But it was not here in the apartment, or else I would have discovered it by now.
Moving back to the front door of the apartment, I listened until the voices had abated, and then cracked the door open again and peeked out. I could see the back of a uniformed officer standing in the doorway of unit 214, but not his face. Nobody else was visible.
Now was my chance.
Taking a deep breath, I exited Louie’s apartment as quietly as I could and ran like hell for the elevator, pressing the down button. Making it down to the lobby unnoticed, I got out and saw a group of people, presumably tenants, collecting in the lobby. Walking through them, I headed for the front door.
Once outside, I counted four police cruisers, two fire trucks and a yellow paramedic’s vehicle, which unless one of the other tenants had fainted from the shock, was redundant.
I almost made it past them when a man standing on the sidewalk stopped me. “Hey, what’s going on?” he asked.
“I have no idea,” I replied. “All these vehicles just showed up, so I guess someone is sick, or had an accident, or something.”
“You look a little sick yourself, buddy.”
“I do?”
“You’re all pale.”
Yes, well you try getting hit on the back of the head with a statue of Batman and then trip over a dead body and see how you react to it, a voice said in my head, and strangely enough, it was my own.
“That’s why I’m on my way to the doctor,” I said, leaving the guy and walking, but not running, to my car.
Sliding behind the wheel, I sat there for a moment, thinking about what had just happened. I had touched nothing in Avery’s apartment, except for the doorknob, and I did not see that as a problem since the prospect of isolating one specific set of prints from a frequently used doorknob seemed daunting at best.
As best as I could tell, I was in the clear. The real question at this point was, what do I do now?
Despite my lack of actual information, I felt it might be best to keep Zareh Zarian at the Journal apprised of the fact that this seemed to be turning into a highly complex problem. I reached into my pocket for my cell phone to call him, but it wasn’t there. I checked my other pocket and found nothing.
I checked every pocket I was currently wearing: nothing.
Where the hell was my cell phone?
The last time I had seen it was when I checked the time and then started dialing 911 to report Avery’s death, and…
“Oh, jeez,” I moaned, lowering my aching head onto the steering wheel. I must have set down my cell when I first heard the approaching sirens. It was still inside Avery Klemmer’s apartment, waiting to be found by the police.
And when it is found, I become the prime suspect in Avery’s death.
“If I’d been a character in one of Jack Daniel’s novels,” I told the steering wheel, “this never would have happened.”
CHAPTER TEN
I actually ran a red light driving back to my office, something I never do.
Normally I never even run a yellow light unless stopping in time means excessive tire damage, but I was preoccupied. Fortunately there was no cross traffic coming, and even better, no cops around to pull me over. Because of my sudden vehicular crime spree I slowed down to a grandpa-crawl for the rest of the way.
It was nearly two by the time I arrived at my building. After parking in my spot, I went up to my office, finding that it took me three tries to get the key into the lock on my door, my hands were shaking so badly.
Take it easy, kid, Bogart told me.
“Hey, don’t you give me any guff,” I said, finally opening my door. “Your hands shook, too, in The Maltese Falcon. Remember?”
Must have been Huston’s idea, he argued, and then disappeared.
Maybe I was overreacting. Maybe I hadn’t dropped my cell phone in Avery’s apartment. Maybe I had put it back in my pocket and it had fallen out in Louie’s bathroom when I peeled my clothes off to do the shower pretense.
Naw, you gotta expect the worst on this beat, sonny, Charles McGraw said in my head.
Swell.
I flopped down in my desk chair and started searching through my top drawer where I was pretty sure I had a bottle of Advil, which I desperately needed right now. Finding it, I popped three of the remaining five pills in my mouth and then went to the kitchen sink to wash them down.
Returning to my desk, I decided to take score. I had one vanished client and two dead witnesses, my cell phone was probably in the hands of the police right now making me a prime suspect for at least one of those murders, while Detective Mendoza desperately wanted to frame me for the other one.
And I had no leads.
I tried to think on the bright side: at least no one had kicked me in the crotch so hard I required surgery.
The Advil were beginning to work to the point where I could probably withstand the sound of another real voice without my head splitting open, so I picked up my desk phone and put in a call to Zareh Zarian.
“Hey, Beauchamp, what’ve you got for me?” he asked.
“An expense report for a crate of Advil,” was the best I could come up with.
“That’s it? How about Sandoval’s notes?”
“Sorry. She either hid them so well no one can find them, or she has them on her, or someone else has them, or they’ve been destroyed, I just don’t know. Look, Zarian, I have a rather awkward question to ask. Would Louie go to bed with someone just to get information from them?”
He laughed. “You think it’s going to be that easy getting in her panties?”
“I’m serious. Would she sleep with someone in return for information?”
There was a long pause before he answered, “She is a very dedicated reporter.”
“So that’s a yes?”
“Why are you asking?”
“I’m just curious, is all.”
“Okay, you’re not hearing this from me, okay? That story I was telling you about, the exposé of the developer, well, for that one she did what she had to do to get close to someone who works for the city permit office. I should say used to work for, since he got canned when they found out he was the source of an information leak.”
So somebody wanted to get even with her, William Demarest’s voice barked in my head.
“I don’t know,” I absentmindedly responded. “It doesn’t fit.”
“What doesn’t fit?” Zarian asked.
“Hmm? Oh, uh, what I meant was, opening herself up like that is kind of a dangerous business practice, isn’t it?”
“You don’t know Louie like I do. She has a little bit of a jones for getting into danger.”
“She should be having a field day right now, then.”
“Why, what have you learned?”
I quickly laid out everything that had happened since we had last spoken, but left out the business of finding the picture in her apartment.
“Holy shit, two murders?” Zarian said. “This is big!”
“Big and serious. But getting back to Louie’s method of gaining information, would she ever go so far as to…”
“As to what?”
“Well, might she ever trade herself to the other team if that’s what it took?”
“Are you asking if she’s a lez?”
“Well, maybe, or would she go to bed with a woman even if she wasn’t a lesbian just to get information out of her?”
“Look, Beauchamp, I really don’t know where you’re going with this, but I don’t have to answer these kinds of questions about my staff.”
“It might be important.”
I heard a sigh at the other end of the line, and then Zarian said, “Sandoval is a dedicated reporter, the best I’ve got. Sometimes I wonder myself how far she’d go for a story. That’s all I can tell you. Now, if there’s nothing else, hang up and let me get the hell back to work.”
“There is one other thing. Whatever is going on might have something to do with the Temple.”
“The temple?”
“The Temple of Theotologics.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“You didn’t assign Louie to investigate them, did you?”
“Hell no!”
There was a pause and I heard him yell off into the distance, “Ashley, close my door, would you?”
After another moment, he came back on.
“You’re not wearing your headset any more, are you?” I asked.
“My headset? No, I couldn’t get used to that frigging thing. What difference does that make?”
“None, I guess. It’s just that I heard you move away from the phone, which means you’re using the receiver.”
What it really meant was that I was relieved to discover the deductive reasoning portion of my brain was still functioning after the blow to the head.
“Whatever. You want to hear about the Temple or not?” he asked.
I did.
“Okay. I don’t want my staff to hear this, but I won’t touch the Temple of Theotologics. I won’t go anywhere near them.”
“Why not?”
“Because their belief system doesn’t include freedom of the press, that’s why not. You try to investigate them and you find yourself shut down.”
“How can they do that?” I asked.
“They own an entire law firm here in town. They even own a few judges who are all too willing to sign off on a warrant so that all your computers and files can be confiscated.”
“You know this for a fact?”
“A couple years ago I wanted to run a story on an enterprising little theatre here in town that somehow attracted big name actors and directors despite its size and location, and got citywide attention, the kind usually reserved for the Mark Taper. It wasn’t even a controversial story. It was supposed to be a nice little puffy feature about a playhouse with a real can-do attitude, with quotes from actors, directors, stagehands, management, all about the little stage that could. I assigned our second-string theatre critic to do the piece and he started researching it. He did too damn good a job.”
“What do you mean?”
“Jonathan was part of the L.A. theatre scene so he knew how things were supposed to work,” Zarian went on. “Back then acting unions had agreements and rules that governed these little places based on the number of seats, and everyone is supposed to be making a little bit of money. These days the union’s got even greater control over them, but in those days you were supposed to get something, even if it wasn’t much. Yet this place was paying nothing to anyone, not the actors, not the crew, not anybody. They were working with the absolute best, but nobody got anything. Well, Jonathan smelled a rat somewhere and he started digging around, and before we knew it the piece had changed. It became an exposé about a place where something really fishy was going on.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like the fact that some people who worked in the theatre were never seen again.”
“Maybe they took the bus back to wherever they came from.”
“Not everybody moves back to Springfield, Beauchamp. Then there was an instance involving an actor who was killed when a light fell on him. Our guy started digging and found out it took three tries before it was successful?”
“Murder? Why didn’t you run a story on it?”
“Because, and here’s the point I’m making, Jonathan found out the theatre was owned and operated under the table by the Temple of Theotologics.”
“Oh. Well, maybe I should talk to Jonathan, then.”
“You’ll have to wait for visiting day.”
“What?”
“He’s up in Chino serving fifteen to twenty-five.”
“What did he do?”
“Discovered the truth. The Temple made sure that story never saw the light of day by implanting kiddie porn on his computer and making sure he got caught, tried, convicted and imprisoned.”
“You’ve got to be joking.”
“Think? Want to drive up to Chino and tell that to him? When you go tell him I said hi.”
“You know for a fact that the child porn was planted?”
“I know it for a fact, because the day he was sentenced I got a phone call from some guy telling me that if I tried to resurrect the story, or think about doing any other story that involved the workings of the Temple, I’d find myself in the cell next to him. So the only time you’re ever going to see the word Theotologics in the Independent Journal is in one of their paid ads.”
I felt chilled. Could this sort of thing really be going on outside of a movie or thriller novel?
Then something struck me. “What was the name of that theatre your guy was writing about?”
“They call it the Star Stage Center Theatre.”
Right. The same theatre that Regina Fontaine had done so much work for.
“I have to tell you, Beauchamp,” Zarian went on, “if you’re dragging the Temple into this, I’m going to have to cut you off.”
“But you do want
to find Louie.”
“Of course I want to find Louie, and I still want her notes. I just don’t want to hear the word Theotologics mentioned again. Now get off my phone, I’m busy.”
“I’ll be in touch,” I said.
“Yep.” He hung up.
At least the call had given me a positive connection between Regina Fontaine and the Temple of Theotologics, but that was cold comfort from any direction. I doubted I’d get very far going down to the theatre and saying, ‘Hi, folks, anyone here know anything about a dead dancer?’
Though if Mendoza had anything on the ball, he would have already done that.
Mendoza.
Oh, the idea that just came into my head was a diabolical one, and it was my own creation, not one from the Hollywood Victory Caravan, and it might even alleviate my other, bigger, immediate problem, the one involving my cell phone.
Maybe the bonk on the head back there at Avery’s apartment had sharpened my wits!
Opening my desk drawer, I pulled out the stack of business cards I keep rubber banded together and flipped through them until I saw the one for Detective Dane Colfax at LAPD’s Northwestern station. I knew from Hector Mendoza that Colfax was no longer there, but I hoped the phone number still worked.
I dialed it and on the second ring a voice answered, “Yee.”
“Yee what?” I said.
“This is Detective Dylan Yee, who is this?”
“Oh, I was looking for Detective Willford,” I said. “I’m sorry if I got the wrong number.”
“No, he’s here, hold on.”
A few seconds later, Bruce Willford identified himself.
“Hi, detective, this is Dave Beauchamp. We met a day or so back.”
“Right, hi. What can I do for you?”
“Well, this may make you laugh, too, because it’s so ridiculous, but someone stole my cell phone.”
“Someone stole your cell phone?”
“Yeah, I was standing on a corner waiting for the light to turn so I could cross, and someone bumped into me,” I lied. “I felt something in my pocket, like a hand, and then my phone was gone.”
“But not your wallet?”
“Um, no, because see, I keep my cell phone in my back pocket, where most guys carry their wallets. He probably thought that’s what he was getting.”
Eats to Die For! Page 9