Three Grooms and a Wedding

by JoAnn Ross

  “It’s probably more likely that since it was easy to determine that Alexandra had died by strangulation, that the coroner didn’t delve any further.”

  “But that’s what autopsies are supposed to do,” Cait pointed out.

  “True. But let’s face it, the murder was more than sixty years ago and things were different. Even these days, with all the tools of modern science, mistakes can be made. As you’ve just pointed out.”

  “There is the possibility that you’re mistaken,” Lily suggested gently. “About Alexandra being pregnant.”

  “No.” Blythe realized how strange the swift denial sounded, given the facts of the case. “I can’t explain how I know, but I’m absolutely positive that she was carrying Patrick’s child.”

  “This is going to sound crazy,” Lily said tentatively. “But have you considered the fact that perhaps those dreams you’ve been having are Alexandra’s spirit somehow talking to you? Trying through you to absolve her husband?”

  “Believe me, Lily,” Blythe said honestly, “three months ago, I would have laughed at the idea.”

  “And now?”

  “And now, I’m not willing to discount any possibility. Including the fact that Alexandra Romanov is telling me that her husband was executed for a crime he did not commit.”

  “You know, this conversation just keeps getting more and more depressing,” Cait said. “So, moving on to more pleasant topics, congratulations on moving in with Gage.”

  “How did you know I’d agreed to that? I only made the decision a few hours ago.”

  “I am a detective,” Cait pointed out with a flash of her usual humor. “Actually, Gage told Lily, who called me at the courthouse.”

  “News certainly travels fast.”

  “Always does, in this town,” Cait agreed. “I figure by this time next week exaggerated stories of your sexy Grecian Island love nest will be scooped up by shoppers in checkout lines all over America.”

  “Unfortunately, you’re probably right.” Blythe said. “In fact, believe it or not, when we were waiting at the Athens airport, I saw our picture in Tachidromos.”

  The candid photograph, which had earned the cover of Greece’s leading national picture magazine, of Blythe and Gage dancing together had been taken during the wedding reception they’d attended. Anyone looking at the captured moment might have been excused in mistakenly thinking they were the happy couple.

  The love she felt for Gage had been written all over her face—and in her eyes. Viewing it, Blythe understood why neither Lily nor Cait had believed her when she’d claimed she wasn’t falling in love with the sexy private detective.

  So, why couldn’t she just agree to marry him? She needed time. Time to think.

  The thought had no sooner flowed through her mind when Blythe remembered something Gage had said to her. He’d accused her of thinking too much. And, although she hated to admit it, this was one of those cases when he could be right.

  Perhaps it was having grown up surrounded by adults who played make-believe for a living, perhaps it was her own way of finding logic in a business that revolved around fantasy, or perhaps, it was merely her nature, but for whatever reason, Blythe had always felt more comfortable when things made sense.

  When they were safe. And predictable.

  Unfortunately, love was anything but logical. And nothing about her feelings for Gage made any sense. Neither were they safe or predictable.

  But she could no more stop from feeling them than she could stop the sun from sinking into the Pacific Ocean every evening. Or cause the tide to cease its age-old ebb and flow.

  As hard as she’d tried to avoid it happening, the truth was that she’d fallen in love with a man who was as devoted as he was exciting. As trustworthy as he was dangerous. As honest as he was passionate.

  She could take all the time in the world, she could try to analyze her feelings for Gage Remington from now until doomsday, but she’d never have the answers she was seeking. Or the guarantee she’d once thought she needed.

  Love didn’t come with guarantees.

  Love didn’t come without risk.

  Now, as she vaguely listened to Cait and Lily discussing Cait’s wedding plans, Blythe came to the unpalatable conclusion that her unwillingness to make a complete commitment to Gage was due to a deep-seated, private fear that having lost control of her heart, she was also in danger of losing control of her life.

  The one thing she’d neglected to factor into the equation was that she’d fallen head over heels in love with the one man worth the risk.

  10

  THE SPORTSMAN’S SALOON definitely went overboard in trying to live up to its name. Mounted fish and hunting trophies—deer, elk, mountain lion, antelope, big-horned sheep—hung on knotty pine walls. A Kodiak bear stood in the corner, towering threateningly over whoever ended up with the last stool at the end of the L-shaped bar.

  As he nursed a draft beer and listened to Michael Connelly’s fishing plans, Gage couldn’t quite shake the feeling that he was being silently observed—and judged—through all those unblinking marble eyes.

  “You ever fish for steelhead?” the elderly man asked.

  Michael Connelly was a large man, built like a railroad boxcar, darkly tanned, with beefy arms the size of Virginia hams. He was wearing well-worn jeans, a flannel shirt and boots. The sleeves of the black-and-green plaid shirt had been rolled up to his elbows. His right forearm was adorned with a blue tattoo of an anchor; the right bore a red heart with the name Ethel inscribed across the center. Had he not known better, Gage might have taken the man for a former lumberjack who’d earned his living cutting down the towering ponderosa trees that surrounded the town.

  “Can’t say as I have,” Gage said. “I’ve caught a few catfish in my time—”

  “Trash fish,” Connelly snorted dismissively. “But they’re not bad deep-fried in a beer batter,” he allowed.

  “That’s the way my Grandma Remington used to fix them back when I was a kid growing up in Whiskey River, Arizona,” Gage agreed. “My dad preferred bass.”

  “Too damn expensive for my taste.” The former detective tossed back his Jim Beam. Gage signaled the bartender for a refill. “Had a friend who near went broke, by the time he finished paying for his boat and all that fancy, newfangled electronic sonar equipment. Guy had more stuff on board than we used to search out Nazi U-boats back when I was on submarine duty during the war.”

  He rubbed his chin, home to a grizzled pewter beard. “Don’t remember it helping him find all that many fish. Old Jack never was much of a fisherman. But he could sure tell crackerjack stories about the one who got away.”

  “Speaking of ones who got away,” Gage began carefully.

  Michael Connelly slammed his glass down onto the nicked pine bar. “Thought I told you, young fella, digging around in graveyards is a good way to end up causing a helluva stink.”

  “Or clear the air,” Gage countered.

  The man’s answer was a pungent curse spat out through teeth yellowed from years of tobacco. “Dead’s dead. No amount of second-guessing is going to change that.”

  “You’re right. But what about the murderer? What if he’s sitting in some bar tonight, planning to go fishing tomorrow?” Gage shook his head and took a drink of beer. “Doesn’t seem fair, somehow.”

  “You’d think you would’ve caught on, having been a cop and all,” Connelly said. “Sometimes—hell, most of the time—life isn’t fair.”

  “You’ve got a point,” Gage conceded again. “Still, sometimes I just get the urge to go tilting at windmills.” When his assertion drew a blank look in return, he said, “You know, like Don Quixote.”

  Connelly shook his head. His baseball cap, which appeared to have once been white, but was now the color of mud, was a billboard for Big Al’s Bait Shop.

  “Never much liked that artsy stuff they made us read in school. Give me Zane Grey and Jack London any old day.”

  “How about Dashiell
Hammett or Raymond Chandler?” Gage eyed the former L.A. detective over the rim of the pilsner glass. “You like reading them?”

  Michael Connelly may have been in his eighties. But his blue eyes were bright and direct. He speared Gage with a stern, accusatory glare.

  “You don’t give up easy, do you, boy?”

  “No, sir.” Gage’s look was every bit as direct. “I don’t.”

  There was a long silence as Connelly mulled that over. He pulled a cigarette from a pocket of his shirt, broke off the filter tip, then stuck it between his grimly set lips. Another foray into the pocket retrieved an old-fashioned kitchen match which he struck on the sole of his boot.

  Gage wondered if the slight hand tremor, as he lit the cigarette, was due to age or discomfort in talking about a case the former cop would prefer to forget.

  Utilizing his customary patience, Gage waited.

  “You gotta understand how it was,” Connelly said finally. “The world we were all working in.” He drew in on the cigarette. “These days, everything is fair game—a married actor screws his leading lady on some beach he thinks is deserted, two days later the photos are plastered across the front page of a supermarket tabloid.

  “Or a teenage sitcom star throws a tantrum and throws a punch at her boyfriend in an after-hours club, and bingo, that night Leno and Letterman will be making jokes about it in their monologue.”

  He pursed his lips, blew a perfect smoke ring and watched with satisfaction as it slowly wafted upward toward the ceiling. When the blue circle settled over an antler, Gage decided it was a trick the old man had spent a long time perfecting.

  “Back in the old days, a helluva lot more happened in the movie community than was made public. Like the Fatty Arbuckle case. And the Paul Bern suicide.” He shook his head. “It’s no wonder that poor loser shot himself in the head with that .38. Imagine being married to Jean Harlow and not being able to get it up.”

  Connelly blew another smoke ring. “It’d be like not getting an erection while watching a Blythe Fielding video.”

  Irritation flared, white-hot inside Gage. Figuring he’d have to get used to the idea that men all over the world fantasized about bedding the woman he loved, he managed, with effort, to tamp it town.

  He also suddenly understood how difficult it must have been for Reardon, knowing every male who’d ever stepped inside a theater was lusting after his wife. For not the first time since discovering the truth about the actress’s less than pristine past, he found himself wondering if Reardon had known about Alexandra’s former occupation.

  “You were telling me about the Romanov murder,” he coaxed the elderly man back on track. “About the difference between people’s perception of Hollywood and the truth.”

  “People talk about the good old days. When the studios existed just to make movies. Hell, from the beginning, they looked out for their own interests before anything else. That’s what the publicity departments were established to do—to see that the scandals never got out.”

  “But some scandals are too big to cover up.” Gage knew the press was always hungry for scandal. And Alexandra Romanov’s murder by her husband had provided a virtual feast that had lasted long after Reardon’s execution.

  “That’s true,” Connelly allowed. “And whenever those scandals did get out, the flack machine kicked into high gear, pumping out propaganda, twisting whatever facts were necessary to make the ticket-buying public believe whatever the studios wanted them to believe.”

  He took out the rumpled pack of cigarettes again, broke off another filter and lit the shortened cigarette from the smoldering end of the first.

  “Of course no one gave a damn what truths they might be obscuring. Or even whose lives they might be ruining. The important thing was that the studios, and the guys that ran them, came out smelling like roses.”

  “Is that what happened in the Romanov murder? Was the truth obscured?”

  “Obscured?” The laugh turned into a hacking nicotine cough that went on and on. “Hell,” he managed finally, “try buried. Six feet deep. Right along with Reardon’s ashes.”

  “The press only prints what it’s given,” Gage said. “I understand how Xanadu Studios may have wanted to slant things to its own advantage, but there must have been reporters on the L.A. papers with sources inside police departments. And surely there must have been some frustrated cops willing to leak facts to those reporters.”

  When Connelly didn’t answer, Gage realized he may be looking at something that went a lot deeper and got a lot darker than murder.

  “If the police department, for whatever reason, aligned itself with the studio bosses, you’d be talking about the hindrance of a criminal investigation on a major scale.”

  Broad shoulders lifted in shrug. “I couldn’t argue with that.”

  “Following that line of thought,” Gage suggested slowly, carefully, “it’s also possible that the Los Angeles Police Department—”

  “Don’t forget the D.A.’s office,” Connelly broke in.

  During his teens, Gage had owned a German shorthair dog named Flick. Right now, he figured he knew exactly how Flick had felt pointing out a covey of quail.

  “You realize, if Reardon didn’t do it, you’re talking about the entire legal system being guilty of aiding a criminal—a murderer—to escape.”

  “I’m not talking about anything. You’re the one headed off down that trail, boy.” The vague, purposefully evasive answer proved that police training never wore off.

  Gage was beginning to get the feeling that the trail in question was no longer going to turn out to be a dead end.

  “You were the first detective on the scene, weren’t you?”

  Connelly nodded. “Me and my partner, Hank Greene.” He eyed Gage’s empty glass. “You want another?”

  Seeing that the former cop’s glass was empty again, Gage ordered another round. “Tell me what you found.”

  Another shrug. “There wasn’t all that much to find. The murder took place in a dressing room that was part of the master bedroom suite. The lady was lying on the floor, in front of this huge ugly mother of a mirror, deader than Marley’s ghost. From the bruises on her throat, it didn’t take a medical genius to see that she’d been strangled.

  “There were two glasses and an open bottle of champagne on a table. One of the glasses had lipstick on the rim, the same color worn by the victim. The other looked untouched. A cigarette had been stubbed out in a crystal ashtray on that same table. Since there weren’t any lipstick traces on it, we figured it was probably Reardon’s.”

  “What was she wearing?”

  “It was more like what she wasn’t wearing.” A long smoldering flame of lust sparked in the former detective’s eye. “It was one of those negligee things, white and lacy, trimmed in some kinda fancy white feathers and so transparent a blind man could probably read the fine print of a used car contract through it.

  “You should have seen Hank.” He laughed, coughed, then cut the cough off with a swallow of whiskey. “The guy was still a kid, just outta school and I’m not sure he’d ever seen a naked woman before. One look at Alexandra Romanov definitely put the wind in his sails. So to speak.”

  “I’ve seen the pictures,” Gage said without a trace of an answering humor. He’d never found anything the slightest bit funny about homicide.

  “Most people have.” Connelly flashed a lascivious grin. “I heard later that the police photographer retired to a ranch outside Mt. Shasta with the dough he got from selling those bootleg pictures to the papers.”

  One of the more depressing aspects of a homicide scene was the way the victim lost any sense of dignity. It was bad enough having a cabal of cops looking at you after you’d lost the ability to protect yourself; having the world gain access to the intimate photographs taken at a crime scene added an additional note of vulgarity to an already unsavory situation.

  “You didn’t find any sign of a struggle?”

  “Nah. That
, along with the see-through nightie and the champagne glasses pointed to the fact that the lady was intimate with her murderer.”

  “That’s the case the prosecutor made in court,” Gage agreed. “But there are several other possibilities. One being that the killer could have broken into the house and taken her by surprise while she was waiting for her husband to come home.”

  “That’d be a little difficult. Since Reardon admitted the door was locked when he came home and supposedly found her body.”

  “Someone else could have had a key.”

  “From the rumors about her, there’s a good chance half the guys in town had keys to Alexandra Romanov’s house.”

  “Rumors?” Gage lifted a brow. “What kind of rumors?”

  As if realizing he’d said too much, the cop stared down into his glass, as if seeking a hiding place in the smooth brown depths. “You know,” he mumbled, “wild parties, drinking, the typical Hollywood stuff. The fact that she wasn’t really a member of the Russian royal family.”

  Michael Connelly knew a lot more than he was telling. Gage would bet his P. I. license on it. “A lot of people arrive in Hollywood pretending to be someone they’re not. If lying about your background was a capital crime, the only stars we’d have left would probably be Mickey and Minnie Mouse. And who really knows about Minnie? I mean, where, exactly did she come from before she started up with the Mick, anyway?”

  “Anyone ever tell you that you’re warped, Remington?”

  “All the time. Which is why I’m in private practice these days.” Gage paused, then drove the arrow he’d been saving home. “So, how about Cuba?”

  “What about it?” Connelly’s tone, and his look, turned suddenly defensive.

  “I would assume someone did a background check on Alexandra.”

  “Probably.”

  “I would also assume that it wouldn’t have been all that difficult to learn how she’d made a living in Havana.”

  “Seems to me she was some kind of model.”

  “Among other things.”

  Connelly didn’t answer. His stony expression revealed nothing, but from the red flush rising from the man’s plaid flannel collar, Gage knew he’d hit the bull’s-eye.