“You’re not getting away with this bullshit!” Bru hissed at her. “It doesn’t go down like that!”
Rosemary stood up, tapping sharply at Bru’s leg. “We’re going. Bru! Gray!” Her stern voice brought her sons to attention. “What can you expect from a pathetic old man who cared more about proving his virility than he did about taking care of his flesh-and-blood sons!”
As the strained party broke up, I could see ex-wife number two conferring with Mark Baker, perhaps the quicker to pay off her tab.
In the main hall, I tried the handle on the powder room door, opening it on a very startled Carmen Huntley. She was just standing there in the tiny garnet-colored room, staring at herself in the oval antique mirror, dissolved in tears.
Well, I had hoped to talk to her sometime in private. I stepped in and shut the door.
“Carmen! Guess the door was unlocked.” I smiled at her. She blinked fat tears down her perfect dark cheeks. “I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”
They say timing is everything.
“What are you doing here?” she sniffed. That could mean anything from what was I doing at this family disaster of a will reading to just a simple inquiry as to why I was invading the privacy of her restroom needs.
“I have a few questions about the party. Did you see Bruno drink cognac that night?”
“Yes. I got him a glass of his Armagnac after dinner.”
Simple as that.
“You got it yourself? From the liquor cabinet?”
“Yes.”
“What time was that, Carmen?”
“I don’t know. Maybe eleven-thirty.” She stared at me.
“Were you with Bruno while he drank the brandy?”
She nodded.
“Did he seem okay?”
“Of course he was okay! I didn’t poison Bruno. Is that what you think? We just talked.” More tears and more sobs.
“Care to tell me about it?”
“He and Gray had been fighting at dinner, so I wanted to see if I could smooth him over, you know?
“I found him at the dance tent. He said, ‘Carmenita, go get me my Armagnac like a good girl. Then we can talk.’”
She turned back to the mirror and dabbed a handkerchief gently under her eyes, perfectly catching the tears while protecting her mascara. “So what was I to do? I had to tramp all the way back to the house like a waitress. Your partner had the key, so I unlocked the cabinet and poured the drink. Just the way Bruno likes it.”
“How’s that?”
“In a Baccarat brandy snifter, filled about a third…”
“That’s right.” She had jogged my memory. He had liked to warm it between his hands, and then just nurse it forever.
“…and warmed against my thigh,” she finished.
“Excuse me?”
“You knew Bruno pretty well, didn’t you?” She looked at me through thick black lashes. Although her makeup had been carefully tended, her huge dark eyes were red from crying.
The door opened abruptly, and Deborah seemed startled to find Carmen and me chatting in the loo.
“Oh, dear,” she offered.
“I’ve got to go.” Carmen stepped out into the foyer.
“Me, too.” I tried to follow Carmen and keep up our conversation, but she was quickly back at her husband’s side.
What had she meant? Was she having an affair with Bruno? With her husband’s father? My God, had she reason to kill him?
Still, something seemed off. If she’d poisoned Bruno, would she have admitted to handling the deadly drink?
I wasn’t under many illusions about Bruno’s character, but I didn’t want to believe he’d been having an affair with his daughter-in-law. I wanted to believe he was happy with Lily, but then what was this horrible game he was playing with the will? Surely he knew the obscene lengths to which his sons would go to prove Lily was a tramp. And what was the point, if all the time, Bruno was fooling around with Carmen?
I needed fresh air. I moved to the front door to let myself out. On the steps to the driveway, I saw the attorney stepping into his Rolls Royce. He stopped and turned to me.
“Ms. Bean. I hope you realize that Mr. Huntley meant for you to take possession of the cookware, regardless of the outcome of the other bequests.”
“How could Bruno do this?” I walked up to Baker. “I mean, how could he put Lily through this kind of humiliation?”
“I gathered that Mr. Huntley was amused by the circus atmosphere that this provision in his will would provide. I have drawn up a good many odd documents for Mr. Huntley in the past. This was just another way for him to make his presence felt, but you shouldn’t let your own kind feelings for Mrs. Huntley stop you from taking your property, Ms. Bean.”
“I’m really shocked that he would mention me in his will in any way. It’s truly odd. We weren’t that close.”
“That wasn’t the impression he left with me. Mr. Huntley spoke of you with affection. Why, he even told me he considered you as his ‘backup.’”
I stared at him, not wanting to get it.
“I hope I didn’t just reveal a confidence that should have been covered by attorney/client privilege,” he said, trying for a droll smile. “But, in the circumstances, I would have thought you’d be flattered.”
“What did he mean by ‘backup’?”
“It was just a little joke, naturally, but he did say that if Lily didn’t work out, he considered you as his best candidate for wife number four.”
Chapter 20
A silver Mustang convertible, with the top down, pulled up the driveway. From behind the steering wheel, Lieutenant Chuck Honnett stared at me. I felt my stomach jump.
He stepped out of the car.
“Ms. Bean, don’t you look nice!”
I smiled, and then noticed that I was wearing that three-sizes-too-large red sack. Hey, maybe this was a look I should try on purpose.
“So are we starting over?” I asked.
“Might be an idea.”
“I’ve been thinking about you.”
“Want to confess?”
I smiled. He was tall and in the late afternoon sunshine, he looked better than I remembered.
“Woman at your place said I’d find you here. Do you have a minute?”
“I could use a ride. How about a lift back to my car?”
“Get in,” he offered, holding the passenger door open. I could not remember the last time a man held the door open for me. “Where you parked?”
“Century City.”
That gave him pause. “Must have been a long walk.”
He pulled out into the street and eased his car toward the west side of town. I liked the rush of the wind in my hair, racing away from the Huntley house. I liked noticing that Honnett was speeding.
“You better call me Madeline.”
“All right.”
“And I’ll call you…” I thought a moment.
He had many helpful suggestions. “Lieutenant? Sir?”
“Honnett.” I smiled. Out the window, I noticed the neatly tended homes in Los Feliz give way to blocks of Hollywood sound stages and postproduction facilities.
“Well, Honnett, about this murder…” I took a deep breath. “Why Wesley?”
“Maybe you could pass on some advice to your friend. We cops tend to know pretty quick when a man is lying.”
“Lying? Lying about what?”
“About where he was yesterday.” He looked over to catch my reaction. I was reacting to his blue eyes.
Honnett looked back to the road and turned west on Santa Monica. “Day after our murder, your Wesley vanishes. See our side of it? Here’s a guy on the scene has a beef with our victim, and right after the murder this guy disappears. Under the circumstances, we take an interest.”
I didn’t like how it sounded.
“Here’s a tip: if you should ever want to hide out, use cash. We track people by where they used their charge cards. This morning we got a lead. West
cott used his American Express card yesterday at the Ritz-Carlton out in the desert. So why did he insist he was at home all day yesterday?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Know what I think? He ran. He got out of town fast and then maybe he cooled down and had a chance to think. Or maybe someone called him out there at that fancy hotel and warned him to get his butt back into town. I don’t know yet, but we’ll have the hotel phone records soon and check it out.”
I nodded, working hard at looking unconcerned. I was wondering just how quickly the police would find the spa attendant who took an emergency call from “Mrs. Westcott.”
Honnett took in my unconcerned nod and shot me a nonchalant look. There was so much subtle acting going on in that Mustang, someone should have called Scorsese.
“Westcott made a classic mistake, trying to bluff his way through an interview with the police. Most folks improvise badly. See, a killer can’t stick to the absolute truth. Otherwise, he’d be confessing, wouldn’t he? So we investigate his story, and we catch him here and we catch him there and pretty soon we’ve worn down his story and just plain catch him. It’s simple, really.”
“Don’t innocent people ever lie to the police?”
“Yeah.” He smiled. “Sometimes they do. That’s what makes the whole thing interesting.”
“It’s a real science, huh?”
He didn’t seem offended by sarcasm. I liked that in a man.
“Look, we haven’t found out how the poison was administered, so no fingerprint evidence to match to the killer’s. And we haven’t been able to link Westcott to any source of strychnine. So far. What I’m saying is, if you’ve found something that could clear your friend, now’s the time to speak up.”
“I may have figured out how Bruno took the poison,” I said, tentatively.
“That would be helpful. Lord knows our guys are clueless even after sifting through every goddamned piece of china in the state.”
“Bruno kept a private decanter of Armagnac.”
“That’s a fancy kind of brandy?”
“Right. He kept it locked up in a liquor cabinet. I think he was given a glass of Armagnac just before he died.”
As I was talking, Honnett picked up his mobile phone and called in the information to someone at his office.
“What makes you think the Armagnac was poisoned?”
I explained my theory and he nodded.
“Okay. So who could have tampered with it? Who had the keys to the liquor cabinet?”
When I didn’t answer immediately he said softly, “Oh, no. Not Westcott?”
“So what? Lots of people used those keys. Or maybe the poison wasn’t put into the decanter at all. Maybe someone poured strychnine straight into Bruno’s glass. Just because Wes had those damn keys…”
He let it pass. “So how did you find out Bruno drank this special brandy that night, right before he died?”
“Carmen Huntley. She said she got it for him.”
“That’s Huntley’s daughter-in-law, right? The beauty.”
He had no trouble remembering the lovely Carmen. Ah, well. “She brought a glass of Armagnac to Bruno at around eleven-thirty p.m.”
Honnett thought that one over. “They close?”
“Well, don’t be shocked.” I looked over and saw a man who may never have been shocked by anything in his life, and that included the O. J. verdict.
“Go ahead,” he drawled, “shock me.”
“I think Carmen and Bruno may have developed the kind of intimate in-law relationship you only hear about on ‘Jerry Springer.’”
Honnett gave me a questioning look. “Sleeping together? How do you figure?”
“Well, she’s crying too much. She’s making odd remarks, intimate, sexual. And she gave me this…” How could I explain it? “…this…look.”
“A look, huh?”
“Clearly, she had a much better chance to poison Bruno than anyone else at that party. She gave him the brandy, and now she has a motive!”
“Assuming Carmen and Huntley were lovers?”
I nodded.
“If people murdered everyone they’d gone to bed with, this town would be empty.”
I was getting kind of down, I had to admit. “So all this stuff I found out is just a big fat zero.”
“No. Absolutely not! I’m going to check out everything. That’s what I do.”
Honnett was close to the Century City Mall. Just in case those guys were still hanging around, arriving with a cop seemed like an excellent precaution. I directed him down into the underground parking structure and over to my car. By this time, the lot was pretty deserted.
He pulled his convertible into the space next to my car and turned off the engine. We sat there. Suddenly, it felt like maybe there might be more on his mind than just the murder investigation. I don’t know. It was an eleventh-grade kind of feeling. Was he going to make a move?
I did what I used to do in high school. I didn’t open the door of the car and say goodbye. I just sat there.
“So, this was good,” he said. “We had a pretty productive talk, right? I mean without you having to storm off.”
“Everything out in the open. Much better,” I agreed.
“People don’t like the police.”
“That’s so true.”
He smiled. Perhaps he hadn’t expected me to agree with him so quickly.
“So, thanks for the information. We’ll check out everything from our end, of course.”
“Of course.”
“And if you should come across anything else…”
I was getting the old heave-ho. I bent down to get my purse and a bullet sang through the air and embedded with a crack in the glove box right in front of me.
Honnett was shouting to get down and another shot rang out and hit the Mustang. As I flattened myself on the floor, I could hear a car race by.
I crouched as low as I could, hands covering my head. An open convertible does not give one a secure feeling in a bullet storm. Over the pounding of my pulse, I could hear Honnett’s footsteps as he chased after the car that had gone flying by. Boom-boom-boom. I heard more gun shots, much louder, maybe coming from Honnett’s gun, echoing in the underground acoustics. Then, a car’s tires skidded.
Footsteps running. I peeked up. Honnett, fully adrenalized, was coming back to see if I’d been shot.
“You hit?” he shouted, still thirty feet away.
“I’m fine,” I shouted back. “Tell me. Was that a Taurus?”
He stared at me.
“A gray Taurus?” I asked him again, urgently.
Honnett was still breathing hard. “You know those guys?”
“Not really.”
“Everything out in the open, huh?” His voice was back to its casual drawl. “Lady, I was just about to ask you out on a goddamned date.”
He was going to ask me out. That high school crap really works!
Chapter 21
It was well past ten on Sunday evening as I stepped out of Parker Center, the downtown headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department. It had taken four hours to describe where I’d been and who’d I met while looking into Bruno’s murder.
My talent for collecting rumors, scandals, and guesses was acknowledged by the cops. That and the fact I’d managed to annoy someone to the point where they’d shoot at me. What they wouldn’t acknowledge was my certainty that the attack had something to do with Bruno’s real murderer. My ‘instinct’ doesn’t count, they said. This proof thing’s a bitch.
I was asked to check mug shots, but I’m lousy with faces. Honnett had looked at me with something like disgust and asked for the third time, “Are you positive you don’t know anything more?” I informed them about my visit to Perry Hirsh. They took notes but looked bored.
On Sunday night, the deserted downtown streets seemed like canyons between all the gleaming, empty office towers. As I stopped, virtually alone at a four-way signal, my car phone beeped. It was Wes,
worried. Where was I?
Where was he?
“I’m at your place, you know, pacing.”
“I’m okay. Just got hung up with a little police business.”
“Madeline, are you in trouble?”
I thought, “No, you are,” but I said, “I’ll explain when I get there. I’m on my way.”
“Wait. You just got a call from Graydon Huntley, of all people. He sounded upset. He wants you to come by and talk to him.”
“That’s odd.”
“Definitely, but never mind that. I’m dying to know what happened with the will. Did Bruno leave you all his money?”
“Alas, no, but we did get his pots from Windsor Castle.”
“Hey! Not too shabby! Think Graydon wanted them?” Wes snickered.
“No. But he might have been happier if his father had left him a little more than he did.”
“What did Gray get?”
“Remember Petranilla?”
“Zip? Absolutely nothing? Oh my.”
“I think I’ll just go on over to Graydon’s and find out what he wants. Did he leave his address?”
Wesley gave it to me and offered to stick around so we could talk later.
It was almost ten-thirty when I pulled up in front of a high-rise on Wilshire. The name “Wilshire Heights” was inscribed in the brown granite at the base of the building and a sign, advertising “Luxury Condominium Living,” promised several one- and two-bedroom units were still available starting “in the low $400,000s.”
I pulled my car around the corner and found a space to park on the side street.
There was no one at the guard desk in the lobby. Security maybe had to take a leak. It happens. I waited.
After a few minutes I just leaned over the desk and picked up the intercom handset. I leaned a little further and tried to read the list of extensions for each of the condos. I had just about gotten to Huntley.
“Can I help you?”
I looked up to see the security guard. “I’m here to see Graydon Huntley.”
“May I?” he asked, as he and I traded places, me handing him the phone and moving, he sitting at the desk. He seemed polite, no matter how inappropriate my behavior. A lone woman was simply not a security threat to this man.
Sympathy for the Devil Page 13