“I was told he jumped off a cliff up near Big Sur. And that’s what the papers all say.”
“Stillman and I worked that case. We were there when they brought up his body.”
“Then you already know all this.”
Stillman turned around and lasered his focus on Teri. “What we know is that somebody jumped off that cliff back then. It might have been Leland Crowell; might not. We sure thought so back then, but now we’re not so sure.”
Teri felt her antennae start quivering. Something did happen last night, but what? “What do you mean, you aren’t sure?” she asked.
“Because he went off that same cliff again last night,” Stillman said. “This time with a bullet in his back.”
She felt her pounding heart suddenly stop. The blood rushing in her ears drained away, and the tingle extended all the way down her neck and shoulders, to her fingertips. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“What we’re saying,” said Nichols, “is that we’re no longer sure the man who jumped off that cliff a couple of years ago was Leland Crowell.”
“Then who was he?”
“We’re still working on that.”
Lightheaded, Teri slid off the couch arm and onto the seat. She needed the back of the couch for support.
“What does this have to do with me?” she asked.
“Well, Ms. Squire, we know you talked to this man—I’ll call him Leland Two—last night at Caleb’s Diner,” Stillman said. “What did you talk about?”
Teri felt as if she might throw up. Her words froze in her throat.
“Ms. Squire, you okay?” Nichols asked. She detected genuine concern in his voice.
“I’ll get some water,” Swafford said, heading for the kitchen. In a moment he was back with a glass half full and handed it to her. She took a small sip, just enough to wet the inside of her mouth.
“Ms. Squire,” Stillman said, “what did you talk about last night?”
“I told you I’ve never met Leland Crowell.”
“Okay, let’s go with the idea that it wasn’t the real Leland Crowell. But you were at Caleb’s Diner last night, weren’t you? And you talked to somebody. The same somebody that our witnesses say threatened you. And they also say he left the diner with you.”
“That’s impossible.”
“I’d love to hear why.”
Teri remained silent, trying to process what she had been told with what she had seen last night. Who had been driving that SUV, the one that looked exactly like hers? Whoever it was had killed the scraggly-haired man and was doing exactly what she feared: trying to frame her.
“Ms. Squire, I’m kinda like Detective Swafford’s wife,” Stillman said. “I’m a big fan of yours. And I keep up with all the movie gossip. So, yeah, I know all about your big movie about to open up from Leland Crowell’s screenplay.”
“Everyone knows that,” she said.
“But here’s what I keep asking myself: What if it turned out that Leland Crowell wasn’t really dead? What if he was still alive? Would you still own his screenplay?”
“I’m not a probate lawyer, detective. I don’t know what the law is about people faking their deaths. Assuming your scenario is correct, of course.”
“But it would sure solve a lot of problems for you if he turned up dead before he could make a stink about it, wouldn’t it?”
“And wouldn’t it open up a whole lot of new questions?” she asked. “Like just exactly who was it who went off that cliff two years ago?”
“Another question for another day,” Nichols said. “Our question for today is who put a bullet in that man’s back last night.”
“Ms. Squire, do you own a handgun?” Stillman asked.
“You don’t ask many questions you don’t already know the answer to,” Teri said. “I’m sure you already know I have a registered twenty-two. I keep it in the coffee table.”
She leaned forward to grab the drawer. As if in one motion, all three cops grabbed for their weapons. She froze, her hand just inches from the handle.
“Maybe one of you would like to check,” she said.
Swafford stepped over and grabbed the handle. Teri leaned back as he slid the drawer open.
To reveal nothing.
Teri looked at Swafford, who met her gaze with a skeptical eye. “That’s where I always keep it.”
He straightened and backed away.
“When’s the last time you saw it?” Stillman asked.
“I don’t remember. It’s always in there, so I hardly ever notice it or even think about it.”
“Well, here’s what we know so far,” Stillman said. “You argued with Leland Two last night at Caleb’s Diner. Leland Two then got into a car that witnesses describe as looking exactly like the one that’s registered to you. Then someone put a bullet in his back. A twenty-two. You have a twenty-two registered to you, and it’s missing. Do you have any conclusions you suggest we draw from all that?”
Teri felt numb. Everyone in the room knew the conclusion to draw. The unspoken line was that she had motive—a multi-million dollar motive; she had means—a missing .22; and she had opportunity— witnesses who placed her with the victim last night, and even placed him in her car.
“Do I need a lawyer?” she asked.
Stillman took a deep breath then paused, as if weighing his next words very carefully. “I suspect that would be a pretty good idea, don’t you?”
CHAPTER 27
Mona didn’t know what time it was or how long she had been lying there. All she knew when she regained consciousness was that the pain was like nothing she had ever felt before. Not even the skiing accident four years ago when she leg-whipped a pine tree at sixty miles an hour. Every time she replayed that one in her mind, nausea roiled her stomach as she slowed down the picture and watched her lower leg snap like a pencil, bending ninety degrees sideways. Nor the time she was texting while driving and plowed into a parked car on Wilshire. The airbag punched her texting hand into her face and the corner of the phone gouged her cheek. That one had required sixteen stitches to close.
And not even the emotional pain when she had come home early from a shoot and found her first and only husband in a three-way with her two sisters. In fact, she had been able to excise that pain painlessly with just a few signatures on court documents that cut the bastard permanently loose. And as for her sisters, well, what sisters? They were now dead to her.
She wondered how long before she would be dead to them. In fact, she wondered simply how long before she would be dead. For a few brief moments as she cleared the cobwebs from her mind,
she couldn’t even remember where she was or what had happened. All she knew was that she found herself lying face down on her bedroom floor, unable to move. Barely able to breathe. And with a deep pain in the middle of her back.
It slowly came back to her. The sounds in the house, the man on the other side of the door, the sound of gunshots. And then the pain. She turned her head, a simple motion that upped the intensity of the searing hot sensation in her back. She could see three holes in a triangular pattern on the wooden door and shards of splintered wood that marked the paths of the bullets. It was a big triangle, isosceles in shape, the pattern made by a man who couldn’t be real sure where she stood and was shooting blindly and hoping to make contact. She didn’t know how many bullets were in her back, but the pattern suggested no more than two, maybe only one. That uncertainty on the part of her assassin might be the only reason she was still alive.
What was puzzling, though, was why he had not entered the room after firing. Once she no longer blocked entry, he could easily have pushed the door open, stepped inside, and emptied his weapon into her. Then she remembered that she, too, had been armed, albeit with just a BB pistol. She also remembered that she had fired it, and she remembered groans— or were they screams?—from the other side of the door. She couldn’t imagine that BB wounds would be fatal, but maybe they had been strategic enough to drive h
im from the house.
Unless he was still inside, playing cat and mouse, and waiting for her to exit her hole.
She redirected her focus to her cell phone on the nightstand. If she could just get there without too much pain. It wasn’t the hurt, itself, that worried her; it was the idea that too much would shut down her mind, sending her back to blissful unconsciousness. And if she blacked out, if she couldn’t get to the phone first, she might never wake up again.
She raised up onto her elbows and dragged herself forward. The carpet burned on her skin, but she paid it no mind. Carpet burns were no more than hiccups in a hurricane compared to the pain in her back. She moved forward what seemed like only an inch at a time, the nightstand growing tantalizingly closer with each pull of her elbows. The black waves seemed held at bay as they crashed on the shore of her consciousness, driven back by her sheer will power.
At last she reached the nightstand. She paused for a moment, as each breath came in a ragged gasp. At times she felt as if she were drowning, and she wondered if the bullet had punctured a lung. She pushed up as high as she could on her left elbow and reached with her right arm. Her hand danced around on the surface of the nightstand until she found the phone.
With a sigh of relief, she rolled onto her side as best she could, but even that small pressure on her back sent lightning bolts through her body and into her brain. She pressed the first number in her “favorites” and held the phone to her ear.
After a moment, a familiar voice answered.
“Teri,” she said, her voice weak and breathy. “Help me.”
“Where are you?” Teri asked.
Mona gasped, spit out a wad of phlegm onto the carpet beside her face. Dark red, glistening in the glow of the lamp from the nightstand.
“Bedroom.”
Then she blacked out.
CHAPTER 28
“Mona?—Mona!” Teri looked at Stillman, her face a pale spectre. He read her look instantly.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“We have to go to Mona’s,” Teri said to the three detectives. “Something’s wrong.”
“Give me the phone,” Stillman said.
Teri complied and watched as he raised it to his ear. “Mona?” He looked at Teri and shook his head. “The line’s still open.”
“Can you hear anything?”
“Nothing. Who’s Mona?”
“Mona Hirsch. She’s my producing partner. I tried to call her all night, but she wouldn’t answer.”
Swafford took his own cell phone from his pocket and dialed a number. “This is Swafford. We need a unit to respond to...”
He looked at Teri. “What’s her address?” he asked Teri. She told him and he repeated the address, then said, “I don’t know. Just have someone get there ASAP. I’m on my way.”
Teri led the way in her SUV, followed by Swafford in his car and the two CHP detectives in their Chevy Tahoe. She tried to make some sense of events over the past twenty-four hours, but none of it lined up.
She knew she had been recognized at the diner. Los Angeles and its environs were used to celebrity sightings of disguised and camouflaged movie stars, and only rarely did disguises work. Just as some people supposedly had “gay-dar,” able to pick out those still hidden deep within their closets, and others could spot toupees at a hundred paces, Angelenos knew their celebrities when they saw them. Half of them might not know who the President of the United States was even if you spotted them the O and the bama, but flash a picture of a sunglasses-and-baseball-cap-wearing two-time Academy Award winner, and ninety percent of them would nail the identity in a split second. The other ten percent would simply mistake her for Sandra Bullock, Hilary Swank, or Angelina Jolie.
She wished now that she had kept following the look-a-like vehicle north on the PCH last night. Maybe things would make more sense to her if she had actually seen what happened up there, but common sense told her that would only have made things worse. Someone might have spotted her in the vicinity, which would have gutted her already nearly worthless alibi.
But then she remembered calling Mona last night. Was there technology that would allow the police to figure out where she had been when those calls were made? Seems like she had seen that at least once on a cop show on television, but then again, how much of what you saw on TV could you actually believe? Still, it was worth a shot. If so, it would show that she had been working her way home when she had called, and maybe it could provide her an alibi for the exact time Leland Crowell, or whoever the scraggly-haired man was, took a header off that cliff.
But the real nagging question, the one that was now gnawing at her heart, was why Mona hadn’t answered last night. If she had been home, she would have had her cell turned on. If the battery was low, she would have had it charging, but still turned on. Mona never turned her phone off. It was her umbilical to the world.
Then Teri thought of the ragged gasps and the nearly guttural sound of Mona’s voice on the phone. “Help me.”
She pressed harder on the gas, took the turn onto Sunset on two wheels, and accelerated. Behind her, the detectives did the same, keeping a close tail on her. Within a matter of minutes since receiving the call, she turned onto Mona’s street. It was a stereotypical Beverly Hills residential neighborhood of luxury homes from another era, many gated or walled off by hedges, usually some variety of free-blooming hibiscus bushes, yards neatly trimmed, high-priced cars in circle driveways. The air was sweet with the fragrance of a hundred varieties of flowers, and not a soul was on the sidewalks other than the hired help with gas-powered edgers, leaf blowers, and hedge trimmers.
A Beverly Hills PD squad car sat at the curb in front of Mona’s house, which was more modest than those of her gaudier neighbors. Teri remembered the first time she had been here, meeting Mona who had just put a down payment on the house. It was with the joy of a child getting her first bicycle that Mona led her through the vacant structure, pointing where she was going to put this and where she was going to put that, and what she was going to have to buy to fill this room, and the artwork that would hang on this wall and that wall. When their financial success as a producing team snowballed for a brief while, Mona had done exactly as she said, filling her house to fit the exact parameters of her dream.
Teri wondered what nightmare they would find inside now.
She got out of her car as the detectives pulled up behind her. Two uniformed police officers stood at the front door, looking back at the sound of the arriving vehicles. Teri rushed to the door, Stillman hard on her heels.
“Is this your home, ma’am?” one of the young cops asked, recognition in his eyes, but professionalism in his voice. He looked as if he had come straight from a GQ modeling shoot, with every hair in place, his skin bronze from the sun. His partner, a slightly older but equally gorgeous cop, nodded toward Swafford, who brought up the rear, as if they knew each other.
“Anything?” Swafford asked.
“We just got here,” said the first cop, whose nameplate identified him as S. Baskind. “We rang the bell, but there’s no answer. And the door’s locked.”
“I have a key,” Teri said. Her fingers trembled as she struggled to single one out on her key ring. She had just managed to grasp it when it slipped through her fingers. She knelt to pick the ring up, her eyes suddenly filling with tears.
“Let me help you, ma’am,” Baskind said. He picked up the key ring and extended the one she had been trying to grasp. “Is it this one?”
She nodded.
He inserted it into the lock and turned. The deadbolt slid back, and he slowly pushed the door open. The only sound was an urgent beeping from the security system in the entryway.
“Alarm is set,” Baskind said.
“I know the code,” Teri said as she tried to squeeze by. He stepped aside and allowed her to enter. She punched in the four digit code, and the beeping stopped.
She took a quick step toward the interior of the house, only to be stopped by Sti
llman grabbing her arm. She looked back at him, startled by the suddenness of his movement.
“Stay behind us,” he said.
She nodded then noticed Swafford squatting at the threshold. “Check this out,” he said.
All eyes turned to the area indicated by his extended index finger, on the entryway floor just inside the door. Guns were drawn as they recognized the unmistakable droplets of blood. Looking outside the door, Teri saw additional droplets on the porch that she had not noticed before.
Swafford pointed toward the interior of the house. “They’re coming from there, leading out to the door.”
“Oh, my God,” Teri said, her words barely audible. “Mona.”
“Go wait by your car,” Stillman said. Then, to Officer Baskind, “Wait with her.”
“And call for Crime Scene,” Swafford said.
Baskind nodded. “Let’s go, ma’am,” he said to Teri.
Teri felt numb as the officer gently grasped her elbow and escorted her to the curb.
CHAPTER 29
Stillman led the way toward the interior of the house. “There’s more here,” he said. A thin but clearly defined trail of blood led in a zig-zag pattern deeper into the house, as if someone had carried a bucket of red paint with a tiny pinprick hole in the bottom. “And you’re right, whoever was dripping was moving this way. They weren’t moving too steady, though. At least they couldn’t walk a straight line.”
Swafford stopped at the entrance to the living room, still shrouded in darkness despite the brightness of the day outside. He reached inside, felt along the wall, and flipped the light switch. A chandelier clicked on as a ceiling fan slowly revved up. He crossed the room and opened the drapes, allowing light into the room. The blood trail glistened.
Stillman looked back at the others. “Follow the yellow brick road.” Baskind had told Teri to sit in the back seat of the car, which he turned on and cranked its air conditioning, but she found it impossible to sit still. She joined him beside the car as he finished calling for Beverly Hills crime scene technicians.
The Bequest Page 12