Killer Mousse

by Melinda Wells

  Mickey and Iva Jordan lived in a large, two-story Spanish-style home in the seven hundred block of Alpine Drive, in what’s called “the flats” of Beverly Hills. Those are the blocks south of Sunset Boulevard and north of Santa Monica Boulevard. Below Santa Monica is the Beverly Hills business district, with its elegant department stores, European boutiques, jewelers, and art galleries.

  I parked on the street, just to the right of the driveway leading to the open door of the two-car garage. Iva’s sunflower yellow BMW sports car was parked inside. Mickey Jordan’s four-wheeled behemoth was out in the driveway, being waxed by a heavy, middle-aged man in brown overalls. It was some sort of steroidal SUV, almost as big as a yacht, and painted a matching sunflower yellow to Iva’s car. Iva had told me that yellow was Mickey’s favorite color; it looked as though “big” was his favorite size. If I hadn’t known whose SUV that it was, the “MICKEYJ” license plate would have been a pretty good clue. Iva’s car had a vanity plate, too: “MRS M J.”

  I got out of the Mustang and walked up the brick path to the Jordan house. Its exterior was cream stucco, with the windows trimmed in cocoa brown. The heavy wooden front door sported large, hammered iron hinges and looked as though it might have come from an old Spanish mission. Along the top and down the sides, the wood had been carved with small figures of monks in robes. To the right of the door, a great swath of scarlet bougainvillea climbed to the edge of the curved red clay tiles on the roof.

  Seconds after I pressed the bell, the front door was yanked open. I had expected to see the Jordans’ urbane English butler Maurice (pronounced “Morris”), but Mickey himself was standing there. His full head of salt-and-pepper hair recently had been cut so short it seemed to be standing on end. At sixty, Mickey had the energy of an athlete less than half his age. His body was compact, with the muscular shoulders and the wiry lower body of a bantamweight prizefighter. It was an image perpetuated by his habit of punching the air with his fists to make his points.

  Mickey nodded a greeting at me while he barked into a hands-free phone fastened to one ear. Never a soft-spoken man, his New Jersey accent—familiar to fans of The Sopranos—grew more pronounced when he was angry.

  “What the f—you trying to pull?…F—the FCC. I wanna know how I can get around the regs and pick up those two Texas stations…. By six o’clock tonight, Jimmy, or look for another gig.”

  Mickey disconnected and gestured for me to follow him through the foyer arch into the living room that was as large as a tennis court. It was a beautiful room: original Spanish tiles on the floor, heavy dark beams above, and a stone fireplace big enough to roast a side of beef.

  “Sit, sit, sit,” Mickey said, gesturing to one of the two matching yellow couches flanking the fireplace. Because of the width of the hearth, they were far enough apart to have separate carved wood and glass-topped coffee tables in front of each. Mickey plopped down on the one nearest the door. So we wouldn’t have to shout at each other across the distance between coffee tables, I sat on the same sofa, leaving the space of a seat cushion between us.

  Mickey looked as though he was still three-quarters dressed from his trip to New York, in dark brown suit pants, a pale yellow dress shirt—the top button undone—and one of his bright yellow silk ties loosened around his thick neck.

  “Maurice is upstairs unpacking for me, but when he comes down and asks you what you want, say tea—he makes crappy coffee.”

  “I know,” I said, smiling. “Iva warned me when we had lunch here a few weeks ago.”

  Mickey slipped off his glossy brown Italian shoes, slung his feet up on top of the coffee table, and let out a sigh of relief. I saw that he wore yellow socks.

  “So, what’s the story, Del? Why’d you want to come over?”

  “You can imagine how horrible it was to see Mimi Bond die. Even though she was a stranger, I’d like to know something about her.”

  He snorted. “She was a miserable old broad.”

  Trying to get him to be more specific, I said, “She seemed to be a very unhappy woman.”

  “She was a bitch, and a mean drunk.” He folded his arms across his chest and glowered into space.

  “How long did you know her?” I asked.

  He leaned forward and took a cigar out of the handsome old humidor on the coffee table. He asked, “Mind if I smoke?” but he was already clipping the cigar’s tip and reaching for a lighter.

  “No, not at all,” I said.

  As he lighted the cigar, he turned to glance at the staircase in the foyer behind us, as though checking to see if either Iva or Maurice were on their way down. Satisfied that we were still alone, he leaned back and relaxed as he drew on the cigar.

  I asked again, “How long did you—”

  “I remember the question. I met Mimi about ten years ago. She was a real foxy babe then. She’d just started doing an evening cooking show on one of my radio stations, KLEX. Only five thousand watts, but we had a long reach at night when there wasn’t much signal interference. I saw her at the station. We got kinda friendly.”

  Kinda friendly. I wondered if that was a euphemism for…one of Mickey’s favorite words. “Was she good?” I asked. Realizing how that might sound, I added quickly, “I mean, was she good at her job, on the radio?”

  Mickey smiled, more to himself than at me. “Let’s just say she looked better than she cooked,” he said softly.

  “I thought she was very successful.”

  “When she got her own TV show—I was still in radio then, hadn’t started buying my cable stations—she had a ‘stunt cooker.’ She called the woman her assistant, but that gal did all the real work, with the finished stuff and on the air. By herself, Mimi couldn’t make instant oatmeal.”

  That surprised me. “The couple of her shows that I saw, she was on camera alone.”

  “Oh, yeah, by then she’d learned a few tricks about cooking, so long as the dish had booze in it.”

  “But if that was your opinion, why did you put her on the air?”

  “I didn’t,” he said. “Mimi was on the Better Living Channel for a couple of years before I bought it. The first year she sponsored it herself, with her late husband’s money. We hadn’t seen each other for a long time, so you could say I sort of inherited her.”

  “She must have been very surprised when you let her go.”

  Mickey tapped cigar ash into a crystal ashtray and nodded. “You got that right. She threw a f—ing class-A fit. She thought she’d be able to write her own ticket because we had a kind of history…but I’m a businessman. Her show was crap on toast.”

  Inwardly I shuddered at that image, but I pressed on. “She accused me of getting my show by sleeping with you.”

  “I don’t do that anymore. I’m a happily married man now.”

  That wasn’t a subject I wanted to get into because of my fondness for Iva. And I couldn’t see how it had any bearing on Mimi’s murder. “As terrible as it was to have Mimi collapse, it was even worse when I realized that her daughter was there and saw her mother die. I’d like to visit her, to express my condolences.”

  Mickey grimaced and shook his head. “You’re a better man than I am. Accusing you of offing Mimi—that’s one weird kid.”

  “I’m sure she was just in shock.”

  “Go see her if you want to, but in my opinion, that little girl’s a whack-a-doodle. Always was.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Mickey tapped some more ash off his cigar. “The girl was eight or nine when I met Mimi. One night I came to their house to take Mimi out. The kid was polite when she met me, but when we got back we found her in the living room. She’d shaved her head.”

  “Oh, the poor girl…”

  “‘Poor girl’ my left toches. Mimi said she’d been a problem since the dad died. A year ago, when I bought the channel, the kid was away at college. Mimi said Faye was doin’ great—but then Faye had that meltdown with you at the studio.”

  Knowing that Mimi drank, and havi
ng learned how she’d planned to ruin my show, I thought that being Mimi’s daughter must have been difficult. “I’d still like to go see her,” I said.

  “Suit yourself.” Mickey reached over to the end table for the note pad and pen lying next to the phone and started scribbling. “Faye lived with Mimi, so I guess she’s still in the house. Here’s the address. It’s a little tricky to find, so I’m writing down directions.” He finished, tore the page from the pad, and handed it to me.

  “Thank you.” I got up to leave and Mickey rose with me. “Please tell Iva that I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to see her while I was here,” I said.

  “Yeah, I will. She likes you. I’ll take you two gals out to dinner soon.”

  As we walked to the door, I thought of a question. “Whatever became of Mimi’s assistant—the ‘stunt cooker,’ you called her?”

  “She did okay. Didn’t really like cooking all that much. Maybe working with Mimi ruined it for her. Anyway, she came up with a gimmick for herself and she’s pretty successful. Has her own TV show, and she makes tchotchkes to sell on one of those shopping channels.”

  “I wonder if I’ve seen her. What’s her name?”

  “Seen her—you’ve met her. It’s Lulu Owens, our crafts lady.”

  The woman who was with Iva at the studio last night. The woman who took Iva home. The woman who flirted with Detective Hall and said how much she likes to talk.

  I decided that after I saw Faye Bond, I would get to know Lulu Owens.

  Mickey and I said good-bye at the door.

  As I started down the brick path to my car, some instinct made me glance back at the house. A shutter on one of the upstairs windows opened a few inches. I caught a glimpse of blonde hair and realized that Iva was watching me.

  Why hadn’t she come downstairs?

  12

  On my way to see Faye Bond, I stopped at a florist’s shop and bought a plant blooming with little white orchids. I had the clerk put it into an elegant black ceramic pot. Thus armed with a condolence gift, I headed west on Sunset Boulevard.

  Reaching Rockingham Drive in Brentwood, I turned south. Several turns later, I reached my objective: a small residential street with homes set a generous distance apart.

  The address Mickey gave me was a lovely old house in the French country style, bracketed by mature shade trees. A mantle of English ivy covered both sides of the front door and climbed all the way up to the underside of the peaked roof over the second floor above the entrance. More of the ivy was draped like a garland along the top of the row of casement windows on the first floor.

  The only unattractive thing about the house was the local TV news van positioned in front of it. A man in a dark sweater sat behind the wheel. I recognized the woman with streaked blonde hair who occupied the passenger seat; she was an on-air reporter. I drove past their van and parked at the curb just beyond the mouth of Mimi’s driveway.

  When I got out of the car, cradling the potted orchid plant against my chest, I saw the reporter simultaneously climbing from the TV van. She clutched a microphone with the station’s identifying letters on it in one hand and fluffed her hair with the other. The driver hopped out, too. He hefted a camera rig onto his shoulder and hurried behind her.

  The woman reached the path leading to the front door just before I did and blocked my way. She turned toward the camera and beamed a professional smile at me, but the expression didn’t reach to her dark, predator’s eyes.

  “I’m Teddi Ross from KUBS. Were you a friend of the murder victim?” She shoved the microphone toward me.

  “Just an acquaintance,” I said. Barely even that.

  “Why are you here?”

  “To pay a sympathy call.”

  “What do you know about Mimi Bond’s murder?”

  “Sorry.” I hoped she wouldn’t notice that I’d given her a nonanswer answer.

  The man poked his face out from behind the camera. “Hey, Ted—she’s the poisoned-chocolate woman.”

  Oh, great, another awful nickname. It wasn’t quite as bad as when the gate man at the Better Living Channel referred to me as “the killer chocolate woman.”

  When her cameraman identified me, excitement lighted the reporter’s eyes. She thrust the microphone closer to me, almost decapitating an orchid blossom.

  Annoyed, I pulled the plant out of range. “Please be careful with that microphone,” I said.

  “Mimi Bond was killed on your cooking show. Tell us what happened to her.”

  “I don’t know,” I said firmly.

  “Were the two of you enemies?”

  “Absolutely not. I’d never met her before last night. If you want information about the investigation, you’ll have to get it from the police. There’s nothing I can tell you.”

  I stepped around Teddi Ross and was about to start toward the house when she grabbed my arm.

  “I do ‘The Two of Us’ feature segment on the news at six and eleven,” she said. “We’re number one in the ratings. An interview on my show could do your new little show a lot of good. How about coming on with me tomorrow, Delta?”

  Delta? She didn’t even know my name. I eased my arm from her grasp. “I don’t make those arrangements. You’ll have to talk to our publicity man, Phil Logan.”

  “I know Phil. He’d kill to get you on my show.”

  I flinched. “Under the circumstances, that’s a pretty insensitive way to put it.”

  “It was just a figure of speech,” she said defensively.

  “I’ve really got to go now,” I said, shifting the weight of the plant in my arms.

  Teddi Ross lowered her microphone and signaled the cameraman to turn it off. “I’ll call Phil,” she said, “but if you’re going to do an interview with me, you’ll have to give me some exclusive information, or it’s no deal. You don’t want to make an enemy out of me, Delta.” After tossing off that threat, the reporter and her cameraman trudged back to their TV truck.

  Now that I’d met Teddi Ross, I thought she wasn’t as appealing as she seemed on TV. While doing her reports, she appeared to exude warmth toward the people she interviewed. Her sympathetic smile made her features look soft, lovely. Threatening me, her face had hardened, and she lost several points on the beauty scale.

  The path from the street to the house was lined with tall rose bushes in shades of pink and red. They were still bursting with this year’s blooms. I’m not exactly a talented gardener, but several years ago I saw two parched-looking bare root rose bushes on sale in front of a supermarket. I didn’t want to leave them there to die, so I bought them, along with some organic rose food, and planted them in the backyard.

  Much to my surprise, those plants lived and started to grow. What a thrill it was to see them bud. Because there hadn’t been any labels on their dirty plastic wrappings, I had no idea what to expect, but they turned out to be a type of big and gorgeous yellow rose called “Brandy.” I made a promise to myself that when I could afford luxury spending, I’d buy a few more bushes. But first I had to keep my job, and that need had brought me to Brentwood to try to question the girl who accused me of killing her mother.

  Out on the street behind me, I heard the engine of the TV truck start. Either they’d given up on the idea that anything interesting was going to happen here, or the team had received a call that some famous name had gotten into trouble. A celebrity “Ooops!” was always a good TV story, especially if there were unflattering photos to be had. The truck was out of sight before I managed to find Mimi’s front doorbell, which was partially concealed in ivy.

  Leaning close to the door, I could hear a faint chime inside the house, but it took three politely spaced rings before footsteps approached. The cover over a peephole slid aside and an eyeball peered at me.

  “Yes?” asked a woman behind the door. Even though she’d uttered only that one word, something about her voice was vaguely familiar.

  “I’m Della Carmichael. I came to express my condolences.”

 
“Lord Almighty, Ah’m glad it’s only you.”

  The eyehole cover slipped back, the door opened, and I was facing a woman with a soft pink complexion, tanned, muscular arms, and long silver gray hair tied back in a ponytail: Lulu Owens, the Better Living Channel’s crafts lady, and the one-time “stunt cooker” for Mimi Bond. She grabbed one of my wrists and pulled me inside. If it hadn’t been for the orchid plant between us, I think she would have embraced me.

  “Hello, Lulu,” I said.

  We were in the entry hall, but I felt as though I’d stepped into a big, exploding blood vessel: wine red carpeting below my feet, scarlet felt wallpaper to the left and right, and a crimson velvet tented ceiling billowed above, swept up in the center and anchored by a brass chandelier. The gaudy décor was a surprise because it was so different from the sedate elegance of the exterior.

  Lulu peered around me at the street. “Is that bottle-blonde polecat possi-tutely gone?”

  “They just drove away in a rush. What’s a polecat?”

  Lulu wrinkled her nose as though reacting to a bad smell. “Country cousin to a skunk.” She closed the door, slipped the dead bolt, and gestured at the orchid plant in my arms. “Is that for little Faye?”

  I nodded. “How is she?”

  “One heck of a Rocky Mountain mess, poor baby.” Lulu took the orchids from me and said, “Come on.” She started walking toward the back of the house.

  As we passed the living room, I saw it was another symphony in red, with timpani notes of gilt and brass.

  “Faye’s in the kitchen. I got her to eat something.” Lulu snorted. “The kitchen’s the only room in this imitation bawdy house that Mimi was hardly ever in. Ah wish you coulda seen this place before her husband died and Mimi redecorated. Faye’s daddy was a real sweet man, an’ he had real good taste—in everything except women.”