Killer Mousse

by Melinda Wells

  Halfway to the Mustang, my musing was interrupted by the noise of a powerful engine roaring up my street. Recognizing that sound, I felt my pulse rate increase at least twenty thumps a minute from its usual steady fifty-eight.

  The silver Maserati screeched to a stop and NDM vaulted out. He was the last person I wanted to see, but I had to admit that he was attractive in his pale gray shirt and navy blazer. I refused to let myself think about the skillful body under his clothes. No matter how much effort it took, I would adhere to my resolve not to let our one-time physical encounter go any further. My erotic exorcism, Liddy had called it. NDM pushed an unruly hunk of dark hair back from his forehead and marched purposefully across my lawn. I was tempted to ask him not to walk on the grass, but I didn’t get the chance.

  He smiled at me, but I didn’t smile back. Positioning himself between me and the Mustang, he said softly, “We need to talk.”

  Hoping to discourage him, I tried to sound cool. “I’m sorry, I don’t have time. I have to get to the studio.”

  NDM didn’t discourage easily. “How about having dinner with me tonight? Only dinner. And conversation. I want to find out what you like to read.” That was a subtle reference to our first fight, about those “very mature” young models he dated. Considering the harsh things I’d said then, I had to give him credit for being a good sport about it.

  “No. I’m going to be busy. Do you mind stepping out of the way so I can get this box to the car? It’s heavy.”

  Instead of moving, NDM took the box out of my arms and held it. “Okay, I know this is a little awkward, but I’d like to see you again.”

  I wanted to say, “Let’s go to bed together as soon as I finish taping!” Liddy had been right; I’d released the “beast” of sexual desire. Now I had to control it, so what I actually said was, “It’s not going to work.”

  NDM stared at me, an expression in his eyes that looked like hurt. But I couldn’t believe I’d hurt him; he had all those gorgeous blonde actress-models.

  “What was last night?” he asked quietly. “Did you just use me for sex?” He shook his head in amazement. “I can’t believe I said that.”

  Gently, but not unkindly, I said, “How does it feel to be used for sex? Why should it only be the privilege of men?”

  “I never thought of it like that, but I get your point.”

  “Then you agree with me, that we should quit while we’re ahead?”

  “No, I don’t. I’m saying that—under more traditional circumstances—I want to get to know you better.”

  I thought: You know me pretty well in one respect right now.

  From inside the house, Tuffy began to woof; it was his special “the postman is coming” signal.

  Simultaneously, I heard, “Hello, Mrs. Carmichael.”

  Recognizing the cheery voice of our neighborhood’s pleasant Filipina mail carrier, I turned, waved at her, and called, “It’s okay, Tuffy.” He stopped barking.

  The young woman’s straight, shoulder-length black hair bounced as she hurried up from the sidewalk with a rubber-banded bundle of envelopes and magazines in her hand. Full of energy and good humor, she always seemed to enjoy her job. “Here’s your mail,” she said.

  I took it from her. “Thanks, Vera.”

  Vera smiled at me and at NDM. “Happy Wednesday,” she said, as she headed toward the next house on her route.

  “I preferred Tuesday,” NDM said pointedly. “Tuesday night.” Indicating my plain green sweater, he added, “You look good, but I’m kind of fond of what you wore last night—that silly blue sweater with the poodle on it.”

  Ignoring the remark, I pulled the letters from the bundle, tucked the magazines under one arm and riffled through the envelopes. A bill, a bill, an advertisement. When I came to one rectangle, I stopped flipping through them. It was from the Better Living Channel, and it looked like a check. I ripped it open and sighed in relief.

  “Something good?” NDM asked.

  “My paycheck.” I knew what the gross would be, but not the net. Now I saw that even with all the deductions, the amount would get me through this month and next. If I kept my job, and if the school didn’t lose more money, in a few months I could begin to save again, and I wouldn’t have to admit to my accountant mother the financial trouble I was in. Folding the check to put into my pocket, I saw the envelope beneath it. The handwriting was unfamiliar, but the sight of the return address label startled me. I must have made some sound, because NDM moved quickly to stand beside me and look at the object in my hand.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “This is from Lulu.”

  “Lulu Owens?” He put the box down on the path and leaned in for a closer look but didn’t try to touch it.

  The envelope was plain white and business size.

  NDM said, “It’s postmarked yesterday, the day after she was murdered.”

  With hands that were trembling, I opened the flap and carefully removed the single sheet of paper inside. So as not to destroy any possible prints, I held it at one corner, with just the tips of my thumb and index finger.

  It was a page of ordinary white copy paper. At the top, Lulu had written in blue ink: “Glad to know you, Della. Enjoy!” Below that she had printed the recipe for her lasagna.

  NDM said, “A recipe? I don’t get it.”

  “I do. Lulu made us lasagna for dinner that night. I told her it was better than mine, and she said she’d give me her recipe. Lots of people say that when you compliment something they’ve made, but few actually take the trouble to do it. Lulu must have written it out after I left her house Monday night….”

  Visualizing her street, I remembered something. “There’s a mail box at the corner, half a block from where she lived. She must have walked up to that box, mailed the letter, and—Oh, no!”

  “What?”

  “That’s why she was killed outside her house,” I said. “The murderer caught her before she could go in.” I stooped down to the food box. With my free hand, I reached in and extracted one of the several zip-top plastic bags I’d tucked between the pan of breadless meatloaf and the package of spinach fettuccini. I used the bags as a cushiony buffer to keep the strands of dry fettuccini from breaking in case the meat loaf shifted in the box while I was driving.

  NDM said, “The only snail mail I get anymore are bills. I’m surprised Lulu didn’t e-mail you the recipe.”

  “She told me she didn’t trust computers. She kept all of her recipes in big albums she showed me.”

  NDM watched me put Lulu’s envelope and recipe into the baggie and zip the top closed.

  “Not a bad emergency evidence bag,” he said, “but I doubt there’ll be any prints on the letter except Lulu’s.”

  “Maybe you’re right, but if there are other prints, we’d know that someone else handled the paper. It could be a clue.”

  “It’s a long shot, but you’re right to be careful. We can’t afford to assume the paper won’t tell us anything. We’ll give it to Hall for SID to go over.”

  I held on to the top of the plastic bag. “Would you put the box in my car for me? I’ve got to take that, another box, and Tuffy to the studio. I’ll drop the letter off at the North Hollywood Station on my way.”

  “You can come with me, in my car,” he said.

  “No, thanks.” I started walking ahead of him to unlock the Mustang’s doors. “I’m taping two shows today and I don’t know when I’ll be through.”

  Just as I reached my car, I saw something so shocking that it sent me reeling backward. I collided with NDM. Both of us would have fallen if he hadn’t grabbed my arm to steady me. At the same time, miraculously, he managed to keep the box of food upright.

  “What happened?”

  I pointed. Barely managing to croak out the word, I said, “Look.”

  Following my line of sight, he whispered, “Oh, Jeez.”

  We stared at the Mustang. The driver’s side window was smashed in and the contents of my glove
compartment were scattered over the front seat. And someone had stuck a sheet of white paper under my windshield wiper. Scrawled in big black letters, it read:

  U R Nxt

  Without touching the paper, NDM read the message aloud. “‘You are next.’”

  “I understand the text,” I said. “It also means that the killer knows where I live.”

  28

  I called Hall on his cell phone to tell him that my car had been broken into, and about the message on my windshield.

  “Don’t touch that car!” he shouted. “I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  “Five minutes? From North Hollywood? How can you get here so fast?”

  “I’m in Brentwood.” He hung up before I could ask anything else.

  Indicating the box, I said, “We should take the food into the house.”

  NDM, carrying the box, followed me into the house, picked up the second box, and put both of them onto the kitchen table for me.

  I picked up Tuffy’s leash and brought him outside with us while NDM and I sat together on the front stoop, waiting for Detective Hall.

  “To be safe, I think you should move out of your house for a while,” NDM said. “Is there someone you could stay with?”

  “Of course.” Liddy. In any disaster, she would take Tuffy, Emma, Eileen, and me in before I could ask for shelter. There was no way I was going to endanger Liddy and Bill by staying at their house with a killer threatening me, but perhaps Eileen could stay there for a while.

  “After we see Hall, I’ll take you wherever,” NDM said.

  “No. I’m not going to let anyone chase me from my home.”

  “The police won’t be able to give you meaningful protection. At most, they’d have a patrol car circle the block every hour or so, but even that’s doubtful, given all the crime in this city. I could stay here, if you like.”

  “Absolutely not!”

  “I wasn’t suggesting anything personal. I’d sleep on the couch in the living room. My being under your roof would be strictly business—the business of trying to catch a murderer.”

  “No. I don’t need a bodyguard.” Even as I said that, I felt my stomach muscles clench in fear at the thought of the killer having been here in the night, so close he was in my carport.

  “Della, I have a friend at North Hollywood Station who told me that a guy chased you after you visited Faye Bond. Threatening you here at your home is an escalation. If you don’t back off now and stop asking questions, he could proceed to the next step: killing you.”

  “I’m not going to be intimidated. I have a big advantage over Mimi and Lulu. Neither one of them had any reason to think they were in danger. I do. I can be careful not to let anyone surprise me. And I have Tuffy. He’s strong and very protective. Just see what happens if you try to grab me.”

  “Don’t tempt me,” he said. He reached across my lap and scratched Tuffy behind an ear. “Nice dog. I’m not going to hurt your mistress.” He straightened. “You’d be better off with a piece. Do you have your husband’s service revolver?”

  “No. I turned it in.”

  “He had a backup, didn’t he? Something not on the official list?”

  “I gave it to John,” I said. “I don’t like guns.”

  “Let’s not debate gun ownership now. Tell me why the killer seems to think you’re getting close to finding out who he is. What do you know that hasn’t been made public? Hall is keeping a tight lid on the case. Even my friend at the station told me only about what happened to you in Brentwood. She wouldn’t risk saying anything else.”

  She. Why am I not surprised his informant is a woman?

  “I have no idea who the killer is,” I said, “but I’m convinced that the person works at, or has some connection to, the channel.”

  “Why?”

  I told him about discovering the car that pursued me was at the studio. “It’s a Simba that Car Guy uses on his show. When he drove it onto his set, I recognized the rough sound it made. Then the damage to the front looked like it matched the damage to the back of my Mustang. I called Detective Hall, who had SID go over it. Car Guy told us the Simba was parked on the street outside the studio along with other employees’ cars from Friday morning until Monday morning, because the parking lot was being paved on Friday. The street behind the studio is dark and pretty deserted. Car Guy had the key, but apparently anyone who knows how could have hot-wired it and driven without a key.”

  “So whoever took the car and drove to Mimi Bond’s house didn’t want his own vehicle to be recognized. The question is why did the driver go to the Bond house in a stolen car? He couldn’t have known you’d be there, so what was he planning to do that he didn’t want to use his own wheels for?”

  I focused on that evening and remembered something that hadn’t seemed significant at the time.

  “Lulu was at the Bond house,” I said. “I took flowers to Faye, as an excuse to question her. She was still too upset to say much, but Lulu and I talked. She was just about to tell me some things about people at the studio when we were interrupted. Faye was making noise upstairs and Lulu was concerned. That’s when Lulu invited me to dinner at her house on Monday night, so we could keep talking.” I was beginning to see part of the puzzle; the shape was starting to form. “What if the killer was really after Lulu but was distracted by seeing me there?”

  “That was Friday. If the person planned to kill Lulu, why did he wait until Monday night to do it?”

  I knew the answer to that. “Lulu told me she was staying at Faye’s all weekend, to take care of her. The person wouldn’t have had a chance to get Lulu alone until Monday night. There’s something else that convinces me the person has a connection to the channel,” I said. “Do you know how Lulu was killed?”

  “She was stabbed to death.”

  “The murder weapon was a knife that was stolen from my kitchen at the studio. It had to have been taken after I left Monday afternoon because I used it during my rehearsal with Quinn Tanner.”

  He reached for my free hand and folded it into his. “That’s got to be tough for you.”

  “I really liked Lulu. It’s terrible that she’s dead, and it makes me sick to know someone took a knife of mine—a tool I’d used to make good food—and…Yes, it is tough.”

  “Who did you see at the studio that day?”

  “Quinn Tanner; George Hopkins; Car Guy; the day security guard, Stan; and the person at the desk who operates the gate buzzer. Gil York was taping his show at the other end of the building; I saw him on the monitor. And there was also whoever was working with him.”

  “Okay, those names are a start. We’ll need to find out who else was there, or who might have come after you left.”

  At that moment, with the two of us sitting together on my front stoop and NDM holding my hand, Detective Hall drove up in the vehicle I’d nicknamed the Green Hornet.

  And John O’Hara was with him.

  29

  Embarrassed to be seen with NDM holding my hand, I pulled away quickly and stood up. NDM stood up, too, and so did Tuffy. We made a line of three, facing the duo of investigators getting out of Hall’s Rover. Detective Hall nodded at me and strode right for the Mustang.

  John headed for us, threw a glare at NDM, and asked me, “What happened here?”

  “Sometime during the night, that message was placed on my windshield.”

  John started toward the car. I followed, with Tuffy on his leash. Glancing back, I saw that NDM had remained by the stoop. Half turned away, he was speaking quietly into his cell phone.

  Slipping on latex gloves, Hall removed the note. He and John studied the scrawled threat. John cursed softly and asked me, “Where’s Eileen? Has she seen this?”

  “She left early for school. I woke up in the middle of the night to be sure she was home and saw her car parked in the driveway behind mine. I’m sure she didn’t see it, or she would have come back inside and told me.”

  Hall put the note in an evidence env
elope and carefully examined the outside of the Mustang. “Is this car exactly the way you found it?”

  “Yes. As soon as I saw the note I called you. I haven’t touched anything.”

  On a case, John was usually the epitome of cool, but right now he couldn’t hide the lines of worry etched in his face. “It isn’t safe for you and Eileen to stay here.”

  “I’ve already had this argument once today and I’m not going to have it again.”

  John stiffened. “Does D’Martino want you to leave?”

  “You two think alike. Look, I’m sure Eileen can stay with Liddy until you catch whoever did this, but I’m not leaving.”

  John turned to scowl at NDM. I saw the journalist disconnecting from his call.

  “How long has he been here?” John asked.

  Coming toward us, NDM heard the question. “I got here a couple of minutes before Della saw the break-in and the note. Not that it’s any of your business, unless you think I wrote that message.”

  John’s voice was hard; he wasn’t retreating an inch. “Do you have an alibi for last night?”

  I almost choked, but I managed not to make a sound as I stood rigid with tension.

  NDM was as smooth as cake batter. “Is that a serious question, asked in your professional capacity? If so, the answer is no, I don’t have an alibi. I was alone all of last night.”

  I relaxed inside, but tried not to let my relief show. Then I thought, What’s the matter with me? I’m an adult and I can do anything I want to do, as long as it’s legal. But I knew my situation wasn’t that simple.

  John asked NDM, “What are you doing here this morning?’

  “Visiting a friend,” NDM said. “Lieutenant O’Hara, you’re beginning to sound like a jealous husband, but you need to remember that you’re not Della’s husband.”

  John’s face reddened, but Hall interrupted before the exchange could get more heated. “Cut it out, you two. We don’t have time for a head-butting contest.”