by Al Roker
“Hell, thanks to Clint, I’m also one degree away from Kevin Bacon. So what?”
“There’s not much chance Kevin Bacon killed your daughter.”
“Wh-hoa there! You lost me round that turn.”
“How’d Connie die, Stew?”
He was silent for a beat. “You tell me.”
“It happened less than a year after that picture was taken.”
“How d’you know that?”
I didn’t want to bring Gloria into the conversation, so I asked him a question instead. “She was on a trip to Europe, right? No. You said she was graduating in two years. Junior year abroad?”
“Ellery Queen’s got nothing on you, Billy.”
“Studying in Ireland?”
“Goldsmith’s in London.”
“How’d she die, Stew?”
“You’re the—how do they put it?—the amateur sleuth. You tell me.”
Fitz had told me Des had been serious when he was younger and he’d done something for love of country that had gone bad. Then there was Dr. Dover’s story about the vengeful father. An eye for an eye. A drowned son for a drowned son.
“Did she die in an IRA bombing?” I asked.
Stew gave me a wistful smile that I didn’t think had any relationship to what he was thinking. “In the Mill Hill section of London, Miz Thatcher’s parliamentary constabulary. They were sending the prime minister a message. Connie was spending a few days with a girl she’d met in one of her design classes. They went out to breakfast at a place British Army soldiers frequented.
“The fragile things on which our lives depend.” His eyes filled with tears, but he held on. “Those were the days when you had some control over your privacy. And a macho superstar such as yours truly wasn’t looking for pity from his fans. So to the rest of the world, Connie was just a college kid from Southern California, one of three civilians who died in the explosion. Today there’d be pictures on the Internet of me being held down by a couple of Teamsters and getting tranked by the location nurse after hearing the news.”
He took a deep breath, then let it out slowly.
“All a long time ago,” he said.
“How’d you find out Des was involved?”
“Trey. I hadn’t seen him since Connie’s funeral. About seven or eight months ago, he called, out of the blue, I thought, and suggested we have dinner. Turned out he’d spent a lot of loot on investigators over the years, and one finally came up with a list of the four Mill Hill bombers. Three had died in the Troubles. The survivor, Desmond Rafferty, had been booted out of the IRA shortly before the peace accord. He’d reinvented himself as Desmond O’Day, a comedian who’d migrated to the States and was appearing in a sitcom shot on the East Coast.”
It occurred to me that, like Des, I’d engineered my own reinvention. I’d walked out of those prison gates with a new skill set, new ambition, and, within a few weeks, a new name. But even if there’d been a reason to mention this to Stew, he was too deep into his own story to have paid it much mind.
“Trey asked me what I thought about Connie’s killer leading the good life in New York. I must admit I told him I wished I could get my hands on the mick bastard. To my surprise, he said he could arrange that.
“I started backpedalin’. I said it was macho bluster, that I really didn’t give a damn about the asshole. Twenty-three years was a long time. And it wasn’t like he’d aimed a gun at my baby and pulled the trigger. He was fighting a war, and Connie just happened to get in the way.
“But Trey was deep in vengeance valley. He said he had no interest in anything but avenging Connie. He had no personal life, no desire for fortune or fame. And he’d wound up in a position to get O’Day to come to him. Then he’d make the man pay.
“I told him he was on his own. Next I knew, the papers are talking about O’Day doing a nighttime TV show from out here, exec-produced by Max Slaughter and line-produced by Trey. So I sat back and waited to see what would happen.”
“Accessory before the fact. And after.”
“Oh, hell, Billy. I didn’t know for certain what Trey had in mind. And I sure as hell felt no obligation to warn the Irish prick.”
Stew’s story was pretty convincing. I knew that Trey had sold Max on hiring Des. But I also remembered something else he did. “If you weren’t involved in Trey’s murder plan, why’d he pick a house for Des barely a grenade throw from yours?”
“That’s something you’d have to ask him. Maybe he figured my being that close to the guy, seeing him in all his glory, might change my mind. It didn’t, but … I have to fess up. I did leave a rat in his oven.”
“That adds breaking and entering to the accessory charge.”
“I hope you’re toying with me, Billy. It was a joke, for Christ’s sake. I was joggin’ by and saw the damn back door hanging open. If Rafferty or O’Day or whatever the hell he called himself was stupid enough to go off and leave his door open, I figured I might as well poke around a little.
“I found a stash of pills and cocaine in the party room. Typical. I could have made an anonymous call to the cops, but, like I said, I wasn’t looking for any serious payback.
“So I tossed his stash in the ocean. And I took his broiling pan back to my place. I found a nice juicy rodent in the walk-in traps they’ve got all round the palms and fixed up a little dinner surprise.”
“It scared the crap out of him,” I said. “So much so, he immediately moved out of the villa.”
He smiled. “So the little rat chased the big rat away.”
“He was scared of you, Stew. According to his friend, Fitzpatrick, on our first night out here, when I passed along your party invitation, it sent him into a dark mood that ended with him getting drunk and nearly killing someone.”
“Sounds like the kind of guy who made a lot of enemies,” he said. “Maybe it wasn’t Trey took him out. I’d be surprised if your cop friends didn’t wind up with a list of suspects long as your arm.”
“My cop friends.”
“The two detectives who were prowling the beach with you. What brought ’em out here, anyway?”
He popped the remains of his cupcake into his mouth.
“I asked them to come. Last night—”
I was interrupted by door chimes.
“Hold that thought,” Stew said, and hopped from the chair. He was halfway to the front door by the time I stood.
I’d barely made it around the couch when he said, “Don’t run off, Billy. I want you to meet an old friend.”
A tall man with gray hair was standing in the open doorway. He was wearing odd octagon-shaped sunglasses. I’d seen them and him at the theater the day before the explosion. I was pretty sure that if he took the glasses off, there’d be a milky film over at least one of his eyes.
“Meet Doc Blaney. He’s the troubleshooter you went to in the old days when the job was too shady for Pellicano to handle.” Anthony Pellicano, the so-called “private eye to the stars,” had recently been convicted on charges of wiretapping and racketeering, among others.
“Then it’ll be four of us for lunch at Beau Rivage?” I asked.
Stew smiled. “Trey should be arriving shortly,” he said. “Fact is, we’d been plannin’ to just rustle somethin’ up here.”
“And Dani?”
“She’s in Coral Gables. I got her a script-girl job on a TV pilot.”
“So it was all a lie?”
“I’d prefer to call it acting.”
“What’s goin’ on, Stew?” Pellicano’s moral inferior asked.
“Billy brought the cops out here today,” Stew said with a hint of regret.
Blaney removed a gun from beneath his rumpled jacket. “Told you we shoulda just wasted him last night. Dumping two is as easy as dumping one.”
“Billy’s a friend. I was hoping he was so drunk that … Hell, in the light of day I can see it was a dumb idea.”
“Like I told you before, simple is better. You can fuck yourself up trying t
o be too clever.”
“That’s one of the problems with spending a lifetime pretending,” Stew said. “The movies I make, the plans always work out in the end.”
“This sure isn’t any movie,” Blaney said.
“No. But it will work out. Only not so nice for you, Billy.”
I guessed they were not planning for me to be around to see this flick released on Blu-ray or DVD.
Chapter
FORTY-FIVE
Trey arrived within the hour. By then, Blaney had cuffed my right wrist to the leg of a table in the kitchen. Stew had slapped together a pile of sandwiches for us. Roast beef, honey-cured ham and Swiss cheese, and for Trey, who was one of those meatless half-vegans, a tuna melt on rye.
They had theirs with soft drinks. I ate mine, single-handed, with a wheat beer while they discussed my fate.
The early part of their conversation concerned my “cop friends.”
“What’d you tell ’em about last night?” Blaney asked.
“That I saw Gibby Lewis being murdered.”
“Shit,” Trey said. “I told you this would happen, Stew.”
“It’s just a hiccup,” Stew said. “On Monday, when both Lewis and Billy are no-shows, things will get a little frantic at the network. Eventually, the police will be notified. The lead detective—what’s his name? The one who caught The Hairdresser?”
“Brueghel,” Blaney said.
“Right. He’ll zoom here and find that Billy moved out the night before. That’s why we’ve got to keep him alive. So that the security guard can see him drive away with all his crap in the car.
“Brueghel will still dig around out here like a hound hunting truffles, but there are thirty-seven homes in the Sands, not including the villa. I’ll take those odds.”
“He won’t have to dig too deep to make the connection between you and Des O’Day,” I said.
“Let him. I got an alibi for that night, podnah.” He smiled. “I was with my good friend Doc.”
Blaney smiled, too.
“But Blaney did kill Des,” I said.
“That’s the beauty part, Billy,” Stew said. “By him being my alibi, I automatically become his. We both slide.”
“Why’d Gibby have to die?” I asked.
“Tell him, Doc,” Stew said. “That one’s on you.”
“I, ah … It’s my eye thing,” Blaney said. “I spent a lot of time in the sun, growing up. It kinda fucked up my eyes. It’s why I wear these glasses during the day. But after dark, I can’t see worth shit with ’em. That night in the theater, just as I’m getting ready to operate the fucking overcomplicated trigger device, I look up to see the schmuck staring straight at me. I tell him some bullshit that I’m a photographer and it’s a camera I’m carrying, and between that and the fact I’m hidden by this black outfit head to toe, I figured all was copacetic.
“But last night, almost midnight, I’m relaxing in my hot tub with a friend and the phone rings. My office number. It’s the schmuck. He says he recognized me by my eyes.
“A few years back, I did some work for a friend of his, a cheeseball comic named Philly Slide who needed somebody to throw a scare into this bimbo who was squeezing him. Lewis tells me Slide confided all this to him just after I put the fear in the broad so bad she went running back to Bumfuck, Kansas, or wherever she was from. At the time, Slide also mentioned my … eye ailment which is how Lewis made the connection.
“So he’s blabbing to me about all this, and I’m thinking about how I’m gonna have to kill him when here comes the fucking unbelievable part. He offers me a hundred grand to appear on his show in disguise and tell the world who hired me to off O’Day. That’s more than Stew paid me to do the job.
“Lewis swears he’ll never give me up afterward, even if they throw him in the slams. It’ll only add to his fame. He’ll write a book about it. He’s got it all figured.
“It’s too loony to be a setup. I mean, the schmuck is a witness to murder. He goes to the cops, they’re not gonna play games like this. They’re gonna drag my ass in and then do their best to make me give up names.”
He turned to Stew. “Not that I ever would. Anyway, I can’t see a downside in meeting the schmuck. If the cops are behind it, I’m nailed anyway. If he’s for real with his offer, I can get all or part of the hundred grand and … kill him. It’s a win-win.
“At my suggestion, we meet in the parking lot at Du-par’s in the Valley. I get him into my car. Check for a wire, though I know fucking well there will not be one. Then bounce his head off the dash and stick him in the trunk.”
“And you bring him out here,” Stew said, obviously miffed.
“Like I told you, where else? My ‘friend’ is at my crib. I don’t know where Trey coops. I got to find out if the schmuck’s told anybody about me, and I figure this place is nice and secluded.”
“With the party of the year going on,” Stew said.
“How the fuck was I to know that?”
“There are a million places where you wouldn’t run the risk of the guy breaking away and running for it. The place where you disposed of the body, for one.”
“Stew, ease off, huh?” Trey whined. The peacemaker. “We’re all in this together.”
“Yeah, Stew. Don’t forget, if we hadn’t listened to you, right now we’d be looking forward to a nice, enjoyable Saturday night. Instead, we’ll be heading back to the fucking dump.”
“You’ll be heading back,” Stew said. “Like last night.”
“It’s a different situation from last night, Stew,” Doc said. “I drove in with Gibby in my trunk, and I drove out the same way. No prob. But this guy is gonna have to be seen driving his car out. So it’s a three-car, three-person job, like Fitzpatrick was.”
Poor Fitz, I thought. Didn’t make it to his safe haven.
“Okay,” Stew said reluctantly. “But I’m not going to be the guard dog again. You can hold the gun on Billy, Doc. I’ll drive your car out.”
“That won’t work. You don’t look nothing like me.”
“I’ll wear your glasses.”
“I don’t wear ’em at night. And I don’t like other people wearing ’em. It’s called conjunctivitis. Look it up.”
“This is fucked,” Stew said. “All I wanted to do was blow that homicidal mick to hell. That was a just act. That was setting the record straight. This other stuff, it’s murder, boys. And it doesn’t seem to end.”
“This is definitely the end,” Trey said.
“You said that about the musician.”
“We had to do that, once we realized he knew about you and Des. But you can’t call this murder. It’s more like … I don’t know, collateral damage.”
Stew glared at him, eyes blazing. “That’s what they called Connie’s death.”
Trey lowered his head and seemed to melt into his chair.
They were quite a trio. Larry, Moe, and Curly given a David Mamet update. But they’d killed three people, and, unless I was very, very lucky, I’d be number four.
Chapter
FORTY-SIX
It was near midnight when we got rolling.
They spent the time arguing, eating, watching one of Stew’s movies on a big screen in his den. High Timber was the title, in case you were wondering. Not the film ripped from the Westlake novel. All agreed it was one hell of a flick. I thought it may have been just a tiny bit too heavy on exposition. Kind of like what I had just endured.
At ten the four of us slunk along the sand under the cloak of darkness to the guesthouse, where they put on latex gloves and paper booties, provided by Blaney, before entering. They cuffed me to the bed’s headboard, without much conversation, then removed all my stuff from the closet and drawers. They carefully folded my clothes and placed them and my other possessions into my bags.
I asked why they were being so neat, and Blaney explained, “If the cops ever do find your body and the luggage, it’ll slow ’em down a little if they think you did your own packing.”
Ah, that’s where they slipped up. Little did they know, I’m a lousy packer. I had them right where I wanted them.
“Look around,” Blaney said. “Make sure we got everything.”
“What about his computer?” Trey asked. “Shouldn’t we make sure he didn’t put anything on it that could cause trouble?”
“Good call,” Blaney said. He pulled the laptop from a bag and took it into the bathroom, where he began banging it against the tub.
When he tired of that, he returned with the poor thing’s case dented and cracked. He dropped it onto the bag.
“That looks dumb,” Trey said.
“His car is going to take a real long fall,” Blaney said. “Things break.”
“You oughta distress the bag, too, or it won’t look right. And the computer could still work.”
“Fuck it,” Blaney said, and slammed the bag shut.
Eventually, they were going to kill one another. But probably not soon enough to do me any good.
They spent the final hour sullenly eating and drinking the remains of my larder, allowing me a final hunk of Jarlsberg Swiss and a cluster of red grapes. They cleaned everything and, like the good departing guest they assumed I was, left the house keys in their box on a table near the door.
At the Lexus, Blaney popped the trunk and they laid in the luggage. Then Trey departed.
Blaney watched Stew remove the handgun from his belt and get into the Lexus behind the front seats. There was not a lot of room. Whoever designed the floor space had not had the body of a big, raw-boned man in mind.
Stew grunted, twisted, tried to find a position at least partially comfortable, and failed. “Trey had better stop for the switch as soon as we make the turn,” he told Blaney. “Otherwise, I may shoot myself.”
He did something that I assumed was releasing the safety and pointed the weapon at me as I got in behind the wheel.
“Trey should be in his car by now,” Blaney said to me. “A Prius. He’ll make his exit. Give him a minute, then you leave. I’ll be following.”
I watched him open the metal door and depart into the night. The door swung shut behind him with a clang.