by Jesse Miles
Zara leaned over me. “Why are you looking down there? Aren’t you going to look at the engine or the brakes and things like that?”
I said, “The air vent under the passenger seat in a Mercedes is an important inspection point.” I held the monitor where she could see it.
She bent over and stared at the image on the screen. “What the hell is that?”
“It looks to me like the expended casing from a .380 pistol. Probably a SIG P238.”
Her eyes widened, and she took in a quick, shallow breath. She composed herself and said coldly, “I never did have much of a mechanical aptitude. I’m going out to the sidewalk for some fresh air.”
She vanished, and I stowed the inspection camera back in my briefcase. I could have devised a way to extract the casing from the air vent, but I was already in enough hot water with LAPD. On the way to my car, I reported to Mr. Como’s wife that the Mercedes was in very nice shape, and Franz might call her husband Vlad on Monday. I was playing a moderately dirty trick on Vlad and his wife. The Mercedes would be impounded and towed by Monday.
Zara stood on the curb in front, with her hands on her hips and a cigarette dangling from her mouth. She pointed across the street at the Warner Brothers Ranch and put some cheer into her voice. “People don’t realize how many great movies have been shot there.”
“It’s a holy site. It’s where most of the Three Stooges comedies were filmed.”
She took a little gold and red-lacquer pocket ashtray from her purse, squatted down, and put her cigarette out on the curb. She stood up and popped the butt into the ashtray. “With all your artistic insight, you should work for the American Film Institute.” She didn’t sound unfriendly, but there was no smile in her voice.
During the drive back over the hill, we took the freeway instead of Mulholland. Zara phoned ahead for our lunch. Not a word was said about the stray cartridge casing in her old Mercedes.
There were long silences during the drive, during which I mulled over the newly discovered evidence. Matching casings to a particular pistol is not always an exact science. On the casings, you can examine firing pin impressions, ejector marks, breach block markings, chambering marks, and bulge marks. All that analysis works well on older guns, which were assembled with hand-finished parts that leave distinctive marks. Newer pistols like Zara’s SIG are built with machine-finished parts, and the evidence is more difficult to match up.
I was now obligated to call Rocky and tell him about the Olympic Gun Club, the limerick, the wedding in Santa Barbara, and the cartridge casing in the Mercedes. He would call Detective Mondrian at the West Valley division, and they would devise a strategy for impounding the Mercedes. But before I could give Rocky and Detective Mondrian the full story, I needed to have one more chat with Zara Manning.
44
4
When Zara and I stopped to pick up our lunch, the traffic was heavy, and the restaurant crowded. I drove around the block three times while Zara picked up the pizza, which we then transported to the Manning residence. Zara let herself into the guard shack with a key and did something that opened the gate. Back in my car, she said, “The gate opens automatically when you leave.”
When we walked into the house, she said, “No maid, no gardener, no security, no Mother. We have the place to ourselves.”
“Where’s your mother?”
“In New York, shopping and visiting friends. Arden might drop by later, but she will have eaten. She said something about bringing a dessert.”
We reheated the pizza, organized our lunch trays, and ended up at the apex of the Manning property in the gazebo. We sat side-by-side at a teak table, munching our shrimp pizzas. The view was of the Manning house, the swimming pool and mermaid sculpture, a neighbor’s tile roof, distant houses sprinkled on canyon ridges, and the ocean. The Santa Ana breeze had made its way over the hills and pushed the smog out, airbrushing a pale beige-blue hue over the Pacific.
I pointed toward the ocean. “Believe it or not, I think the smoggy sky actually looks good sometimes. I like the combination of blue and brown, when it’s done right. You just have to forget that it’s smog.”
She said, “Good point. It reminds me of the night sky in Los Angeles. It’s supposed to be black, but when you look straight up, sometimes the smog and the city lights make it look pinkish. At first it seems creepy, but you look at it again, and black and pink is fun. And speaking of colors, Monday is the absolute last day for me to decide on the color of my next car.”
“Another Bentley?”
“The new car will be essentially the same thing I have now, with some minor improvements. I’m down to two color choices. One is cream exterior with a navy-blue top and interior. And I don’t mean white or off-white. I mean a really rich cream color. The other finalist is indigo-blue with smoke-gray top and interior. I can’t decide. I may end up flipping a coin at the dealership.”
We both knew the conversation was eventually going to turn from polite chatter to the .380 casing in her old Mercedes, and we both knew the life-altering significance of that little brass cylinder. In the meantime, we casually discussed our favorite movies. I recommended she take in some of the Powell and Pressburger flicks, especially A Canterbury Tale and A Matter of Life and Death. Zara had recently discovered the French director Agnès Varda. Her favorites were Cléo from 5 to 7 and Le Bonheur.
After we finished eating, she lifted our food trays over to the side table, sat directly across from me, and looked straight into my eyes. “What was all that business with that car in Burbank?” She made it sound like she was sincerely curious.
“You have no idea?”
“Assume I need to be enlightened.”
“That was your old Mercedes. You hadn’t seen it for a few years, and you didn’t recognize it right away. On a Saturday night in 2012, you and Cinnamon Strauss were driving that exact same car back to LA from a wedding in Santa Barbara. The date was May 26. There was a shooting in Canoga Park around the same time you would have been passing by on the Ventura Freeway.”
She spoke with the buoyancy of a Girl Scout selling cookies. “What happened?”
“A liquor store owner was on the way to his night-deposit. You and Cinnamon tried to rob him. You referred to him as ‘Fatty.’ His actual name was Luis Reguillo. He surprised you by pulling a gun and firing one shot. He missed. Seven shots came from your SIG P238. Three shots hit Reguillo. You or Cinnamon—or both of you—tried to pick up all the expended casings from your SIG, but you left one behind, and the police found it. You tossed six casings under the front passenger seat of your car. One of them went into the air vent. When you searched your car later, you could find only five. We found the sixth one this morning.”
Zara didn’t even blink.
I continued, “You may not have known if you fired five, six, or seven shots, which is understandable, because you were probably impaired, and you must have been frightened. When you and Cinnamon used to go shooting at the Olympic Gun Club, you didn’t always know if you had loaded five, six, or seven cartridges into your SIG’s seven-shot magazine. You hated to chip your nails, made a joke of it.
“After the shooting, you and Cinnamon made a calculation. If you fired only five shots, you were okay. The police couldn’t possibly have a casing. If you fired six or seven, you had a problem. It was easy for you to get rid of the pistol. But you had to worry about the possibility of a missing .380 caliber casing that might link you and Cinnamon to the crime. You searched your car carefully, but not carefully enough. I don’t know why you traded in your Mercedes two days after the shooting, but you did, and the car ended up in Burbank, where we saw it this morning. Your old car will soon be in the possession of the police.”
Zara dropped the Girl Scout routine, easing into a more relaxed posture. “I traded my Mercedes on a Bentley for a very specific reason. I received the first installment of my inheritance four months before I bought the Bentley. I didn’t want to buy a luxury car the first day I had a
ccess to the money. That would have been vulgar, like a truck driver who wins the lottery and runs out the next day and buys a gold Rolex for every family member. On the day I came into my inheritance, I could have purchased a dozen Bentleys, but in the spirit of reverse psychology and self-admiration, I waited four months, to demonstrate my good breeding.”
“How did the trade-in happen to be two days after the shooting?”
“I know nothing at all about any shooting, except for shooting paper targets at a pistol range. After the wedding in Santa Barbara, I crawled out of bed the next day at two in the afternoon with the worst hangover in history. I went into the garage and looked at my Mercedes. It was filthy. It looked like it had been through the Augean Stables. I said, ‘Fuck it, I’m getting a Bentley.’ The next day I went to a car wash and had the car detailed. I was too embarrassed to take it to the dealer as a trade-in when it was dirty. Then I drove straight to the dealer and bought a Bentley Continental GT Convertible off the showroom floor.”
She looked away from me, keeping her thoughts to herself. She sat like that for a few moments, then shifted her gaze back to mine. “You were right on one count. I certainly was impaired on the day of that wedding. During the reception, Cinnamon and I were drinking and sneaking out to the car, doing lines of coke. The wedding was hideously boring. The bride was an old friend of mine from the sixth grade. It was one of those situations where I couldn’t say no without hurting her feelings.
“Cinnamon drove us back to LA that night. All I can remember, before I climbed into the back seat and fell asleep, was Cinnamon doing imitations of the most boring people at the wedding. She was very good at improvisation. I remember laughing and laughing, and the next thing I knew I was home. If Cinnamon did something wrong, I wouldn’t know about it. I would have been asleep in the back seat of my car. And by the way, your hypothesis about the alleged shooting and its proof in court are two very, very different things.”
“My hypothesis is based on facts.”
She gave me a cool, provocative smile. “Would you want to see me in prison?”
“I don’t cherish the thought, but I would leave it to the justice system.”
“What good would it do to lock me up? I’m no danger to anyone.”
“That’s not how the law looks at it. Anyway, I don’t think you’ll be indicted.”
“Why not?”
“In the first place, Cinnamon Strauss is cinnamon toast. That means no witnesses to the shooting. And even if your prints are on the casing in your old Mercedes and on the casing in the LAPD evidence box, it probably won’t hold up in court. Those .380 cartridges are too small to hold a print fragment big enough to be usable.”
Zara said, “I might have loaded the pistol at the range. That would account for my fingerprints on the bullets, should there be any. Anyway, the pistol was stolen from my purse about three weeks before the date you mentioned.”
“How do you remember the dates so clearly?”
“I remember that the pistol was stolen from my purse when I was shopping at Whole Foods exactly two weeks before my birthday, May 18.”
“Did you report the theft to the police?”
“No, but I told the men who work at the pistol range. They referred me to a gun shop where I purchased a replacement. I didn’t want to admit to the police I carried a gun in my purse. It was a bit reckless on my part. I don’t do nearly as many reckless things as I used to.”
I said, “There’s another factor working in your favor. The case is tainted by my clandestine actions, such as sneaking into the houses of Cinnamon and Rod and fondling various pieces of evidence. Your attorneys will sniff that out immediately. On the other hand, the prosecutors will have an interesting talking point when they learn you paid big bucks for Cinnamon’s aborted stay at the Latigo Alliance drug rehab. If they can get into your financial records, they might find other evidence of payments from you to Cinnamon. That would point to blackmail, which would point to your having something to hide.”
“What makes you think I paid for Cinnamon’s rehab?”
“Your corporation Sparkes Investments paid for it. The document was in your home office files.”
“How did you get past the dogs and the alarm?”
“I noted your alarm code when we were going out to lunch, and I fed the dogs when I came through the front door.”
Zara’s voice stiffened. “When did the sneak thief sneak into my home?”
“Thursday night when you were trapped at the charity event at the Bonaventure.”
“And the door lock?”
“I picked it.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“Not in the same league as giving Luis Reguillo a hot lead shower.”
She stood, pulled a pack of cigarettes and her lighter from her purse, and lit up. Her hands moved in semi-slow motion, with an exaggerated calmness, as though she were trying to make time wait for her. She moved to the gazebo entrance, keeping her back to me, and blew smoke out toward the ocean.
She inhaled frequently and spoke slowly. “I felt sorry for Cinnamon. She could have been a minor celebrity, but she blew it. I helped her out financially when she was having a rough time. She couldn’t be in my social sphere, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t do something for her. We made a deal. I promised her that if she went through the same kind of drug and alcohol rehab program I had done, I would set her up in her own fitness club. I promised to finance a top-drawer facility, with really good equipment, in a really good location. Cinnamon would have been the celebrity owner-manager. If she could have stayed sober for a full year, I would have signed the whole enterprise over to her. She would have owned the building and equipment outright. All she had to do was take the benefit of my generosity and regain a productive life. She agreed with my plan, and she found that hideously expensive drug rehab called Latigo Alliance. I paid the bill up front, and I ended up paying for nothing. The way I heard the story, Cinnamon somehow managed to convince one of the rehab employees to sneak cocaine to her, and they got caught. She walked out of the place, and the entire fee was forfeited. She tried to call me a couple of times, but I severed relations with her.”
She took a final drag off the cigarette, came back inside, and put the butt in an ashtray on the side table. She sat straight across from me again. “How do you think Cinnamon died?”
I said, “It was a torch job, and I think Rod Damian did it.”
“I wouldn’t think Rod Damian would have the intelligence and the nerve to pull off such a caper. He seems like such a lightweight, such an inconsequential person.”
“Rod could have committed the arson, but I don’t think he’s smart enough to get away with it.”
“Why would Rod do such a thing?”
“Cinnamon shot her mouth off too much, and that’s how Lillie learned about the shooting of Luis Reguillo. Then Lillie shot her mouth off to Rod. After Lillie was no longer available as a meal ticket for Rod, he extracted the detailed blackmail information from Cinnamon. That way, he could take over the scam and not have to share anything with anyone. I’m not sure if Rod had time to hit you with his own blackmail demand before he vanished, but I’m sure that’s what he was planning. It’s my opinion that Rod burned Cinnamon’s house with her in it.”
Zara said, “How ghastly,” but there was no shiver in her voice. She spoke as though she had just noticed her socks didn’t match.
I kept going. “Cinnamon was blackmailing you over the shooting. At first, I thought she was the one who shot Reguillo, but I was wrong. You were the gun moll.”
Zara’s face was as stiff as a hockey mask, but it was still pretty. “And how did you arrive at such an imaginative conclusion?”
From my shirt pocket, I unfolded a copy of Cinnamon’s blackmail limerick and pushed it across the table. “I found this in Rod’s house Thursday night. I’m sure you’ve seen it before. Cinnamon must have presented it to you, along with her demand for a big payday.”
She look
ed at the limerick without reading it, shrugged, and pushed it back toward me.
I said, “Here’s what I understand from this piece of literature. Make mine five might be a reference to the limerick’s five-line structure or the number of cartridges loaded in your SIG, but my guess is Cinnamon was trying to shake you down for five million dollars. You could afford five million, especially compared to the public spectacle of a trial and possibly a conviction. Stretch unknown is a prison sentence. Stainless steel throne is a prison toilet. Two-Faced Queen of Disdain would be you, according to Cinnamon Strauss.
“Here’s the bottom line. You and Cinnamon encountered Luis Reguillo when he was driving from his liquor store to his night-deposit box. Maybe you stopped off at the liquor store to grab a bottle for the rest of the drive home, and Reguillo said something offensive. Maybe you had planned the armed robbery ahead of time, as a game. I’ll probably never know.”
Zara said, “This all seems terribly whimsical. You said Rod vanished. What makes you think something happened to him?”
“I went into his house Thursday night, to snoop around and maybe put the squeeze on him for torching Cinnamon. Based on the remnants of a hastily cleaned-up mess, it looked to me like he had been removed from his house against his will. In his kitchen there was a cookie tin with a very distinctive Christmas tree motif. The tin should have contained fifty thousand dollars in cash and cocaine, but it was empty. When that exact same cookie tin was in Cinnamon’s house, on the day of Lillie’s funeral, it was full of cash and coke, the same treasure that was in Lillie’s possession when she died.”