“Not really,” Keegan said. “I was never good with a boss.”
On the other side of the two-way mirror, a woman entered the empty interrogation room holding a stack of manila folders against her chest. She was plump and silver-haired, a plausible librarian. The woman detective sat down on the side of the steel table farthest from the door and tapped the folders straight on the tabletop. She laid them down flat and then folded her hands on top of them, next to the mounted reel-to-reel tape recorder.
It was an old cop-house trick, Keegan knew. A stack of folders a couple of inches high suggested a pile of evidence amassed against you—an open-and-shut case there was no real point in denying. Anyone led in through the door in handcuffs would see them right away and assume the worst. But Keegan knew they were papers dug out of the nearest file cabinet—a two-inch stack of old shift schedules and outof-date APBs posing as evidence. At this point, the only real goods the LAPD could possibly have against Zinnia was a couple of DMV headshots. Keegan took a sip of bad coffee and tried to get comfortable on the cold, hard chair.
The interrogation room door eventually opened, and two burly uniformed cops came in. Zinnia was so small, so downtrodden, that at first, Keegan didn’t even notice her there between the two hulking men. She wore a rumpled, shapeless housedress and held a blue handkerchief in one hand.
They sat her down in a steel chair and took the handcuffs off her wrists. The cops both left the room, closing the door behind them. The detective twisted a knob on the tape recorder and the big reels started turning. She spoke into the machine in a clear and even tone.
Zinnia sat in the chair, stooped forward, wilting with grief and shame. Her eyes were red, her hair disheveled. The few weeks since Keegan had first met her had brought her nothing but havoc. She was a hollowed, withered version of the woman he’d first seen reading a Michener novel in the Chateau Marmont kitchenette.
Keegan’s instinct was to look away, but the Lieutenant was right there beside him, so he checked the impulse. He sat forward and watched as the questioning got underway.
Zinnia was no match for the detective, and, after a few opening questions, the whole story began to emerge. It had all begun, according to Zinnia, with Ida Fletcher’s death.
“I found her in bed,” she said. “We were staying in the Newport house, and I brought up her morning tea. I set the tray on the edge of the bed and pulled open the curtains, like I did every morning.” Zinnia held the crumpled blue handkerchief with one hand and worried the collar of her blouse with the other. “When I turned back to her, I could see in the light that something was wrong. I touched her hand. It was cold. She’d passed away in her sleep. There was nothing anyone could do.” Zinnia stopped talking. She squeezed the wadded handkerchief with her fist.
“And then what happened?” The detective’s voice was gentle and sure, unwavering and warm. Keegan could see why the Lieutenant had put her in charge of the case. Not a whiff of threat came off her.
“I came down and told the others,” Zinnia said.
The detective opened the top file. “For the record, that would be Lillian Frances Cole and Frank Luca Romano?”
Zinnia nodded.
“You’ll have to say it out loud,” the detective said. “For the tape.”
“Yes,” Zinnia said, her voice small and pliant. “Lillian Cole.” She seemed to be staring down at her lap as she said the words. “And Frank.” Her voice caught on the dead man’s name, and Keegan felt a pang of pity for her.
“And what did the three of you talk about?”
“Well, we’d all just lost our jobs,” Zinnia went on. “I mean, there was nothing set up for us. No provisions.” She looked up at the detective pleadingly and then looked down again. “Just like that, we’d be out on the street. We just sat around that kitchen table a long time, not speaking.”
A flicker of impatience crossed the detective’s face, but Zinnia wasn’t looking, and it was quickly swept away. She was a professional. “But eventually you came up with a plan, correct?” she asked.
Zinnia nodded. “It was Lillian’s idea,” she said. “But Frank thought it would work. Mrs. Fletcher had become more and more reclusive over the years. No one would have to know she had died unless we told them.”
Little by little, thread by thread, the detective teased Zinnia’s story loose. Frank had wrapped the old lady’s body in a shower curtain. He’d taken it offshore in the sailboat and sunk it with some rope and a few cinder blocks. Lillian had then taken Ida Fletcher’s place, riding behind the tinted windows of the limousine and renting a cloistered bungalow at the Chateau Marmont. They’d found Donovan and strung him along a few weeks, playing up the old lady’s famous paranoia. Madame Lena was cheating her. She didn’t trust that lawyer of hers. Could Donovan help her make a new will? The poor sap never had a clue. They’d planned to string him along a while, until suspicion died down, and then they’d fake the old lady’s death.
“But then Danny showed up,” Zinnia said. “He threw everything into chaos. We had to rush everything.”
“And what was the plan you came up with?”
Zinnia shook her head disconsolately and began wringing the handkerchief again. “Lillian would go into hiding,” Zinnia said. “She’d lie low. Frank would take the boat out. I’d tell everyone the two of them were sailing to Avalon. He’d fake an accident. Sink the boat, and swim to shore. He’d make a big play out of almost drowning. Call the Coast Guard. Make sure it all looked real.” She started sobbing then. “Only, he never made it back to shore. Oh God, what were we all thinking?”
“And where is Lillian Cole now?”
“I don’t know,” Zinnia said. “She thought it safer if none of us knew.”
Keegan turned to the Lieutenant, feeling every inch the fool. “I don’t know where she is now,” he said, feeling the heat creep up his face, “but a couple of days ago I saw her on Catalina. I think she saw me too, so she’s probably long gone.”
“What?” Moore said.
His voice was loud enough that Zinnia, startled, looked at the two-way mirror.
The Lieutenant cursed under his breath. “That seems like something you should have mentioned before now, Jimmy,” he said, keeping his voice lower.
Keegan sighed. “I know,” Keegan said. “It’s a long story, Lou. And I don’t come out of it looking very bright. But she was there in the Avalon house.”
The Lieutenant was staring at Keegan now, but on the other side of the glass, Zinnia started speaking again, so they both turned their attention back to her.
“I didn’t want to go along,” she was saying. “But Frank thought the money would let us go away somewhere. Get a place of our own. That’s all we ever really wanted.”
“SHE SHOULD BE okay,” the Lieutenant told Keegan when the cops came back in the room to cuff Zinnia again. He seemed to have picked up on Keegan’s sympathy for the woman and wanted to reassure him. “No one was murdered here,” he said. “Fraud is all we’re talking about—and Lillian Cole seems to be the brains behind the whole thing. This one here can turn state’s evidence.”
He was right, of course, Zinnia wouldn’t likely go to prison, but that wasn’t the worst fate she could have faced. She’d always have to live with the fact that she’d gone along with a foolhardy scheme that ended up killing the man she loved. No one in this whole unholy mess was getting away scot-free.
Except, of course, Danny Church.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
KEEGAN BOUGHT THE best bottle of sauterne he could find—it cost six dollars at the Farmers’ Market wine shop—and had it chilling in the Frigidaire. She arrived, right on time, with Italian takeout—a piping-hot lasagna for two, and tiramisu for dessert.
She paused a moment, when she first came in through the door, to take in the cottage’s small living room. She turned a slow circle, holding the takeout bag in front of her. The place was still crowded with his late mother’s old furniture and décor. It might have been an Edwardian s
itting room. Helen took in the wooden rack of souvenir spoons, the shelves of Delft figurines on their lace doilies, the bookcase of Zane Gray westerns.
Her lips quirked into that crooked smile he was starting to enjoy so much. “You’ve really made the place your own,” she said.
They ate at the kitchen table and Keegan trotted out all the details of the Ida Fletcher case—highlighting his own foolish mistakes, rather than trying to explain them away. It felt good to talk this way with her. He sometimes took himself too seriously.
For her part, Helen listened and laughed and peppered him with questions. At a few points in the story, she reached across and pressed her hand down on his arm.
After dinner and dessert, she poured them both another glass of wine, and they took them out to the back garden to look at all the lights. Nora couldn’t stop showing off, laying sticks at Helen’s feet and barking up at her.
They stood a while in silence, looking down at the innumerable pinprick lights of the city spread out below. Someday he’d tell her the story about the dark Ormsby estate directly below them on the hillside. It would be good to get Eve’s story off his chest, but that would happen in good time. Keegan watched Helen take in the city lights. He liked the way they softly lit her face. He felt good tonight. Being in her company was somehow effortless.
“What I don’t understand,” she said, “is why the lawyer’s boat was in Avalon Harbor.” She was still thinking about Lillian Cole, Zinnia, and Frank the Boxer. “Did you ever figure that out?”
Keegan nodded. The Lieutenant dug up the answer the day after Zinnia’s confession. “Turns out Milton Burritt had a weekend of riding with some of his cronies,” he told her. “The four of them met on the island.” He took a sip of the wine. It was both sweet and tart on his tongue. “His alibi is ironclad. They racked up a five-hundred-dollar tab at a restaurant that has a world-class wine list. It was a real boys’ weekend.”
She nodded, looked down at the lights again, and then looked back at him. “And what about the nephew? Where was he when it all happened?”
Keegan tried to think of the most tasteful way to put his assumption into words. “He was probably with Burritt’s wife somewhere, enjoying his own boys’ weekend while the husband was away.”
That seemed to make sense to her. She sipped her wine and looked him over. “I don’t think you come off looking quite so badly as you think in this story,” she said. “Everything you did was perfectly understandable. You weren’t as foolish as you seem to think.”
“Me?” he said. “The guy who thought he’d seen a ghost? How stupid can a guy get?”
She smiled coyly and looked down into her wine. “I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss it all, you know,” she told him. “Your story still has a dash of the otherworldly in it.” Keegan liked her playful tone.
“Don’t you start talking about ghosts and broken mirrors,” he told her. “I get quite enough of that from some other people I know.”
Helen swirled the wine in her glass. “Well, think of this,” she said. “Stop and consider everything the fortune teller said to you when you met her.”
He thought back to that night on Nella Vista Drive. “That I’d go on a trip over the sea,” he said. “That Ida Fletcher was dead and on the bottom of the ocean.” The truth of what Helen was saying began to settle on him.
Helen nodded, smiling, watching his reaction. “And that she—the psychic—would end up in the will, when all was said and done.”
Keegan thought of Madame Lena’s incensed parlor, where she’d stared down at her tarot cards and seemed to divine in them, even his history with Eve. Now, on this hilltop with Helen, he felt the same chill come over him that he had felt that night.
“I’d say that’s some impressive evidence,” Helen told him. “Maybe next time you should listen to Mrs. Dodd.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A heartfelt thanks to all those who read and responded to drafts of this story along the way: Margo Duncan and Kaysi Butler, Paige Dinneny, Santa-Victoria Perez, Heather Buchanan, Ryan Buchanan, Melody Versoza, and all the Legend Pressers, especially Lauren, Lucy, and Melanie.
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