The Night Visitor (22 page)

“Who told you that?”

Graehme leaned to take another signed photo that Evelyn handed him, brushing back the locks of blond hair that fell into his eyes. “Evie, I’m not going to cause trouble by revealing my source.”

She smirked at him.

“What’s going on with Rory?”

“What do you mean?”

“Puh-leese.
You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t. Why don’t you explain.”

“Rory’s acting like she’s been touched by an angel, if you get my drift.”

“She’s recovering from a serious brain injury. Tell your
source
that. A word of advice, Graehme. Stop gossiping about my family.” She handed him another signed photo. “Understood?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He took the photo from her and rolled his eyes skyward as he blew on the ink.

“Excuse me, missus.” Rosario knocked on the open door of Evelyn’s home office.

“Yes, Rosario.”

“Missus, I thought you should know that Rory’s in the Venezia Suite. I asked her if she needed something there and she said that she was okay.”

“It’s fine, Rosario. Rory can go into the Venezia Suite if she wants to.” Evelyn resumed her work. “Thank you for letting me know.”

Graehme waited until Rosario had left before asking, “What’s the Venezia Suite?”

“Those were Anya’s rooms when she lived in the villa.” She paused. “After she and I came back from Paris and before she moved to New York.”

“And no one’s supposed to go in there?”

Evelyn angrily scribbled her name. “I like to keep it just as Anya left it. Anya always said she was going to sort through her things, but she never did. When she died, I couldn’t bear to take the suite apart. So, there it sits. Is that answer satisfactory for you and your friends?”

Evelyn put the cap on the pen and pushed her chair from the desk. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

After she’d left, Graehme said, “Knickers in a wad much?”

* * *

Evelyn walked to the end of the corridor and took the servants stairs to the third floor. The Venezia Suite was on the opposite side of the villa from the Lido Suite on the second floor, where Rory was staying. The double doors were open. Evelyn passed through them into the sitting room and peeked into a sunny breakfast room. “Rory?”

Inside a walk-in closet, Rory heard her mother in the suite. Rory quickly rearranged the garments inside a drawer in a lingerie chest, silently closed it, and opened a drawer beneath it just as her mother found her. “Keeping tabs on me?” she asked.

Evelyn saw the open drawer of the lingerie chest. “Rosario was just keeping me informed of the things that go on in the villa, as she should.”

“Why do you keep these rooms closed off?”

“I don’t want them disturbed. Dozens of people work in this house. None of them, except Rosario and Hector, realize the significance to me of this space. They are the only ones allowed in here.”

Rory closed the drawer and opened the one beneath it. She reached inside and took out a long, slinky nightgown of claret silk satin. She held it against her by its narrow satin straps, pressing the waist against her own.

Evelyn seemed uncomfortable with Rory touching Anya’s things. “Please put that back.”

Rory was surprised at her mother’s tone. She wound the nightgown around her hands and crammed it back into the drawer.

Evelyn took out the gown and folded it before putting it away. She pushed the drawer closed, walked from the closet, and crooked her fingers at Rory.

Rory followed her into the bedroom.

“Honey, it makes me so sad to see you spending your time like this, going to these dark places. You need to do something light and happy so you can get well.” Evelyn raised her index finger. “I know…Let’s get out of here. Let’s go shopping and have lunch. Have one of our girly days, like we used to, just you and me.”

“I can’t, Mom. I have things to take care of.”

“What things?”

“Things.
I can’t put my life on hold forever.”

“Come and sit with me for a minute.” Evelyn sat on the canopied bed and patted her hand on top of the bed for Rory to join her.

Rory sat beside her.

Evelyn said, “You’ve put Tom and me in a difficult position. We don’t want to talk behind your back, but we’re concerned. This obsession with Junior is bad enough but now you’re obsessed with Anya too? None of this is healthy for you.”

Rory took a stuffed white tiger from where it was nestled against the pillows and cradled it on her lap. “It’s strange how I’ve yearned for Anya lately. I miss her more than ever. I even wonder if Anya’s hand is somehow guiding this insanity, like she holds the key that unlocks everything. If I can only know her better, I’ll find out what happened.”

“Ro, you know what happened. Anya went after Junior and he was a rat. They both betrayed you.” Evelyn’s hands became restless, touching her face and hair. “You and Anya were always competitive, from the time you were little kids. She was jealous of your relationship with Junior so she tried to tear it apart.”

Rory recalled Anya’s Valentine’s Day party and the way Anya had watched her and Junior.

Evelyn said, “The months before Anya died she was depressed. She hid it. Typical Anya pride. Jonah dumped her, you know.”

“I suspected it, but she never said anything to me.”

“She was humiliated. She’d followed him to L.A. only to have him run off with some cocktail waitress. Anya was too high maintenance for most men. Especially someone like Jonah, who had an ego as big as hers. She saw you happy with Junior and it burned her up. She hired Junior to paint her nude to have a reason to spend time alone with him and he took the bait.”

“Junior didn’t sleep with Anya. She flirted with him. She flirted with everybody. But Junior didn’t take the bait.”

“Rory, there had to be something between them for it to end up in murder.”

Rory squeezed the stuffed tiger against her chest and shook her head. “There was something going on, but it wasn’t between Junior and Anya. She might have been pregnant when she was murdered.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I found a receipt for a home pregnancy test at her house. Did she say anything to you?”

“No, but that only proves my point about Junior and Anya. She turned a fling with him into something bigger.” Evelyn put her hand around Rory’s head and pressed it against hers. “Let’s move past all this Junior and Anya business. You have your whole life ahead of you. A wonderful life.”

Rory moved her head away from her mother’s grasp and frowned at the floor.

“Honey, I’m so worried about you.” Evelyn hesitated before blurting, “I want to see those sores on your back.”

“Fine.” Rory returned the tiger to the top of the bed. She grabbed the hem of her knit top, pulled it off, and turned her back to her mother.

Evelyn gasped at the wide patches of raw skin.

Rory put her top back on. “Satisfied?”

“Rory, your mind is doing these things to your body. You can’t give in to it. That’s why you have to do things that are healthy and nurturing.”

“Mom, I have tried to resist, as hard as I can. I’m not imagining what’s happening to me. I’m not doing it to myself. That’s why I just can’t simply move past what you’re calling my obsession with Junior and Anya.”

Evelyn pressed her palms together and touched her lips with her fingertips. She took a deep breath before she spoke. “Honey, I think the concussion and the coma opened up something in you. Something buried.”

Rory suspiciously eyed her mother. “What are you getting at?”

Evelyn opened her hands and took one of Rory’s hands between hers. “You can tell me anything. It’ll never leave this room. Tell me and you’ll free yourself of this guilt that’s eating you alive.”

Rory leaned away from her mother. “Are you suggesting that I killed Anya and shot Junior?”

“You may have blocked it out, but your subconscious knows.”

Shocked, Rory left the room.

Evelyn collapsed facedown onto the bed and clutched the bedspread with her fists.

47

Henry Auburn walked into the autopsy room. The corpse of a teenage, heavily tattooed Caucasian male was on the table, his torso split open from neck to pubic bone. Two men were at work over the dead flesh.

“Dr. Hedges.”

A corpulent older man looked up through a plastic shield covering his face. His rubber apron and gloves were covered with blood. He held a scalpel. “Hello, Detective. What can I do for you?”

The other man continued working, dissecting and weighing the corpse’s internal organs.

Auburn didn’t give the activity at the table a second look. “I came to ask you about the Anya Langtry autopsy.”

The bright overhead lights reflected off the shiny surface of Hedges’s face shield, making his eyes hard to see. “That was a sad affair.”

“Anya Langtry was eight weeks pregnant at the time of her murder. Why didn’t you discover that during the autopsy?”

The assistant didn’t look up but paused in his work, holding his scalpel above the dead man’s open chest cavity.

“Detective, how many years ago was that murder?”

“Five.”

“I’ve done thousands of autopsies since then. I can’t remember the details of an individual case.”

“How many other twenty-five-yea
r-old supermodels have you autopsied?”

Hedges walked to a corner of the large room and gestured for Auburn to follow. “What makes you so sure she was pregnant?”

“Her gynecologist told me.”

“Maybe she wasn’t pregnant when she was murdered. She could have had a miscarriage or an abortion.”

“She could have, but I don’t think she did. I think she was eight weeks pregnant and I want to know why you didn’t discover it.”

“She was shot to death, Detective. If whether or not she was pregnant was an issue in your investigation, you should have requested those tests at the time.”

Auburn fixed him with his pale blue eyes. “Who got to you, Hedges?”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me.”

“Detective, I’ll pretend you didn’t say that. As you can see, I’m busy. Pardon me.” He walked past Auburn.

48

“Hello, Miss Langtry. Welcome to Kwik Kwality Kut and Sewing.” Oscar Han had met Rory in the lobby of the Killingsworth Building.

“Thank you for allowing me to drop in, Mr. Han.”

“No thanks necessary. My pleasure to show you my place of business. You’re a fashion trendsetter.”

Oscar Han, a garment manufacturer from Taiwan, had bought the Killingsworth Building from Junior Lara’s family. The old building had remained vacant for years after the shootings, despite the Laras’ efforts to unload it. The site had joined the list of other notorious L.A. area crime locations, such as the Cielo Drive house where Manson family members murdered Sharon Tate and her friends and the South Bundy Drive condominium courtyard where Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were slaughtered. Like those addresses, the Killingsworth Building also attracted its share of ghoulish sightseers. The buildings in the Five Points neighborhood were still occupied by small businesses, as when Junior was in residence, and the streets were still as dead at night.

The street entrance opened onto a vast lobby with a soaring ceiling. The glass doors were still etched with Killingsworth Printed Document Company along with gang tags, which had been scratched into the surface.

“I’ll give you a tour.” Mr. Han gestured for Rory to go ahead of him. “Show you the changes we’ve made.”

Rory looked around the lobby, which was now lined with offices. “Brings back memories. Junior had great parties here.”

Junior was alert, but he was tiring. Rory was tired too, but in some ways she felt better than she had in weeks.

“Mr. Lara saved the building from being torn down. We are grateful.”

Rory walked to look at a mural covering the lobby wall. “It’s still here.”

“Oh, I hated that painting,” Han said. “But it’s a funny thing. The day the painters come to cover it, I told them to stop. I could not do it. Now I like it very much.”

Rory drew her fingers along the mural, feeling the brushstrokes. She stepped back to better take it in. The Virgin of Guadalupe was a familiar theme in Junior’s art. In folk murals across East Los Angeles, the Virgin was depicted standing, cloaked in a robe, hands pressed together in prayer, with rays of light emanating all around her. In this mural, Junior had interpreted her as a superhero, her blue robe whipping around her as she flew through the air, reaching to grab a light ray to launch onto the city street below, where people she’d already struck were glowing.

“It’s wonderful. Thank you for not destroying it, Mr. Han.”

“I’m glad too. It’s worth a lot of money now. Who knew? Shall we continue?”

He pushed open the elevator’s outer door. It was a pocket style, made of polished, dark wood with brass trim around panes of safety glass. Mr. Han gestured for Rory to enter ahead of him. Inside, he pulled the pocket door closed and latched it. He then pulled closed a metal scissor gate on the car and punched a button on a brass panel to go to the second floor. The elevator cranked as it slowly rose. When it stopped, Mr. Han opened the two doors. They had to step up slightly to exit as the old elevator hadn’t landed precisely level with the second floor.