A Fatal Vineyard Season (16 page)

It was her turn to shrug. “No. You weren't the first guy I ever dated, and I wasn't your first girl.”

“And there were no hard feelings,” said Buddy with a nod. “Well, maybe a few, but nothing serious.” He waved a hand. “Nothing we didn't get over pretty fast, anyway. And then Ivy started going out with other guys and I started dating Dawn.” He smiled at Ivy. “And pretty soon we were friends again.”

Her mouth smiled back. They were both very smooth, I thought.

“Wasn't it a little awkward when you started dating Dawn?” I asked, remembering some similar awkward situations I'd gotten myself into in my pre-Zee days. “I mean, she and Ivy were roommates.”

He took his eyes away from Ivy's and turned them back to me. “Well, sure it was, but not for long. I'd met Dawn because she was Ivy's roommate, but we'd hit it off from the first. So it wasn't like I was somebody new on the scene when we started to date. Besides, Ivy was dating other guys by then, so it was like she was my sister more than an old girlfriend.” He paused, as though deciding whether to go on, then said, “The police asked me a lot of questions about Dawn and me. I think they thought I might know something about her death. But of course I didn't.”

“We usually get killed by people we know,” I said. “Family, lovers, friends, people like that. That's why the cops were interested in you. If I'd been a cop out there, I would have been, too. But all they did was ask questions?”

“Yeah. Probably because they already had Mackenzie Reed with blood on his hands. Besides, I was up in San Francisco the day it happened, so they knew it couldn't be me. There was no way I could have slipped back to L.A. and killed her and then gone back north and never have been missed. I didn't know about it till the next day, when I got back to town.” He shook his head, remembering. “Jesus! I couldn't believe it. I don't think I'll ever get over it.”

Some people plan killings and alibis well ahead of the act, but most murders are spur-of-the-moment things that just happen. I thought the cops were probably right to take Buddy off their suspect list, but I left him on mine anyway. For the time being, at least.

“And now you're here,” I said. “To make sure it doesn't happen again.”

He made a fist with the hand that wasn't holding his coffee cup. “Yes! This man Vegas sounds like an animal! I won't let him hurt Ivy and Julia!”

“They have professional protection,” I said.

“He didn't know that when he came,” said Julia, putting a hand on his arm. “He thought we were alone.”

Buddy's fist became a hand. He put it over hers and gave
her a wan smile. “I don't want anything to happen to my favorite cuz or my pal Ivy.”

I left him and his pal and his favorite cuz and drove to the shop where my faxes were supposed to come in. They were there. I took them home and began to read them.

I read the newspaper stories first. They chronicled the sequence of events from the arrest of Mackenzie Reed to his imprisonment, and I learned not a whole lot more than I already knew, except from some sidebar and background stories that gave a bit more detail about the lifestyles of the young and beautiful and ambitious in Hollywood, including the participants in the murder drama. Fast living, casual and always shifting personal relationships, and unending efforts to achieve fame or at least work on the silver screen or television seemed to be the rule, and the associated passions, disappointments, and occasional triumphs were commonplace.

Dawn Dawson, Ivy Holiday, and Julia Crandel were but three more of the hundreds of aspiring actresses, and Ivy was rapidly becoming more than that, having made the most of a few small roles, having gained an award nomination for one of them, and then having achieved instant fame as a result of her strip act at the Academy Award ceremonies.

Buddy Crandel's aspirations were no less intense, though focused on offscreen work, and he was as much a part of the nightlife scene as were the three young women and their hundreds of fellow wanna-bes.

As I read the stories, I got the impression that if you wanted to survive in Hollywood, you had to be lucky and tough and probably both. Talent seemed to be less important, although it didn't hurt. Enduring personal ties and loyalties seemed rare. Rather, relationships flowered and
faded fast and were readily sacrificed for the dream of stardom, if a choice was required. The person who was your greatest friend when you were down-and-out became a weight around your neck when you moved up, and your best pals up there on top left you if you slipped or fell from favor. Similarly, your eternal lover last month was often someone else's eternal lover this month.

Not that Hollywood was the only place such stuff happened. I was reminded of when I first took note of the Vineyard's winter inhabitants' inclination to marry, produce children, divorce, remarry, and produce more children, until, it seemed, everyone on the island was related to everyone else.

When I finished with the newspaper stories, I read the trial transcripts. Most of what I learned was familiar to me. Mackenzie Reed had been fixated on Ivy for months, had written her letters, followed her, tried to get close to her, phoned her, and otherwise intruded upon her life to such a degree that she had gotten an unlisted phone number, had left her apartment and moved in with Dawn Dawson, and, finally, had gotten a restraining order against him. All three actions were to no avail, since he soon knew both her new number and her address and was once again following her.

The morning of the killing, Ivy had gone to work, leaving by a back door that led to the parking area where she kept her car, and Dawn was home alone. Reed had found the front door unlocked and had gone in. There, with a steak knife taken from the kitchen of the apartment, he had stabbed Dawn Dawson a dozen times. He then had panicked and run out into the street, his hands and clothes bloody, where he was immediately arrested by police officers who were passing by in their cruiser.

The evidence against him was overwhelming: Dawn Dawson's body was still warm; his prints were on the knife; the blood on his hands and clothes was hers; his letters to Ivy were filled with statements about his frustration when
he saw her with other men, and the meaninglessness of his life without her, and with graphic descriptions of the sexual acts they would perform when she finally agreed to love him as much as he loved her.

With nothing to lose by putting his client on the witness stand, the flamboyant William Peterson Calhoun, the best lawyer Reed's father's money could buy, had done that, and Mackenzie Reed had told his tale, which was the predictable one that he had found Dawn Dawson dead, had touched the fatal knife, had gotten her blood on his hands and clothes as he had attempted to discover if she was still alive, had panicked when he realized that he would be accused of killing her, and had tried to run away, which he realized now was a foolish mistake that only made things worse for him.

The jury had taken little time to find him guilty, and I guessed that had I been a member of that jury, it wouldn't have taken me long, either.

Some details were new to me, but nothing surprising. Other fingerprints were at the murder scene, but only the ones you would expect: those of Ivy, who lived there, of Buddy Crandel, who was dating Dawn, and those of the landlord and friends of Ivy's and Dawn's. Although the police were confident that they had their killer, they had interviewed everyone whose prints had been found at the scene and had eliminated them all as suspects.

One oddity was that the knife had only Mackenzie Reed's fingerprints on it, whereas, since it was one of the apartment's kitchen utensils, presumably the prints of one or both of the girls should also have been on it. Calhoun had made as much of this as he could, suggesting that it clearly showed that the real murderer had wiped the knife clean before fleeing the scene. But the prosecutor had a simpler explanation: Mackenzie Reed himself had wiped the knife clean, but had then inadvertently touched it again before fleeing.

I thought back to the few murder scenes I'd observed while on the Boston PD and realized once again that
Dostoyevsky had been right about killers: most of them are pretty ordinary people who are not overly smart, and even the brightest of them often make stupid mistakes. The killers who get away with it usually do so because they're just lucky or because most police, like most killers, are also pretty ordinary people and not overly smart and make stupid mistakes.

When I finished the transcripts, I discovered that I had copies of some official police reports on the Dawson case, the Freed case, and the Hawkins case. Son of a gun! How had Peter Brown gotten his hands on them? My opinion of Western Security Services went right up.

The reports were not, of course, high-class literature, being written, as they usually are, by cops who never majored in English. Police reports can be funny, in fact, even when they attempt to deal seriously with horrendous crimes. But I wasn't interested in the literary quality of these reports; I was interested in what the cops had seen and heard.

They had talked to a lot of people and hadn't found any reason to think that anyone but Mackenzie Reed had killed Dawn Dawson. They had discovered love affairs and hard feelings and drug use and other illegalities, mostly minor, but nothing having anything to do with the murder. I was interested to learn a bit more about the players I knew:

Buddy Crandel, for instance, was something of a swordsman and hadn't always left his maidens laughing when he moved on to his next conquest. There were feelings of anger and betrayal in his wake, and no one had been surprised when he had dropped Ivy and picked up Dawn Dawson. Similarly, no one had expected his affair with Dawn to last long.

Ivy Holiday, no virgin herself, but not given to one-night stands, either, was known for her temper and iron will as well as for her talent and did not take lightly being denigrated as a woman, especially a black woman, or being told
how to live her private life. The Academy Award stunt was apparently quite in character. In fact, Ivy had once gotten so angry at a rival starlet that she had thrown her through a brick wall, which, fortunately for the starlet, had only been a painted prop and not the real thing.

Dawn Dawson's private reputation had been at odds with her appearance and public persona, which had been that of the sweet girl next door. She had been, apparently, one of the more serious party girls in town and had a trail of lovers, each one of whom the police had been obliged to track down just in case one of them had decided to do her in for old times' sake. None had. It was rumored, as well, that she had frequented the casting couch and habitually used illegal chemical additives to stay perky. On the other hand, she had been thought of as kind and generous, and as a “good kid” in spite of her tendency to bed-hop a bit more than most.

Julia Crandel was a different breed of cat. She already knew she could act because she had done it on the stage in New York, and so she didn't need to hang around with wanna-bes for moral support. But she did need to find acting jobs and to keep eating in the meantime. Too proud to support her acting habit on her share of a Crandel trust fund, she got a part-time day job in a grocery store, where she could get food cheap at the end of the day, and avoided partying at night so her money would last longer. Her agent had gotten her some roles in TV commercials, and she was taking acting classes while she sought a start in film.

Like a lot of Crandels, she was smart and focused, friendly and well-liked, but she was also sufficiently uneasy about herself and her life to want a therapist. Thus her relationship with Dr. Jane Freed, who was the second murder victim in Ivy Holiday's life.

Julia was, in fact, a central figure in Ivy's drama. They had met through Julia's cousin Buddy, and Julia had later met Dawn through Dawn's friendship with Ivy. Ivy had
become Jane Freed's patient at Julia's suggestion, and after Dawn's death, Julia had become Ivy's roommate. They were living together at the time that Dick Hawkins had been run down in the street outside their apartment building.

It occurred to me that since Ivy would never have known either Dr. Freed or Dick Hawkins if it weren't for Julia, and if, as Julia seemed to suspect, their deaths were somehow linked to Ivy, it could be argued that Julia was in part responsible for those deaths. The ifs, again. If this hadn't happened, this other thing wouldn't have happened. If, if, if.

Madness.

The reports on the Freed case told me little more than I already knew. Along with her paying clients, the doctor, being persuaded that she had a duty to the poor and destitute, had donated a few hours a week to people who were down-and-out or otherwise unable to afford private psychiatric service. She also kept a small supply of drugs, mostly sedatives, in her office.

Whoever killed her had not broken in, suggesting that the killer and Dr. Freed might have known each other. The doctor had been killed by blows to the head. The killer had used a paperweight from her desk and had afterward rifled the medicine cabinet and the file cabinets. The police theorized that the motive for the crime was the killer's desire for drugs, but were fuzzier about why the file cabinets were also in disarray. Their guesses were, one, that the killer might have hoped to find more drugs there; and two, that the killer, presuming that the police would suspect one of the doctor's patients of having committed the crime, might have taken his or her file out of the cabinet so as to remove his or her name from the list of suspects.

However, a list of the patients' names was later found in a separate file, and all of those patients' files were still in the office, indicating that stealing a file hadn't been a motive after all.

A lot of patients had been questioned, but nothing had
come of the work. The case was still open and the investigation was still going on when anyone had time to devote to it.