Fatal Care (23 page)

“Right.”

“And no tags on my girls.”

“No tags.”

White opened the black book. “What do you want to know?”

“You sent somebody to two-five-two Royal Drive last night,” Jake said. “We want her name.”

White carefully flipped through pages. “She calls herself Princess.”

“You know where she lives?”

“Close by,” White answered. “But I got no address.”

“Does she turn tricks during the day, too?”

“Sure.”

“Then beep her and get her ass up here.”

Jake and Farelli waited for Princess in the corridor outside Frankie White’s one-room office. White continued to conduct business over the phone even though the door was open and the detectives could hear. He tried to speak in code, but it sounded like he did some bookmaking on the side in addition to running whores.

“That guy has got balls the size of an elephant’s,” Farelli said, listening to White talk about a horse named Sunrise. “We’re standing here and he’s taking bets.”

Jake shrugged. “He knows we’re not interested in him.”

“His code is so simple an idiot could understand it.” Farelli glanced into the small office, studied White briefly, and then looked back at Jake. “You think he might have passed a code word to Princess and she split on us?”

“He’s not that stupid,” Jake said, taking out his notepad and turning pages. “Did you get anything from Alex Mirren’s neighbors?”

“Not much,” Farelli reported, reaching for his own notepad. “A surgeon who lives down the street was driving by about ten o’clock last night. He saw a car parked across from the Mirren house. The doc doesn’t remember seeing anybody in it.”

“Was the car old or new?” Jake asked at once, recalling that Mikey Sellman said the hooker’s car was old.

“Pretty new,” Farelli replied. “Maybe a Chevrolet or Buick. And all of Mirren’s neighbors own foreign cars.”

“It could have belonged to the blond hitter.”

Farelli nodded. “It’s the place I would have picked for a stakeout.” He paused and scratched the side of his head. “You know, Jake, we’re taking for granted that the blonde who whacked the Russian is the same one who whacked the doc. There are a hell of a lot of blondes in this city.”

“Yeah, but damn few of them are professional hitters.”

“I guess,” Farelli said, still not convinced. He went back to his notepad. “Anyhow, the blonde covered her tracks pretty good in Santa Monica. Nobody remembers selling her gas, and we checked out all the women who bought gas with credit cards in the immediate area. A shitload of work that turned up a big nothing.”

“What about the motels and bars?”

“Again a big nothing,” Farelli went on, quickly flipping pages. “But I might have turned up something at the bar where the Russian was last seen. Do you remember the old female boozer at the end of the bar?”

Jake nodded. “The one with caked-on makeup?”

“Yeah. Well, I questioned her again, and she starts talking about the blonde who walked out with the Russian. The boozer called the blonde a real phony.”

“Why a phony?”

“Because the boozer believes the blonde was wearing a wig.” Farelli held his hand up to his head and demonstrated. “The blonde kept doing this to her hair, like she was adjusting a wig.”

“Smart,” Jake said. “So damn smart. The hitter knows that everybody notices blond hair. So if anybody makes her, all she has to do is throw away her blond wig, and she loses her identity.”

“So now we’re looking for a sometimes blonde.”

Jake lit another cigarette and inhaled a lungful of blue smoke. “Life isn’t easy, is it?”

“And we’re batting zero on the Russian.”

“Did you check the Russian Orthodox church?”

“Two of them,” Farelli said. “They don’t know him.”

“We’ve got to track down that Russian,” Jake said. “He could be the key to everything.”

Farelli looked at Jake oddly. “I figure the Russian to be a bit player here. You know, like the delivery man who gets caught carrying the wrong goods.”

“Oh, he’s a bit player, all right,” Jake agreed. “But he’s also the link between the blond hitter and the dead babies.”

Farelli nodded to himself as he put his notepad away. “And since the blonde also whacked Dr. Mirren, you figure the Russian is somehow connected to that, too?”

“He’s got to be.” Jake puffed at his cigarette, wondering why the Russian was proving so difficult to track down. The immigrant had to live in the neighborhood. He just had to. “You say the Russian was married?”

“That’s what the guy at the hardware store told me.”

“And his wife hasn’t reported him missing, huh?”

“Not to the Santa Monica police or to the Bureau of Missing Persons,” Farelli said. “And we double-check every day.”

Jake shook his head. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Tell me about it.”

They heard the click of high heels coming up the stairs.

Jake crushed his cigarette out in a standing ashtray and hurried back into Frankie White’s office. Lou Farelli closed the door behind them and motioned for White to stay seated.

A moment later the door opened, and Princess entered. She glanced at Jake and Farelli and immediately recognized them as cops. Her face suddenly lost color. “Oh, shit!” she said hopelessly.

Frankie White grabbed some papers from his desk and quickly headed for the door. “Lock up when you leave.”

Princess glared at him. “You could have warned me, you prick!”

“I ain’t in the warning business,” White said, and closed the door behind him.

“Sit,” Jake told her, pointing at the soiled director’s chair in front of the desk.

“I guess I’m going to need a lawyer,” Princess said, sitting and crossing her long legs in a single motion.

“Maybe, maybe not.” Jake studied the hooker at length. She looked exactly as the little boy had described her. Tall and thin with bushy red hair. But her face was not what Jake had expected. Her features were soft with a small nose and perfectly contoured lips.

“I think I’m going to need a lawyer,” she said again.

“Listen and listen up good,” Jake said, “because I’m only going to say this once. You give us the information we need, and you’ll walk out of here. If you lie, twist, or hold back the truth, I’ll charge you with being an accessory to murder and make it stick. And a pretty girl like you wouldn’t do very well in the slammer. Believe me when I tell you that you won’t get paid for the tricks you do in there.”

Princess swallowed hard. “I didn’t kill him.”

Jake ignored her plea of innocence. “How many times have you serviced this guy?”

“Three times.”

“Last night was the third?”

Princess nodded.

“What time did you arrive?”

“A little after nine.”

“Did you get right to it?”

Princess shook her head slowly. “He showered first,” she said quietly.

“Then?”

“Then I tied him to the bedposts and we started.”

“With what?”

She turned and looked out the window. “With oral sex. He liked to perform oral sex on me while he was tied down.”

“Then what?”

“He wanted me to do the menthol trick, but I had—”

“Forgotten to bring the cream,” Jake filled in. “Is that why you went to the drugstore? To buy some cream?”

Princess’s eyes widened. “How did you know that?”

Jake didn’t answer.

Princess suddenly nodded to herself. “You were in that damn car across the street, weren’t you?”

“What car?” Jake asked at once.

“The Toyo—” Princess stopped in midsentence, thinking as her lips moved silently. Slowly she shook her head. “You wouldn’t have been in that car. If you had, you would have caught the person who did it.”

“You said it was a Toyota.”

“That’s right,” Princess told them. “A new Toyota.”

Jake and Farelli exchanged quick glances; then they turned back to the hooker and stared at her.

“It was a goddamn Toyota,” she insisted, thinking they thought she was lying.

Farelli asked, “Why did you pay so much attention to that car?”

“Just being careful,” Princess explained. “Maybe some of your Vice buddies had the place staked out and were waiting for me.”

“So you looked at the car real hard?” Farelli pressed on.

“Damn right! Wouldn’t you?”

“Did you see a driver?”

Princess hesitated, thinking back. “Not then. But maybe later.”

“What did you see?”

“When I came back from the drugstore, I pulled into the john’s driveway,” Princess recounted. “As I got out of my car I looked across the street to the parked car. I thought I saw something move in the front seat. Then it was gone. I couldn’t be sure anyone was there.”

The blond hitter had gotten back to her car by then, Jake was thinking. The doctor was stone-cold dead. “And then you went back into the house?”

Princess nodded. “And got the hell out when I found the doctor dead.”

“Was the Toyota still there when you left?” Jake asked.

Princess shrugged. “I didn’t notice. All I wanted to do was get the hell away.”

Jake decided to try a long shot. “Did you ever see a blond woman around the doctor’s house on any of your visits there?”

“Sure,” Princess said without hesitation. “I saw a blonde the night he died.”

“Where?”

“In the driveway next door,” she said. “When I was driving away to pick up the mentholated cream, I saw a blond woman in the driveway by the house next door. I thought she was the next-door neighbor.”

Jake and Farelli glanced at each other and exchanged nods. The hooker’s story fit perfectly with the things Mikey Sellman had seen. The blonde in the driveway was the hitter.

“Are you positive that the parked car was a Toyota?” Jake asked.

“Yeah,” Princess assured him. “I’ve been thinking about buying a new car, and I’ve been checking out all the new models. That car was a new Toyota.”

“What color?”

“Dark. Maybe black or deep green,” Princess said, thinking back. “With a California license plate.”

Jake’s eyes narrowed. “You wouldn’t happen to have the license number?”

“It started with the number four,” she said. “Then came some letters. I don’t recall what they were.”

Jake stared at her skeptically. “You just happened to remember that, huh?”

“Uh-huh,” Princess said easily. “I looked closely at the license plate because most unmarked cop cars have a public employee designation. It’s a little
E
that comes just before the numbers. That license number started with a four. There was no
E
.”

“You’re more than just street-smart,” Jake commented, thinking the hooker was sharp and observant and spoke like someone with an education. “You’re plenty bright. What the hell are you doing hooking?”

“You want the long or short version?”

“The short one.”

The hooker fluffed her red hair while she considered how much to tell. “Well, it starts this way. You’re making twenty-four grand a year teaching kindergarten and you’re barely scraping by. A girlfriend tells you about a way to make extra money. You do it, promising yourself you’ll only do it once, that you can always step back across the line. But the money is good and easy, so you do it again and again. You do it enough times and the line I just talked about becomes invisible.”

“Your line is not invisible,” Jake said.

“Sure it is,” Princess said resignedly, and got to her feet. “You got any more questions?”

“No. That’s it.”

The detectives watched the hooker walk out of the office. She closed the door softly, barely making a sound.

“What do you think?” Farelli asked.

“I think our blond hitter just made a big mistake.”

Joanna hurried up the gangplank and onto the deck of the
Argonaut
. Jake was standing near the stern, giving orders to two uniformed policemen.

“And bring his ass back here,” Jake was saying.

“What if we can’t find him?” the shorter cop asked.

“You keep looking until you do,” Jake told him. “Start at the bar across from the entrance to the marina. That’s where his girlfriend works.”

Joanna waited for the policemen to leave. Then she walked over. “What’s this all about?”

“One of the male guests lost a shoe on the yacht the night Rabb was killed.”

“So?”

“So a shoe can make a pretty good weapon to conk somebody over the head with,” Jake explained.

Joanna wrinkled her brow, now envisioning a man’s shoe as a weapon. “The killer would grab the shoe by the toe end so that the heel would strike the victim’s head.”

“Right.”

“But the heels in most boat shoes are made of rubber, and the foreign material in Rabb’s skull was leather.”

“True,” Jake said. “But every now and then I’ve seen heels that are at least part leather or have a leather trim.”

“I think you’re more likely to see that in custom-made shoes.”

Jake nodded. “This crowd could afford that.”

“You sent the cops for the guy who lost the shoe?” Joanna asked.

“No,” Jake said. “They went for the guy who found the shoe.”

Jake explained how one of the female guests remembered that some man had misplaced a shoe. A security guard on the vessel had found it.

“Do you want to guess who the guard was?”

Joanna shrugged.

“Mr. Clean,” Jake went on. “The bald guy dressed in white who was guarding the gangplank on our first visit here.”

Joanna thought back. “And he told us he didn’t set foot on the ship the night Rabb was murdered.”

“We’re going to ask him about that, too.”

There was a sudden burst of laughter from the stateroom below and then a few chuckles followed by loud conversation.

“Apparently they’re not in mourning anymore,” Joanna observed.

“Life goes on,” Jake said dryly.

“With this bunch you wonder if it ever stopped.” Joanna lifted her head up to the sun and felt its warm rays on her face. In the distance she heard a boat’s horn. “Jake, I hope you didn’t bring me down here just to talk about a lost shoe and the security guard who found it.”

“You’re busy, huh?”

Joanna sighed wearily. “You’ve got no idea how busy. I started today looking at dead fetuses and trying to determine why somebody would eviscerate them. By noon I gave up on that one and switched over to the enzyme preparation to see if I could uncover how and why it was inducing cancer in patients. I was in the process of drawing another big blank when I received your phone message. So if there’s nothing more for me here, I’d like to get back to my lab where I can continue to come up with big zeroes.”