Night Night, Sleep Tight (17 page)

Sy trust.
That was underlined twice.

Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Harrison Ford, Maximilian Schell.

The list made Deirdre smile. Arthur was considering A-list actors to play himself.

Deirdre gathered up the manuscript pages and was about to slide them back into the folder when she realized something was stuck in one of its pockets. A small envelope. She slipped from it a greeting card. The front was printed with a ring of flowers circling a baby-carrying stork. Inside was a handwritten message:

Congratulations! It’s a baby.

That’s all. No name. No date. No six pounds eleven ounces. No return address on the envelope. Just a postmark: Beverly Hills, May 11, 1964. Six months after Deirdre’s accident. Six months after Antonio Acevedo was killed.

Chapter 32

A
t four thirty in the morning, Deirdre lay awake in the dark, mulling over what her father had written. There was some comfort in knowing that she had not, after all, been at the wheel of her father’s car when it crashed. But her father hadn’t been driving either. It was Henry who’d led her from the house. Henry who’d driven her up to Mulholland and crashed the car into the guardrail. For some reason he’d been at the Nichols’ house, too, the night Tito was killed.

And what about the dress and the knife? What kind of “insurance” was Bunny buying for herself by holding on to them, and how did her father end up getting them back?

Deirdre got out of bed, pulled out the torn plastic bag she’d stashed in the closet, and took out the dress. Unwrapped the knife. Examined the flourishy initial engraved in the silver cap at the end of the bone handle. Was it
n
for
Nichol
? Or—she rotated the knife 180 degrees—
u
for
Unger
?

And what about the dress? As she smoothed it out on the floor, brittle bits of netting broke away. Were the brownish stains on it blood? They could as easily be cocktail sauce or red wine. She and Joelen had gorged on both after the party, then thrown up.

Deirdre sniffed at the stains, but after all these years the only smell was of dust and decay. There was no telling what had made them. Or was there? Would Tyler, with his chemistry lab, be able to identify the stains? He’d offered to help. Urged her to call on him “anytime.” Did that mean it was okay to call at five in the morning? Would he write her off as a crazy nut job? She hoped not.

She crept into the kitchen, where she’d left her bag by the back door. In it was the report of her accident on which Tyler had written his phone numbers. She dialed the one marked “Home” and held her breath.

“Corrigan,” Tyler said, picking up on the third ring. His voice was thick.

“Tyler? I’m sorry, it’s—”

Before she could give her name, he said, “Deirdre! Hang on.” She heard muffled sounds on the other end, then he came back on the line. “Are you okay? Is everything all right?”

It didn’t sound as if he was writing her off. “I’m sorry to call at this ridiculous time, but you did say that if I needed anything it was okay to call anytime.”

He yawned. “Said it and meant it.”

“The thing is, I’m not sure this is something you’re allowed to do. I found a very old dress and was hoping that you might examine it and tell me whether the stains on it are blood. Off the record, of course. Just as a favor.”

“So you think the stains could be blood?” He said it in what sounded like a cop voice:
Just the facts, ma’am
.

Had she been right to trust him? After all, she hadn’t seen him in more than twenty years and they’d hardly had what you’d call a relationship. Why
was
he so eager to help her, anyway? And why was she so ready to trust a virtual stranger when she couldn’t trust her own mother, whose prayer beads she’d found in her father’s office? Or her brother, who’d never admitted that he was responsible for the accident that crippled her and who seemed to have a vested interest in burying her father’s secrets? Even Sy made her feel apprehensive, though she couldn’t put her finger on why.

Any of them could have purchased a shovel and used it to bash her father in the head during his midnight swim. Even if Arthur had seen one of them in the yard, he’d never have expected to be attacked. Any of them could have arranged for a mythical Israeli artist and a no-show news reporter to ensure that Deirdre didn’t have an alibi.

“Sorry, Deirdre,” Tyler said, “but I have to ask. Does this have anything to do with the fire?” It was a fair question, and he sounded like a real person asking it. She relaxed a notch.

“The stain is old. Really old. From twenty years ago. So I can’t imagine how it could be connected to the fire,” she said with a twinge of guilt. Because it was just possible that the fire had been set in order to destroy items in Arthur’s office, that dress among them.

“Okay then. Sure. It’s not complicated. I’ll bring over my own test kit and you can do the test yourself.”

“That would be great,” Deirdre said, feeling as if a heavy weight had lifted.

“How about later this morning? I could come to your house—”

“No,” Deirdre said, louder than she’d intended. She heard the dogs stirring in Henry’s bedroom. “Sorry. My family is already stressed out, and I’d rather they not know about this.”

“Then how about I meet you somewhere and we can do it right now?”

“Now? Really?”

“Sure. I’m awake.” He yawned again.

“Sorry.”

“No need to apologize. I’m glad you called. Where do you want to meet?”

Where?
She hadn’t gotten that far. Somewhere nearby. “You know the fountain on the corner of Santa Monica and Wilshire, across from Trader Vic’s? Will that work?”

“We should be able to find a spot there that’s dark enough to see the reaction. Assuming you don’t mind crawling around a bit under some bushes.”

It wouldn’t be the first time she’d crawled around under those bushes. She and Henry used to play hide-and-seek in that park, but never at five in the morning.

“Meet you there in thirty minutes,” Tyler said.

“Thirty minutes.” Deirdre couldn’t believe how easy this was turning out to be. “Thank you so much.”

“If you want to thank me, let me take you out to breakfast after.”

He was being so nice it scared her. “Okay. But my treat.”

“We can argue about that later.”

Deirdre rummaged through the dresser in her room and found a white T-shirt to wear with her leggings. She ran a brush through her hair, and scrawled a note for Henry and her mother in case they got up and found her missing. Carefully she folded the dress around the knife again and tucked them in her messenger bag. At the last minute, she stuffed the folder with her father’s manuscript in the bag, too.

When she drove off, it was still dark. It took only ten minutes to drive to the little park that was home to the fountain. She parked around the corner and made her way across the hard-packed dirt path leading to the tiled piazza. The moon was a substantial crescent that hung right over the head of the kneeling Indian on the plinth in the center of the circular fountain. As always, his head was bent and he held his hands out in front of him as if to capture the water playing around him. Or perhaps he was offering thanks to the gods for finding him, among all his compatriots, such a cushy permanent home.

Even at this odd hour the plaza wasn’t deserted. A young couple was entwined, necking on one of the benches. Deirdre picked a spot upwind from the fountain’s spray, feeling first to be sure the bench was dry. The parade of colored lights in the fountain was still going, but as the sky was starting to lighten, the jets of water looked pale rather than vibrant—powder blue, then seafoam green, then pink, cycling through color after color until the grand finale, all the colors at once. When she was little, her father would occasionally bring her there after getting ice cream at Baskin-Robbins. Even as they faded, the lights still seemed magical.

Traffic was sparse in the usually busy intersection of Santa Monica and Wilshire. Deirdre remembered when there’d been a vast empty field across the street where the Hilton Hotel now stood. Trader Vic’s, attached to the hotel’s near end, stuck its palm-tree-lined, Tiki-bedecked entrance into the intersection. More and more, Los Angeles and Disneyland were merging into a single entity with reality at a far remove.

Tyler loped across the plaza in jeans and a black T-shirt that showed off a muscular chest and powerful shoulders and upper arms. “Hey, sorry. I got held up,” he said. He held a black backpack with white letters stenciled on:
A
R
S
O
N
.

“It’s been ages since I was down here when the lights were going,” Deirdre said. “I forgot how cool it is.”

“Me too. I feel personally responsible for that,” Tyler said, pointing to a sign that read
N
O
S
K
A
T
E
B
O
A
R
DING ALLOWED
. “We used to come down here when they were doing repairs and the fountain was empty. We’d race around in circles inside the fountain. Jump in and out. Popped more than a few tiles, I’m ashamed to say.”

Deirdre said, “My brother claimed he and some friends put a box of Tide in the fountain once. Supposedly the suds spread all the way out onto the street and stopped traffic. He was very proud of that accomplishment.”

“Adolescent boys are all idiots.” Tyler sat next to her on the bench. Deirdre could smell his aftershave. “So what you want tested is in there?” He indicated the bag in her lap. “Let’s have a look, see what you’ve got.”

“It’s a dress,” Deirdre said, opening the bag. “It’s probably nothing.” Leaving the knife in the bag, she pulled out the dress and handed it to him.

Tyler turned his back to the fountain and took the dress from her, holding it gingerly away from him. “Like I said, we need to take this somewhere dark enough to see the reaction.” Just then the lights in the fountain went out and the fountain’s jets turned off. Deirdre looked back at Wilshire. The streetlights had gone off, too.

“We should do this now, before it gets much lighter. Behind there.” He pointed to the tall wall that formed the back of a long bench at the rear of the plaza.

Deirdre followed him out and around to where tall bushes lined the back of the wall. It smelled just like it had years and years ago when she’d hunkered down, waiting for Henry to find her. Pee and rotten eggs.

Tyler turned on a penlight, crouched in the shadow between the bushes, and crept in closer to the wall. Taking shallow breaths and steadying herself with her hands, Deirdre followed him, frog walking in close to the base of the wall where it was darkest.

Tyler waited until she was right there in position, too. Then he opened his pack and pulled out a plastic spray bottle. “Okay. You ready?”

“Ready.” She hoped she really was.

“Let’s see what we have here.” Tyler turned off the flashlight and waited. In moments, Deirdre’s eyes adjusted to the dark. Tyler held the dress in front of them and gave her the spray bottle. “Just give it a spritz or two.” Deirdre aimed the nozzle and gave it two squeezes. An instant later, bluish-green puddles of light glowed on the underskirt and the netting lit up like a star-sprinkled fisherman’s net.

“Probably blood,” Tyler said.

Chapter 33

A
fter the blue glow faded, Deirdre returned with Tyler to the park. The air felt laden with moisture even though the fountain was off. The sky had turned pale gray and traffic was coming to life.

“Why
probably
blood?” Deirdre asked.

“It’s called a presumptive test. Luminol occasionally gives a false positive.”

“It glows like that when it hits something other than blood?”

“Like bleach. That’s why people use bleach to clean up a blood spill. It camouflages the stains. Animal blood would luminesce, too. And horseradish. I know, more than you need to know.”

Horseradish? How weird was that? Because the cocktail sauce that she’d gorged on at the party and then thrown up all over herself had been spicy. It could have been that. Maybe. But if that’s all it was, why would Bunny and then her father have held on to it for all these years?

Deirdre said, “I’m amazed at how bright the reaction is, given how old the stain is.”

“The older the stain, the stronger the glow. But like I say, it’s not proof positive. If you want to know for sure if it’s human blood, I’d need to take a sample to the lab and run more tests.”

Knowing whether the stains were blood wouldn’t bring her any closer to understanding how they’d gotten there or how her father had ended up with the dress. But it would be another piece of information about what happened that night. Eventually, all of it had to fit together.

“Could you?” she said.

“Sure. I’ll take a sample.”

While he was digging in his backpack, she considered whether to show him the knife and ask him to test it, too. But he’d said luminol glowed when it came in contact with animal blood, and surely the knife had been used to carve meat.

Tyler used scissors to cut a small square of stained fabric from the dress and tucked it into a plastic bag. He gave her back the dress and she stuffed it into her bag.

“Sorry,” he said. “Forensics is not an exact science. Sometimes the more you know, the less you’re sure of. Do I still get to take you to breakfast?”

A little while later, Deirdre was sitting next to him on a stool at the counter at Canter’s on Fairfax, inhaling the aroma of pastrami and garlic pickles. The waitress, wearing a shirtwaist with white trim almost exactly like the one Bunny had dressed Deirdre up in for her visit to City Hall, brought them coffee and took their orders. Even as early as it was, the restaurant hummed with customers.

Deirdre sipped her coffee. When she looked across at the mirrored wall opposite them, she caught Tyler staring at her reflection. “Twenty-year-old bloodstains,” he said. “So does this have to do with your car accident?”

Deirdre felt her face flush. She looked away. She was ready to call him for help at five in the morning but not ready to spill her guts.

“Okay, don’t tell me,” Tyler said. “But I might even be able to help with whatever it is that’s got you so stuck.”

“I’m not stuck.”

“Yeah, you are. You can’t even look me in the eye and talk about it.”

The waitress brought over their plates and topped off their coffees. Deirdre poked at her egg. Took a bite. The potatoes in the corned beef hash were crisp and the eggs were done exactly right.

“I’m sorry.” She shook her head. “These last few days have been a bit much. Between my father and the fire and the mess, it’s a lot to deal with.”

Tyler tucked into his pancakes. “I can’t even imagine. Though I do know cleanup is brutal after a fire, even when you’re not grieving. You know, there are companies who will come in and do it for you.”

“I need to do it myself. At least a first pass. My father named me executor of his literary estate, and a lot of what should have been preserved was up in his office on the second floor of the garage.”

“Have you started? Because water can be just as damaging as fire, especially to paper.”

“So far, the only thing I’ve managed to save is a sleazy photograph.”

“A photograph?”

Deirdre found it in the bottom of her bag and showed it to Tyler. “How’s this for legacy?”

“Joelen Nichol,” Tyler murmured. He took the photo from Deirdre. “You two were always together.”

Of course Tyler remembered Joelen—he and the rest of the male population of Beverly Hills.

Tyler raised the photograph to the light. “You think that’s your dad?” he asked, pointing to the photographer reflected in the mirror over Joelen’s head.

“Isn’t it?” she said.

He slipped a key ring from his pocket. Hanging on the ring along with keys was a small magnifying glass. Tyler examined the photograph through it. “Have a close look, why don’t you?” He handed Deirdre the magnifier.

Deirdre positioned the lens and looked through it. The photographer’s face was hidden behind the camera’s viewfinder, the lens accordioned from its box. The man had her father’s hair. Same general build. Same stance. But that wasn’t what sent a shiver down Deirdre’s back as she leaned closer to the magnifying glass. On the arm of the photographer’s leather jacket was a Harley-Davidson double-winged eagle patch.

Her father wasn’t a biker. Her brother was.