Pie A La Murder (12 page)

“Don’t forget to call Eileen for me,” I said.

“I won’t.” John cupped his hand under my elbow and gestured for Nicholas to walk ahead of us down the path.

From inside the house we heard a shriek.

“It sounds like Mrs. Redding identified the body,” Nicholas said.

“I don’t think this is the best time for sarcasm,” I told him.

Officer Downey joined us at the sidewalk. He took the keys to the patrol car out of his pocket and unlocked the rear door.

John said to Nicholas, “Inside.”

Nicholas started to follow John’s order, but then turned to face him. “I want to hear my Miranda rights.”

“I’m
requesting
your compliance,” John said. “You’re not under arrest.”

“I expect to be because I don’t intend to tell you one damn thing. As soon as we get to West Bureau I’m going to invoke my right to call an attorney.”

I said, “Nicholas, stop it. You didn’t kill Redding.”

Nicholas’s eyes were cold and distant. “How do you know I didn’t? You weren’t there.”

“You want to play hardball, fine,” John said. “Nicholas D’Martino, you have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. . . .”

“John, please don’t do this,” I said.

John ignored me and continued. “You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. . . .”

As I stood on the sidewalk watching John finish his legal speech and Nicholas climb into the backseat of the patrol car, my heart ached.

Nicholas had deliberately provoked John, forcing him to treat Nicholas like a criminal. He was acting guilty, but nothing short of his looking me in the eyes and confessing would convince me that Nicholas had killed Alec Redding.

I believed I knew what he was doing.

And for whom he was doing it.

“Della?” John’s voice broke into my thoughts. “Get into my car. Please.” He glanced back at Redding’s house. “I don’t know how much time we have to be alone but I want you to tell me everything you know.”

He opened the passenger door for me.

I got in, while desperately trying to decide how much of the truth I could tell John. Certainly the things that he would easily discover on his own, but I would try to omit the one detail that might convince John of Nicholas’s guilt and keep him from widening his investigation.

When Eileen was a teenager and left something out of an explanation she was giving me, I called that “telling the truth, but with an asterisk.”

I wasn’t proud of what I was about to do.

John got in behind the wheel and said, “How well did you know Alec Redding?”

“I didn’t know him. I met him for the first and only time last Friday at the Hollywood Film Society luncheon.”

“How well did D’Martino know him?”

“I’m sure they never met.”

“Then what was he doing in Redding’s house, and why did you come looking for him here?”

“Redding is a well-known portrait photographer,” I said.

“He shot a portfolio for Nicholas’s daughter, who wants to be an actress. Maybe—”

“D’Martino has a daughter?”

“Yes. She’s eighteen, a beautiful girl. Maybe Nicholas came here tonight to pay him for the photographs.” That sounded lame, even to me, but John didn’t show any reaction.

“Did you know he had a teenage daughter?”

“Not until recently.” I related to John what Nicholas had told me about his long-ago divorce, and that the girl had been living in Europe with her mother, but had decided to come to Los Angeles to get to know her father.

“And to be an actress.” I heard cynicism in John’s tone. “Did Redding come on to the girl, or force himself on her?”

John had lasered in on the one area I wanted to get him away from: photographs.

“I doubt there was anything like that,” I said. “The man’s wife works with him. Liddy says she does the lighting for his portraits.”

“Liddy knows them?”

“Casually,” I said. “I think he took Liddy’s professional photos. Anyway, she introduced Nicholas’s daughter, Celeste, to both the Reddings when we were all at the Hollywood Film Society luncheon last week.”

Before John could pursue the subject of Celeste any further, I said, “Look, John, unless Redding’s death turns out to be the result of a burglary that went bad, the answer is bound to be somewhere in Redding’s relationships. I don’t know anything about his personal life, and I can’t imagine that Nicholas does either, but think about this: Maybe his wife hated him and her grief tonight is an act. You know how often the killer is the victim’s spouse. That’s the first person every detective looks at, and for good reason. But if it wasn’t his wife, maybe he owed money to mobsters and couldn’t pay.”

“Oh, come on now. That’s a pretty long reach.”

“Don’t be so dismissive. Think about it. Unless somebody’s killed by a stranger, statistically, aren’t the four main motives for murder love, money, a crime cover-up, or revenge?”

“What are you doing, taking night school courses in detecting?”

“I’ll ignore that crack. Think about this: Redding might have been having an affair with a married woman. Her husband could have found out about it and killed him in a jealous rage. Unless Dr. Carver finds another cause of death, from what Officer Downey said it seems as though Redding was killed by being struck on the back of his head with a stool. That doesn’t sound premeditated, does it? More like a jealous rage, someone lashing out in the heat of the moment. I can’t imagine that whoever killed Redding brought the stool in with him—or her—intending to use it as a murder weapon. You should start digging deeply into Alec Redding’s personal life.”

John’s poker face was back in place.

“You’re talking too much, and not enough,” he said quietly.

I manufactured a tone of righteous anger. “Is anything I’ve said illogical? You know the world is full of unhappy wives and jealous husbands and people who gamble more than they can afford to lose. You’ve got a lot of investigating to do!”

John was about to reply when movement behind me caught his eye. I turned to see Sydney Carver coming toward us, removing her latex gloves.

John immediately opened his car door and got out to meet her. I followed him.

“What do you know?” he asked the ME.

“My TOD guesstimate—based on his liver temp and postmortem lividity and the fact that he’s just now going into rigor—is that your vic was killed close to nine o’clock tonight. I can’t be sure until I do the autopsy, but those are pretty reliable signs.”

“And cause of death?”

“Again, this is preliminary, but it appears to be blunt force trauma to the back of the head. I won’t swear to it until I can take a look inside, and get the results of a tox screen, but you can get started on that assumption. According to the wife he didn’t have any medical problems and wasn’t on medication. Not even Viagra. I didn’t take her word for it, so I looked. The only pills in their medicine cabinets were hers, for birth control.”

“Thanks, Syd.”

She nodded and started toward the ME van. I watched her assistant wheel a gurney down the driveway. On it was a black body bag.

John turned to me. “Time of death rules you out.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said dryly.

His jaw stayed firm, but I saw a hint of softness in his eyes. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. But since you were on the scene, I’ll need your statement. I have to stay here and talk to Mrs. Redding, if she’s up to it. Will you go over to Butler Avenue and write the statement?”

The West Bureau station on Butler.

“And be careful what you put in it,” John added. I didn’t miss the warning in his words.

“I’ll go as soon as the ME van moves. It’s blocking my Jeep. What about Nicholas?”

“I’ll have a uniform drive him over. I’m serious about not wanting you to talk to each other before I have your sworn statements.”

“All right. Did you reach Eileen?”

“Yeah. She’s at your house and said not to worry. She’ll take care of Tuff.”

“That’s a relief. I see the ME’s van is moving, so I’ll get going. May I have my phone back?”

John shook his head. “Sorry. Not until the techs go through your call log, and D’Martino’s.”

“We have nothing to hide,” I said.

John started up the front walk. “If that’s true, then you’re the only two people in the world who don’t,” he said.

The medical examiner’s van made a U-turn and headed down Bella Vista toward Sunset Boulevard. I walked toward my newly accessible Jeep, but looked over at the patrol car. All I could see was the back of Nicholas’s head leaning against the rear seat. Officer Downey stood guard on the sidewalk.

As I made my own U-turn, I saw that Redding’s neighbors—one or two in front of nearly every house on the block, with a few peering out through windows—were giving what they could see of the proceedings their rapt attention.

Most of the houses had satellite dishes on their roofs—metal disks that brought much of the world right into their homes. But in spite of having more than 150 channels to choose from, they seemed to prefer the real reality of neighborhood drama to the fake “reality” that came through their receivers.

I felt the same kind of contempt for them that I feel for people who slow their cars in order to rubberneck at crash scenes. Years ago I was the car just behind a fatal collision: a convertible T-boned by an SUV that ran a red light. So much blood . . . I never wanted to see carnage like that again.

Half a block above Sunset Boulevard I saw a dark van with antenna rigging on top turn up Bella Vista. On the side, in bright yellow letters against dark blue, it said “Channel 4.”

The first of what was certain to be a parade of TV cameras had come to join the watchers.

As I turned east onto Sunset Boulevard, the direction that would ultimately take me to the West Bureau Station on Butler Avenue, I forgot about nosy neighbors and TV news and began looking for a restaurant.

I wasn’t hungry.

Restaurants had working pay telephones.

It had been a long time since I’d seen a public phone on the street that hadn’t been destroyed by vandals, and I needed to make a call before I got to the cop shop.

There were no restaurants on Sunset Boulevard near Bella Vista, so I had to go down into Westwood Village. From a wall phone at the first restaurant I saw, I dialed the office of criminal defense attorney Olivia Wayne and reached the answering service. I gave the operator my name, and said it was an emergency. In less than twenty seconds the operator connected me to Olivia.

As was her usual practice of eschewing small talk, her first words were, “What kind of trouble are you in?”

“Not me. It’s Nicholas D’Martino. He may be charged with murder, but he didn’t do it.”

“First, give me the bottom line. Details later.”

“Nicholas and I went, separately, to the home of photographer Alec Redding and found him dead. Murdered. Before we could call nine-one-one, we heard a police siren and two uniformed officers arrived.”

“So someone else called it in.” She was quiet for a moment. “You said
Nick
is under suspicion. If you both were there, why not you, too?”

“The preliminary time of death rules me out. I was doing a live TV show and couldn’t have got there in time to kill him, even if I’d had a motive, which I don’t. Nicholas arrived at Redding’s house before I did, and he’s refusing to cooperate with the police. He insisted John O’Hara—he and his partner are the homicide detectives on the case—read him the Miranda warning.”

I heard a grunt of disgust on her end of the line. Then: “Do you remember a few months ago when you gave me a one-dollar retainer?”

“Yes, of course.”