The Mercedes Coffin (36 page)

“Occasionally he does, for your information. Now if you’d kindly save your obnoxious aggressive streak for Melinda Little, I’d be much obliged.”

“I bet she drinks mocha, whipped, foamed—”

“Can I kill him?” Marge asked Decker. She turned around to the back. “You know, if you would have ordered a plain coffee and gotten some caffeine in your system, you wouldn’t be bitching at me.”

“I don’t pay two bucks for something I can make for ten cents.”

“Scott, you don’t own a coffeemaker. You don’t even own a jar of instant. That’s your problem. You show up in the morning and wait for someone in the squad room to make coffee, then you mooch off the common pot. This morning, no one bothered to make coffee. Now you have a friggin’ headache and we have to put up with your chemical withdrawal. It’s not fair.” She rummaged around in her purse. “Here. Take a Motrin. Maybe it’ll take the snarl off your face.”

Oliver wanted to sneer, but the pain got the better of him. “Do you have something to wash it down with?” Marge handed him the last of her mocha latte. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” She looked out the window, at the billows of white foam barreling across the cobalt marine expanse. “Sure is pretty around here… especially without the excess noise.”

Oliver held his head and grumbled from the backseat.

Decker said, “How the other half lives.”

Marge said, “I wonder how Melinda — with two kids and probably a lot of debt — managed to snag a multirich guy like Michael Warren.”

“She’s a beautiful woman,” Decker said.

Marge said, “There are lots of beautiful women in L.A.”

“My guess is that she’s hot in the sack,” Oliver said.

“There are a lot of women who are also hot in the sack,” Marge said.

“But probably not many who’ll do
whatever
the guy wants.”

“What makes you say that Melinda’s that kind of gal?”

“She had a gambling problem. She fucked the Doodoo Sluts for money. When you whore, you do whatever the client desires, and in the punk scene, I bet they desired some pretty strange stuff.”

THE WOMAN LOOKED
as if she had just stepped off a yacht. The reality was that Melinda Little Warren was just about to step onto one. She wore a blue-and-white-striped top, white capri pants, and white wedge sandals. Gold bangles along with a diamond watch encircled her wrists, and pearl drops hung from her earlobes. Her blond tresses were loose and wild.

She made a point of looking at her watch. “I don’t have time for this. I have to be at the marina in an hour or else I hold everyone up. What do you
want
from me?”

“I want to find out why you lied,” Decker said.

She blinked her eyes several times. “I’ve already told you. I lied about Phil Shriner because I was embarrassed about my gambling problem. I didn’t see the point of bringing up my past issues when I don’t have them anymore.”

“Not that lie,” Decker said. “I’m talking about the lie about not knowing Primo Ekerling. The record producer who was murdered in a manner similar to your husband. I asked you if you knew him. You told me the name didn’t sound at all familiar.”

Melinda was silent.

“Mrs. Warren, you’re a very bright woman. You knew that we were assigned to investigate and we were going to investigate. You should have known that the lie was going to come back on you—”

“Shriner told you!” Her face was purple with outrage. “That bastard broke confidence. I’m going to sue—”

“It wasn’t Shriner, it was Liam O’Dell.” Melinda’s mouth opened and closed. “You should have known we’d speak to all of them because Ekerling’s murder was similar to Ben’s. Didn’t
you
think that there might be a connection?”

“When I read about it in the papers, I thought it was odd, but…” She stopped and tears pooled in her dark eyes. “Am I going to need a lawyer?”

Oliver said, “Why don’t we ask you a few questions and then you can decide that for yourself.”

“I shouldn’t need a lawyer.” Her cheeks reddened with anger. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Decker said, “All we’re trying to do is get the truth. Maybe we should all sit down and start from the beginning.”

Melinda glanced at her watch. A big dramatic sigh. “I guess a relaxing day on the ocean is not going to happen for me.” Another hostile glare. “I need to call up my husband and tell the group to go without me. You have to give me a moment to compose myself. If he hears tension in my voice, he’s going to come home and I don’t want him knowing about any of this.”

“Fair enough.”

After taking several deep breaths, she made the phone call. Her voice was smooth and her lies were silken. Something about meeting an old friend who’s in L.A. for only a day. When she hung up, her eyes were wet. “Happy?”

“Your misery doesn’t make us happy, Mrs. Warren,” Decker said.

“You could have fooled me.”

SHE CHANGED FROM
the sailor’s getup into jeans and a T-shirt. The bracelets had come off as well as the diamond watch. She had scrubbed down her face, and without any makeup, she looked like the fifties-plus woman she was. She made a pot of coffee and served it with some nuts and candy. She sat in an oversized chair with her legs tucked under her body, sipping coffee and letting the steam tickle her face.

Oliver put his mug down on the coffee table and took out a small notepad. “When you read about Primo Ekerling’s death — and its similarity to your husband’s murder — what did you think?”

She licked her lips. “It was odd, but I didn’t think it had anything to do with Bennett’s death. Fifteen years apart. Why would it have anything to do with Ben’s death?”

“But why not?” Oliver said. “The similarities were right in front of your face. And if I may be blunt, Primo was one of your former lovers.”

Her laugh was derisive. “When my husband was murdered, that psychotic episode of my life had been long over.”

Decker said, “Let’s go back a little bit. How did that psychotic episode happen in the first place?”

Her eyes moistened. She put down her coffee cup and kneaded her hands. “Do you know what it’s like to be married to Jesus?” When there was no response, she continued. “Bennett was a saint and everyone told me so… how lucky and fortunate I was to have bagged him. My parents preferred him to me. So much so, they gave him
my
money.”

“Your trust fund?” Decker said. When Melinda gave him a quizzical look, he said, “We talked to your mother.”

“She hates me.” Her voice was matter-of-fact. “The woman is so incredibly narcissistic that she was jealous of any attention not focused on her.”

Marge said, “Must have been hard having to live up to your husband’s image and dealing with a hurtful mother. Then as a topper, Mom gave away your trust fund to your husband.”

“Oh, you got that right, sister!” She got up and started to pace. “Can you imagine the betrayal? Trusting a stranger over her own daughter? I wanted to kill her!”

“What about your husband?” Oliver asked.

“What?” Face flushed with anger, she turned to him. “My husband? What about him? I’m talking about my mother!”

Oliver pulled back the rhetoric. “I was just wondering if you were as angry at your husband as you were at your mother.”

She stopped walking and let out an exasperated sigh. “Ben tried to be fair. He spent the money on things that he thought the whole family would enjoy. I wanted the Mercedes as much as he did. I don’t know. Maybe I was a little pissed at Ben for setting up the arrangement with Mom.”

“Like they were colluding against you?”

“What choice did Ben have? Either it was that or nothing. My mom was ready to take the money back and put it in trust for the kids. Ben was trying to act the peacemaker. But it was really hurtful.”

Marge said, “Is that when you started having affairs?”

“Maybe… I don’t know.” She shook her head and sat back down, looking at the ceiling as she spoke. “Ben was never around. Always doing something for someone else. For the kids, for the school, for my parents, for the community. I was always last.”

“Did you ever tell him how you felt?” Decker asked her.

“Tell Jesus what to do?” She pointed to her chest. “Moi?” She rubbed her eyes and looked away. “I got pregnant while we were engaged. The kid wasn’t his. I got an abortion and he married me anyway. Saint Ben. My first mistake. I shouldn’t have gone through with it. My mother loved Ben. I thought she might like me better because I chose someone she liked.”

Silence blanketed the room.

“Did you like Ben?” Marge asked softly.

“Sure I liked him. I loved him.” She slouched back into the oversized sailcloth chair. Her voice dropped to a hush. “I don’t think he liked me all that much. I mean, what kind of man marries a woman who fucks around on him?”

No one answered.

“You want my opinion? He filled his life with all these obligations to avoid me. To avoid sex. I don’t think he liked sex. At least not with me.”

“Maybe he was gay,” Oliver said. “Why else would he avoid sex with someone as gorgeous as you?”

That got a genuine smile. Every so often Oliver would do something like that and Marge remembered why she worked with him.

Melinda said, “I thought about that. I doubt if he had someone on the side — man or woman. His work and his extracurricular activities took up all his time.”

“Could he have been lying about some of his activities?” Marge asked her.

“He was always available for my phone calls. And he always left me his schedule — just in case. When I phoned him, he took my calls right away. Maybe he was wrestling with his sexual demons. Maybe that’s why he scheduled himself so tightly… so he wouldn’t have time to fool around.”

Marge said, “And in the meantime, you were home alone with two little boys making demands and no help. I’m a mother. I know it’s not easy.”

“Especially because I was on a very tight allowance… because of my ‘problem.’” She made quotation marks around the word with her fingers. “I had to beg for every dollar just like a kid. It was demeaning!”

“Who controlled the purse strings?” Decker asked. “Mom or Ben?”

“Both. Ben did the weekly grocery shopping, he bought clothes and supplies for the boys, he paid the bills, he paid all the expenses.” She gave a wry smile. “I was allowed to shop for my own clothing, but Ben had to account for every dollar spent or else Mom would take away my trust fund. That didn’t give me lot of latitude for my recreation.”

“By recreation do you mean gambling?” Oliver asked.

She picked up her coffee and took a gulp. It was lukewarm by now. “Everyone was so afraid that I couldn’t control my gambling that I started gambling just to prove them wrong. That’s when I got into deep debt.”

“How’d you pay it off?”

Melinda turned to Decker and raised an eyebrow. “I was creative. A couple of times I managed to forge Ben’s signature and withdrew my own money.”

“Did Ben find out?”

“If he did, he didn’t tell me about it. Maybe he was secretly glad. All this responsibility of taking care of me… I think it was a burden. And every so often, I’d win big at the tables and refill the coffers.”

Decker jumped into the touchy subject. “So when did you meet the Doodoo Sluts?”

The name caused her head to jerk back. “That part of my life was completely over before Ben was murdered. At least a year before.”

“I believe you,” Decker said, “but I need you to answer the question.”

“I met Primo first… at one of the poker casinos. I was about to bust and he bought me some chips. That night I won and Primo and I celebrated.” Again, she looked up at the ceiling. “Ben had taken the boys on a camping trip. No one was home. It wasn’t my first time being bad, but I hardly knew this guy.”

The room was silent.

Melinda said, “He drank, Primo did. He was loose with a buck. I liked that.” A shrug. “That’s it.”

“And how did you move on from Primo to the others?”

Her eyes became steely. “I don’t see the relevance between my psycho past and my husband’s murder.”

Decker said, “Let me tell you why we think it is relevant. We know for a fact that there’s a common link between someone in your past and a prime suspect in Primo’s death.”

Melinda seemed confused. “But they have Primo’s murderers behind bars. Punk kids. Certainly I don’t know them. The paper said it was a carjacking.”

“It was way more than a carjacking, and we’re just beginning to put all the pieces together. But there’s a key player, and I think we both know who that key player is.”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Figure it out,” Decker said. “We believe your husband’s death can be traced back to someone in the Doodoo Sluts. Primo’s dead. That makes three members left. Go down the list.”

She remained silent.

“Melinda,” Marge said, soothingly. “You’ve held in this terrible secret for so long. Get it off your chest. Unburden yourself. Tell us your side of what happened to your husband—”

“But I don’t know what happened!” She cried out. “I don’t know what happened! If I thought it had something to do with the Doodoo Sluts, don’t you think I would have said something a long time ago?”

“Maybe you were too scared to talk,” Marge said. “But now it’s all going to come out. This is your one chance to tell us everything you know.”

“I’m in the dark!” Melinda cried out. “Can’t you get that through your heads? Why would one of the Doodoo Sluts murder my husband? Who are we even talking about, by the way?”

Decker said, “Rudy Banks is missing. And we’ve got a witness who has implicated him in Ekerling’s death.”

“Rudy?”
Melinda gasped. She seemed genuinely shocked. “I… I… Rudy murdered Primo? I can’t believe…
Rudy?
They were friends!”

“They haven’t been friends for many, many years,” Marge said. “For the last ten years, they’ve been involved in multiple lawsuits with each other.”

Melinda shook her head. “I didn’t know. I walked away from those bad boys about a year before my husband was murdered, and I haven’t seen any of them since.”

Decker tried a different tactic. “Why’d you break away from the group?”