“You thought you were in denial and therefore insinuating strange and unusual possibilities into a case that was perfectly straightforward.”
Finally, he smiled. “Trust me, Miss Graduated from Berkeley, I never insinuated possibilities in my life.”
“Yes, you did. And another thing, do you remember Michelle Tarbett?”
He furrowed his brow and seemed to be in pain as he rifled through his mental files.
I said, “Worked at the Hot-Cha Club.”
“Jeez.” He groaned from a deeper place. “How did you ever connect with Michelle?”
“Yesterday she had an appointment to meet Guido for an interview, but she didn’t make it. Took an ice pick in the jugular Tuesday night.” I waited for that to sink in. “Do you know Larry Rascon?”
“Name’s familiar. Works Newton?”
“Works Hollenbeck. He’s investigating.”
“Hookers get murdered by their clients all the time.” Mike rolled his head toward me. “Are you insinuating strange and unusual possibilities into a case that could be perfectly straightforward?”
“Yes, Detective, I am.”
“I’ll look into it.” He grinned. He still looked like hell, but he seemed to be in recovery. “The good news is, you’re talking to me.”
“About Hector and Michelle, maybe.”
He patted the sofa beside him. “Come here.”
“What good would it do me?” I laughed, and stayed behind my desk. “Look at you. You’re such a worthless piece of shit today you can’t even stand up to get a little nooky.”
The effort hurt, but he got to his feet, stopped a moment for his head to get used to the new altitude, and walked across the office toward me. He took me into his arms, held tight, and leaned heavily.
“I’m a two-time loser,” he said. With his lips behind my ear, I felt his baritone as much as I heard it—I felt it all the way down my spine. “But I’m learning. Stick with me, Maggie. I know this time I’ll get it right.”
“What are you learning?” I asked.
He rubbed his head. “Twenty-five-year-old rookies and twenty-five-year veterans can’t play the same games. I feel like I’m dying.”
“You don’t look so hot, either.” I pressed my cheek into the hollow of his neck and breathed him in. “You smell good though.”
He was perking up. So was I.
The phone rang. I said, “Did you give Olga this number?” as I picked it up.
“I might have.”
Fergie called from the soundstage. “JoAnn Chin had some kind of accident. There’s a cop on his way up to see you.”
CHAPTER
14
The walls of JoAnn Chin’s room at County General Hospital hadn’t been patched since the big quake of 1994. I wondered how safe she felt looking up into a network of plaster cracks, trapped as she was by the apparatus that held her right arm in traction.
“You didn’t see the man who attacked you?” Mike asked for the third time.
“No.” JoAnn’s lips were so split and swollen she could hardly form words, so what she uttered sounded like, “nuh.” Her face was a red-and-purple mass crisscrossed by stitches. Both of her eyes were black and her nose was taped. Veteran nurses shuddered when they came to tend her, and she saw their revulsion. From all accounts, JoAnn’s beauty had always been her stock-in-trade. Behind her shattered face she expressed a deep chagrin that went beyond both her pain and fear.
Mike examined her visible injuries as if she were a courtroom exhibit. “You must have had an impression of the man. Big, small, young, old, white, black?”
“Nothing.”
“What did he smell like?” I asked. “Did he smell like booze or sweat or food?”
“Like aftershave.”
I turned to Mike. “A well-groomed assassin.”
He frowned, gave me a nudge. I wasn’t supposed to be there because this was a preliminary police interview. Mike glanced at his notes, and I wondered whether he would write my name on the “persons present at the interview” line.
He went over JoAnn’s story a third time. “You were getting out of your car in the garage at your residence this morning at around one-thirty. You were seized from behind, you put up a struggle using a tire iron you kept in the vehicle for defense purposes. Your assailant took the tire iron from you and used it to beat you. Correct?”
“Uh-huh.” Tears ran down JoAnn’s face, washing rivulets through the iodine stains around her stitches.
“How did you get away from him?” Mike asked.
She had to say it twice before we understood, “Kneed his groin.”
“During all of the commotion, you never got a look at him?”
“I covered my face with my arms.”
“If your face was covered, how did it get so smashed up?”
She moved the fingers of her shattered arm. “Couldn’t cover my face anymore when he broke my arm. There was so much blood, I couldn’t open my eyes.” Sobbing, she was even more difficult to understand. The gist of her mumbling from that point was that she was worried about how scarred up her face would be when she healed. She was also afraid the man would come back to finish his work. I took her uninjured hand in mine for a quick squeeze, but she wouldn’t let go.
I thought that Mike was being hard on her. They may never have been friends, but he had known JoAnn when she was dating Roy Frady, and before that when she was dating Barry Ridgeway. It’s possible that she didn’t recognize Mike after twenty years, with his hair turned white and without the little cookie-duster mustache he used to wear. But he knew exactly who she was, and he didn’t even bring up their old acquaintance. He never offered a single word of reassurance.
Larry Rascon came in and called Mike into the corridor for a conference. JoAnn still clung to my hand. I asked her, “Would you like some water?”
I held the glass for her. After a sip, she lay back as if exhausted. Finally, her sedative seemed to be taking effect. Mike glanced in, winked at me, went back to his discussion with Rascon. JoAnn saw the wink. She said, “He’s making a play for you. Stay away from the asshole. You’ll only get hurt.” Asshole was the clearest word I had heard from her yet.
“Mike’s okay,” I said.
“He’s dangerous. He’ll lead you on, make you fall in love with him. Nail you to the mattress when it’s convenient for him. But he’ll never divorce his wife.” Her eyelids drooped. She yawned, and flinched when it stretched her jaw. “He’ll never split his pension. He’ll never divorce her.”
“Do you feel like talking about Roy Frady?”
“I was.” JoAnn touched her cheek as she closed her eyes. “No cameras.” She let go of my hand and seemed to have fallen asleep.
I joined Mike and Rascon in the hall outside her room.
“She’s asleep,” I said.
Mike asked, “Did she tell you anything?”
“She warned me to stay away from you.”
Mike took my hand. “Good advice.”
“But too late.” I leaned against him. “Tell me something. Frady and Mary Helen were separated for a long time. Why didn’t one of them file for divorce?”
“There was no hurry. Divorce is expensive.”
“When the press interviewed JoAnn, she said she and Roy were planning to get married as soon as his divorce was final. Roy must have said something to you about his plans. Did she lie to the reporters, or did Roy lie to her?”
Mike glanced in at JoAnn before he walked me away from her open door. Rascon, like a good detective, came along.
“The thing is this,” Mike said. “Roy couldn’t even afford a place of his own. When he split with Mary Helen, he had to move in with his parents. It wasn’t working out. JoAnn had an apartment, so he more or less moved in with her.” He half turned from Rascon. “Trust me, JoAnn wasn’t the type of girl Roy would ever marry.”
I said, “She’s beautiful. She’s smart. What’s wrong with her?”
“She slept with half the guys in the division a
nd she talked about every one of them. Because of her, we all knew Ridgeway was hung like a cashew and Frady was good with his tongue. JoAnn was not the girl you took home to your mother or asked to baby-sit your kids. Get it?”
“He used her, and she’s still bitter,” I said. “That’s what she was talking about.”
“That was twenty years ago. I have a feeling Roy wasn’t the last man to use JoAnn.”
“I don’t know what to do now, Mike,” I said. “If you count Hector, my little film project has three major casualties. I’m afraid to go on with it, because I don’t want anyone else to get hurt. But I hate being jerked around.”
“You think there’s a tie-in?”
“I don’t believe in coincidences.” I put my hand over the gun on his belt. “And neither do you.”
Rascon cleared his throat to remind us he was there. “Are you taking this case downtown, Detective?”
“Probably. It looks like a serial crime situation, and the crimes occurred in several divisions. Miss Chin lives in Highland Park, putting her, if I’m not mistaken, out of the Hollenbeck area, where you came aboard. And we have to liaison with Santa Monica PD.”
Rascon was not happy to be reminded. “Chin’s a quarter mile inside Northeast.”
“Boundaries aren’t the deciding factor,” Mike said. “Major Crimes will take over for one simple reason: I want the case, and that’s where I work.”
Rascon shrugged in resignation. He was a young, eager detective. He had told me earlier that this was one of the first cases he had worked that was more interesting than drive-bys, bar brawls, and lethal domestic disputes. Mike, after watching Rascon’s reaction, reached out and caught the elbow of the younger man’s jacket and tugged it.
“You’re a good detective, Rascon. You’ve done good initial fieldwork. We’re going to need liaison with Hollenbeck. How would you feel if I asked your lieutenant and my captain if it would be okay to lend you to Majors for a while?”
Rascon’s grin was slow coming on, snuck up on him at the point of bursting, so he had to tap his cheek to bring it in check: tough detectives do not let out war whoops in hospital corridors. Emotions under control, he said, “I wouldn’t mind.”
“First thing I want to do is bring Anthony Louis downtown, and get a search warrant for his premises.” Mike reached for his pocket notebook. “I’ll give you an address so you can get started on it.”
Rascon raised a hand to stay him. “I’ve got it. Anthony and I go way back.”
“Let’s make our calls and get formal approval, get the warrant going, call in uniform backup. If you know Anthony, you know he’s one unpredictable son of a bitch. And I want medical personnel on standby in case there are any recent injuries on his person. I want every little nick examined.” They were already headed for the elevators, and Mike was in charge and getting bossy. “Maggie, I don’t want you interviewing anyone until we get a handle on things, or can arrange protection. We need a list of everyone you’ve contacted.”
“I can give you my list right now. But I don’t know who all Hector talked to on his own. I’ll go through the tapes and the disk I lifted from his apartment, but I have no idea what’s on them.”
“Take a look at them,” he said.
I asked, “How difficult would it be to get a warrant to search Gloria’s place?”
“Because she took Hector’s things? It would be tough to pull off. You can’t break into your own house, and her name was on the lease.” He made a note, though. “What do you think she has?”
“Guido’s video camera. And the tape that possibly was in it.”
Mike grinned, gave me a wet kiss in the middle of my forehead. “I love the way your mind works. I love all the rest of you, but I especially love your devious mind. Gloria’s new boyfriend showed up at work today wearing Roy’s leather jacket—the one his mother gave him for Christmas. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to get into her place all day. I doubt we’ll get a warrant, but we’ll get inside one way or another.”
“Just don’t hurt her when you boot the door.”
Rascon, the bright boy, said, “Gloria Marcuse? I heard about the jacket and I wasn’t real surprised. I have a few scores to settle with the”—he glanced at me—“with her.”
I led them into the elevator. “You two sound like a marriage made in heaven. But I’m warning you, Detective Rascon, watch out. It’ll be a honeymoon you won’t ever forget.”
CHAPTER
15
Lana did not rant. Lana did not rave. I sat on the edge of my chair in front of her desk with both feet planted and ready for a fast exit—out the door and out of my contract. But all she did was sit back in her big leather chair and grin at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know we’re already over budget and behind schedule. But I cannot risk the safety of anyone whose participation with the project might put them in jeopardy. The police want us to shut down for twenty-four hours.”
“This is for real?” was all she said, but she said it three times in a row.
“The police are afraid that there is some connection between my film and the attacks on Michelle Tarbett, JoAnn Chin, and maybe even Hector Melendez. And so am I. I don’t have hard evidence. If I err, I prefer to err on the side of caution. The police will provide protection, but they need twenty-four hours to put it in place.”
Lana picked up her desk telephone and pushed one of her speed dial buttons.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “We’ll lose time and money. But this is the way it has to be.”
She waved away my apology, brightened even more when there was a voice at the other end of her receiver. “It’s Lana, Gaylord. Listen to this. Someone is killing off the people who help Maggie MacGowen research her Roy Frady film. No lie. Two deaths, one victim in intensive care. Police are asking us to help with their investigation.” She made a Miss-America-is-waiting-for-her-roses-and-tiara smile as she picked up her desk clock. “It’s two o’clock here. I can get something on the satellite in thirty minutes, in time for East Coast news at six. We’ll have a full story ready for five o’clock in Chicago, four on the West Coast, expanded coverage for the elevens.”
I was on my feet; there was no way to stop this from happening.
“Wait, Maggie,” Lana said. Then she repeated for Gaylord, “Two deaths, one intensive care. And we had an incident of sabotage on a location shoot. Shut us down for half a day. Call publicity. Maybe we can get a People feature, Time and Newsweek will follow. We already have Rolling Stone on site, but their publication schedule doesn’t work for us and the assigned reporter defines the word ‘nobody.’ Call Larry King. We’ll step up the filming schedule, take advantage of the public interest.”
At the door, I paused. “I have to go, Lana. The police have given me an assignment. You can reach me at home.”
She protested, gently. “Have Thea work up some figures.”
I said, “Sure,” knowing what she wanted was a banner line: “Network, at a loss of X dollars, shuts down production plagued by, et cetera.” Thea was the last person I wanted to see—would we be sending flowers to JoAnn next?—and I delegated the task to Fergie.
I found Guido in the editing room, and filled him in. He was, in his way, as excited as Lana. Except, he had the decency to also be repulsed and alarmed.
“Hector told me you lent him a video camera,” I said. “Did he give it back?”
Guido curled his lip. “I forgot about it. It’s network property. You didn’t happen to see it when you burglarized the joint?”
“No.” I know I sounded impatient. “I picked up some tapes at Hector’s. Most of them have your label on them. I’d like for you to go over them to see whether there’s anything there that you didn’t give him, or if anything is missing. And I need help compiling a list of everyone who has participated or who has been contacted, and the walls around here have eyes. Can you come home with me?”
“Sure.” He shut off the dialogue loop. “What will you be
doing?”
“Going through Hector’s computer files.”
He was on his feet, the old war correspondent rising to an occasion. “Who’s catering?”
“Chateau Jacques in the Box.”
We drove through on the way.
Because Mike had set up both my computer and Hector’s, I had no problem opening his files. I had intended to get right into them. The problem was Guido.
Guido had three VCRs running simultaneously, was eating tacos, juggling remotes. When you come home at the end of the day, there are chores to be dealt with: take the messages off the machine, feed and placate the dog, change into sweats. Guido wanted attention, so I never got to any of it. Every time I started to do something on my own, Guido called me over to look at whatever he had on the screen—usually something he himself had taped. I was happy to have him in the house, because the truth is, I was a little bit afraid to be alone. Guido kept me from getting into Hector’s files, but I managed to feed the dog and retrieve messages.
Casey needed money, my mom wanted my flight information, Brady was sorry. I had a mystery call, a man who gave no name, only a number, and asked me to call. The voice seemed familiar and held no apparent menace. That was the first call I returned.
“This is Maggie MacGowen,” I said after the same voice had said hello after the sixth ring. “I’m returning your call.”
“Margot Eugenie Duchamps MacGowen? Date of birth, September twenty-sixth at University of California Medical Center, San Francisco, California?”
“At nine-ten A.M. Who are you?”
“We spoke the other day. This is Special Agent Chuck Kellenberger.”
“FBI,” I said for Guido’s enlightenment. “What can I do for you?”
“Maybe we can do something for each other. I understand you’re going to Berkeley tomorrow.”
“You’re a scary guy, Kellenberger. Don’t you know the cold war is over, communism is dead, and you don’t need to follow ordinary citizens around anymore?”
He laughed. “Detective Flint told me you were going.”
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