L.A. Dead

by Stuart Woods

  The cardinal nodded soberly.

  "I wouldn't put too much stock in that theory," Dino said. "You and I both know that, in cases like this, the spouse is always a suspect until cleared."

  Stone nodded. He was trying to think what to do next but not getting anywhere.

  The cardinal came and sat down beside him. "Stone," he said, putting a fatherly hand on his shoulder, "I am aware of your previous relationship with Arrington. Eduardo and I have discussed this at some length, and we agree that it would be extremely unwise to go forward with the wedding, until… this situation has been, in some way, resolved."

  Stone looked at the man but said nothing.

  Eduardo came and stood next to Stone. "This is very complicated," he said. "Both Dolce and I are friends of Vance's, and you, of course, were very close to Arrington. There will be many emotions at work for a while, so many and so confused that to proceed with the marriage at this time would be folly."

  "Does Dolce know about this?"

  Eduardo shook his head. "I am going to go and wake her now and tell her; this is my duty, not yours."

  "I will come, too," the cardinal said. "She may need me."

  Stone nodded. "All right. Tell her we'll talk the minute she's ready."

  Eduardo and the cardinal left the room.

  "What haven't you told me?" Stone asked Dino.

  "Rick says Arrington hasn't made any kind of statement yet. She apparently can't remember what happened. They've put her under sedation in a private clinic, but…"

  "But what?"

  "Before she went under, she was asking for you; she said she wouldn't talk to anybody but you."

  "I'll have to call her," Stone said.

  "I told you, she's under sedation, and Rick didn't know the name of the place where they'd taken her."

  "How about Peter? Where is he?"

  "The servants are taking care of him; he has a nanny. Rick said his people had spoken to Arrington's mother, and she's on her way out there from Virginia."

  "That's good."

  "Did Rick say anything else at all?"

  "No. He was going to make some calls, and he said he'd get back to me the minute he found out anything more."

  Stone walked to the windows and looked out into the lovely garden. "Dino," he said, "did Arrington know that Dolce and I were being married this weekend?"

  "I have no idea. Did you tell her?"

  Stone shook his head. "I haven't talked with her since last summer; Dolce and I had dinner with them in Connecticut, at their place in Roxbury. It's only a few miles from my new place in Washington."

  "And how did that go?"

  "Not well. Dolce was very catty, obviously jealous. The next morning, Arrington showed up at my cottage and, well, sort of threw herself at me."

  "And how did you handle that?" Dino asked.

  "I managed to keep her pretty much at arm's length-though, God knows, that wasn't what I wanted. I told her I wouldn't do anything to harm her marriage, and that was pretty much that. A couple of minutes after she left, Vance showed up-I think he must have been following her. He asked if he had anything to worry about from me, and I told him he didn't. He thanked me and left. That was the last time I saw either of them."

  "Sounds as though you handled the situation about as well as it could be handled."

  "God, I hope so; I hope none of this has anything to do with Arrington and me."

  "I hope so, too," Dino said, "but I'm not going to count on it."

  "Come on, Dino, you don't really think she…"

  "I don't know what to think," Dino said.

  Eduardo and the cardinal returned, and Dolce was with them, her face streaked with tears. She came and put her arms around Stone.

  Stone had never seen her cry, and it hurt him. "I'm sorry about all this, Dolce," he said to her.

  "It's not your fault," she said. "You didn't have any control over her."

  "Now, let's not jump to conclusions," he said. "We don't know what happened yet."

  "All right, I'll give her the benefit of the doubt."

  "You'd better get ready to go, Stone," Eduardo said.,

  "Go?"

  "You're going to Los Angeles, of course," Eduardo said. "She asked for you, and she may not have anyone else."

  "Her mother is on the way."

  "Her mother can take care of the child, of course, but this is going to be a very difficult situation, given Vance's fame and position in the film community."

  "Go, Stone," Dolce said. "We can't have this hanging over us; go and do what you can, then come back to me."

  "Come with me," Stone said, wanting her protection from Arrington as much as her company.

  "No, that wouldn't do. You're going to have to deal with Arrington on your own."

  "My friend's jet is not available today," Eduardo said, "but there's a train at nine-thirty for Milano, and a one o'clock flight from there to Los Angeles. If you miss that, the trip will become much more complicated."

  Stone held Dolce away from him and looked into her face. "You're sure about this?"

  "I'm sure," Dolce said. "I hate it, but it's the only thing to be done; I know that."

  He hugged her again, then left and went to his room, where he found that a servant had already packed most of this things. Half an hour later, he stood on the palazzo's jetty with Dino, Eduardo, the cardinal, and Dolce. He shook hands with Eduardo and Bellini. The cardinal gave him a card. "If I can ever be of service to you, please call me. Of course, I'll make myself available for a service when this situation has been sorted out."

  "Thank you, Your Eminence," Stone said. He turned to Dolce and kissed her silently, then motioned Dino into the launch. "Ride with me," he said.

  "Have you heard any more from Rick?" Stone asked as the launch pulled away from the jetty.

  "No, but it's the middle of the night in L.A. Where will you be staying?"

  "At the Bel-Air Hotel. Oh, will you call and book me a room?"

  "I'll let Eduardo handle it; you'll get a better room."

  A few minutes later they docked at the steps to the Venice train station. Eduardo's butler met them there with Stone's train and airplane tickets and took his bags. Dino walked him to the train.

  "I wish you could come with me and help make some sense of this."

  Dino shook his head. "I'm due back in the office first thing Wednesday. Call me when you've got your feet on the ground, and I'll help, if I can."

  The train was beginning to move, and Stone jumped on. He and Dino managed a handshake before the train pulled out of the station.

  Stone found his compartment and sat down. Stress often made him drowsy, and he dozed off almost immediately.

  Chapter 6

  Even a first class transatlantic airline seat seemed oddly spartan after the pleasures of the Boeing Business Jet, but Stone managed to make himself comfortable. A flight attendant came around with papers; none of the English-language papers had the story yet, but he caught Vance's name in the headlines of an Italian journal.

  He managed to sleep some more and had a decent dinner, which, for him, was lunch, then the lights dimmed, and Vance Calder's face appeared on the cabin's movie screen. It was a report from CNN International and mentioned no more than the bare bones of the story, which Stone already knew. He'd have to wait unti LAX for more news.

  He thought about another flight, how if Arrington hadn't missed it, things would have been very different. They had planned a winter sailing holiday on the island of St. Mark's, in the Caribbean, and he had planned, once at sea, to ask her to marry him. She had called him at the airport as the flight was boarding and said she had just gotten out of an editorial meeting at the The New Yorker, for which she sometimes wrote pieces. There was no way for her to make the plane, but she would be on the same flight the following day. The airplane had taken off in the first flurries of what would become a major blizzard in New York, and there was no flight the next day, or the day after that.

  T
hen he had a fax from her, saying the The New Yorker wanted a profile of Vance Calder, who hadn't given a magazine interview in twenty years. It was a huge opportunity for her, and she had begged to be allowed to miss their holiday. He had grudgingly agreed and had put the newly purchased engagement ring back into his suitcase, to await a return to New York.

  Then he had been caught up in an extraordinary situation in St. Mark's, had become involved in a murder trial, and by the time he was ready to return to the city, there was a fax from Arrington saying that, after a whirlwind romance, she had married Vance Calder.

  After that had come news of her pregnancy and her uncertainty about the identity of the father. The paternity test had come back in Vance's favor, and that was that. Now Vance was dead, and Arrington had turned Stone's life upside down once again.

  Stone looked up at the cabin screen again. A film was starting, and it was Vance Calder's latest and last. Stone watched it through, once again amazed at how the actor's presence on screen held an audience, even himself, even now.

  The time change was in Stone's favor, and they reached LAX in the early evening. Stone stepped off the airplane and found Rick Grant waiting for him. The LAPD detective was in his fifties, graying, but trim-looking. They greeted each other warmly.

  "Give me your baggage claim checks," Rick said, and Stone complied. He handed them to another man. "The Bel-Air?" he asked Stone. Yes.

  Rick guided Stone through a doorway, down a flight of stairs, and out onto the tarmac, where an unmarked police car was waiting. Rick drove. "You all right?" he asked.

  "Well, it's three o'clock in the morning where I just came from, but after some sleep I'll be okay. How about you? How's the job?"

  "I made captain; that's about it."

  "How's Barbara?" Stone had introduced Rick to Barbara Tierney, who was now his wife.

  "Extremely well; in fact, she's pregnant."

  "At your age? You dog."

  "How about that? I thought I was all through with child rearing."

  "Bring me up to date on what happened, Rick, and don't leave anything out."

  The Brentwood station caught the case on Satuday evening, about seven p.m. Calder's Filipino butler called it in. There was a patrol car there in three minutes, and the detectives were there two minutes after that. Calder's body was lying in the central hallway of the house, face down. He'd taken one bullet here," he tapped his own head at the right rear, "from about three feet. He was still breathing when the patrol car got there, but dead when the detectives arrived."

  "The gun?"

  "Nine millimeter automatic; Calder owned one, and it hasn't turned up, in spite of a very thorough search."

  "Where was Arrington when it happened?"

  "In the bathtub, apparendy. They were going out to dinner later. The butler heard the shot and sent the maid to find her. She was still in a robe when the detectives arrived. They noted the strong smell of perfume; there was a large bottle of Chanel No. 5 on her dressing table."

  "And that made them suspicious, I guess."

  "Yeah."

  "But how would Arrington know that perfume can remove the residue from the hands of someone who's fired a gun?"

  Rick shrugged. "It's the sort of thing that pops up on the news or in a television movie. Anybody could know it."

  "Did Arrington say anything to the detectives?"

  "She was distraught, of course, but she seemed willing to talk; then she fainted. By this time, an ambulance had arrived, and the EMTs revived her. When she came to, she seemed disoriented-gave her name as Arrington Carter and didn't recognize the maid or her surroundings. The maid called her doctor, and he arrived pretty quickly. He had the EMTs load her up and take her to a toney private hospital, the Judson Clinic, in Beverly Hills. After the crime scene team arrived, they went to the clinic to question Arrington but were told she'd been sedated and would be out for at least twenty-four hours."

  "Anything missing from the house?"

  "Calder's jewelry box, which, the butler said, had half a dozen watches and some diamond jewelry in it, and the gun. None of Arrington's stuff had been taken, according to the maid."

  "So, Calder could have interrupted a burglary and gotten shot with his own gun for his trouble."

  "That's one scenario," Rick said.

  "And I guess another is that Arrington shot Vance during a quarrel, hid the gun and the jewelry box, scrubbed her shooting hand and arm with Chanel No. 5 and jumped into a tub, just in time to be found by the maid."

  "That's about it."

  "Any other scenarios?"

  "Nope, just the two."

  "How's the voting going?"

  Rick shrugged. "I'd say the burglar is losing, at the moment."

  "Are you serious?"

  "I think the detectives would have felt better about her, if she'd kept her head and told them a convincing story. They weren't too keen on the hysterics and fainting."

  "They think she was acting?"

  "They think it's a good possibility. I'd find her a shrink, if I were you, and a lawyer, too. A good one."

  The two men rode along in silence for a few minutes. Shortly, Rick turned off the freeway and onto Sunset Boulevard. A couple of minutes later he turned left onto Stone Canyon, toward the Bel-Air Hotel.

  "Is there anything else you want to ask me, Stone?" Rick said. "Next time we meet, we might not be able to talk to each other so freely."

  "I can't think of anything else right now. Any advice?"

  "Yeah, get Centurion Studios involved; they're equipped to handle something like this, and I understand that Calder was a major stockholder, as well as their biggest star."

  "I'll call Lou Regenstein tomorrow morning," Stone replied.

  Rick turned into the hotel parking lot and stopped at the front entrance. "Good luck with this, Stone," he said. "Don't hesitate to call, but don't be surprised if I clam up or can't help. I'll do what I can."

  "Thanks for all you've done, Rick, and thanks for meeting my flight, too."

  "Your luggage will be here soon."

  Stone shook his hand and got out of the car. He walked over the bridge to the front entrance of the hotel and into the lobby. "My name is Barrington," he said to the young woman at the desk. "I believe I have a reservation."

  "Oh, yes, Mr. Barrington," she replied. "We've been expecting you." She picked up a phone and dialed a number. "Mr. Barrington is here."

  A moment later a young man arrived at the desk. "Good evening, Mr. Barrington, and welcome back. My name is Robert Goodwood; I'm the duty manager. Did you have any luggage?"

  "It's being delivered from the airport," Stone said.

  "Then I'll show you to your suite."

  The young man led the way outdoors and briskly up a walkway, asking about Stone's flight and making chitchat. He turned down another walkway and arrived at a doorway hidden behind dense plantings, unlocked it and showed Stone in.

  Stone was impressed with the size and beauty of the suite, but concerned about the cost.

  As if anticipating him, Goodwood said, "Mr. Bianchi has insisted that your stay here is for his account."

  "Thank you," Stone said.

  "I'll send your luggage along as soon as it arrives. Can I do anything else for you?"

  "Please send me the New York and L.A. papers."

  "Of course." Goodwood gave Stone the key and left.

  Stone left the suite's door open for the bellman, shucked off his coat, loosened his tie, sat down on a sofa, and picked up the phone.

  "Yes, Mr. Barrington?" the operator said.

  "Would you find the number of the Judson Clinic, which is in Beverly Hills, and ring it?" he asked.

  "Of course; I'll ring it now."

  Apparently the hotel knew of the hospital.

  "The Judson Clinic," a woman's voice breathed into the phone.

  "My name is Stone Barrington," he said. "I'm a friend of Mrs. Arrington Calder. Can you connect me with her room, please?"

  "I
'm afraid we have no guest by that name or anything like it," the woman said.

  "In that case, please take my name-Stone Barrington-and tell Mrs. Calder that I'm at the Bel-Air Hotel, when she feels like calling."

  "Good night," the woman said, and hung up.

  The bellman arrived with the luggage and the papers. "Shall I unpack anything, Mr. Barrington?" he asked.

  "You can hang up the suits in the large case," Stone said. The man did as he was asked, Stone tipped him, and he left.

  Stone picked up the papers. Vance had made the lower-right-hand corner of The New York Times front page and the upper-right-hand corner of the Los Angeles Times. The obituary in the LA. paper took up a whole page. There was nothing in the news report he didn't already know.

  Stone ordered an omelet from room service and ate it slowly, trying to stay awake, hoping Arrington would call. At eleven o'clock, he gave up and went to bed.

  Tomorrow was going to be a busy day.

  Chapter 7

  The telephone woke Stone. He checked the bedside clock: just after nine a.m. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and picked up the phone. "Hello?"

  "Is this Stone Barrington?" Yes.

  "This is Dr. James Judson, of the Judson Clinic."

  "Good morning. How is Arrington?"

  "She's been asking for you. I'm sorry the woman who answered the telephone last night didn't know that."

  "When can I see her?"

  "She's still sleeping at the moment, but why don't you come over here around noon? If she isn't awake by then, I'll wake her, and the two of you can talk."

  "What is her condition?"

  "Surprisingly good, but there are complications; we can talk about that when you arrive." He gave Stone the address.

  "I'll see you at noon," Stone said. He hung up, then pressed the button for the concierge and ordered a rental car for eleven-thirty, then he called room service and ordered a large breakfast. While he was waiting for it to arrive, he called Centurion Studios and asked for Lou Regenstein, its chairman.

  "Good morning, executive offices," a woman's voice said.