Jonathan Kellerman_Petra Connor 01

by Billy Straight

  I take the longest shower I’ve ever had—no Mom waiting to get in and spend half the day there getting ready for Moron; no Moron wanting to sit on the toilet for an hour.

  I just keep soaping and washing off, soaping and washing off. Making sure every part of me gets attention: my hair and under my nails, inside my nostrils, deep up my butt. I want to get every bit of crud out of me.

  Then around front, under my balls.

  I’ve got a hard-on.

  That feels good.

  I’m sitting there drying off, loving being clean and safe, thinking about far places, imaginary places, huge mountains—purple majesty, like the song, a silver ocean, surfer dudes, Jet Skis, girls in bikinis dancing the hula, dolphins, Jacques Cousteau, blue tangs, yellow tangs, moray eels, nautiluses.

  Then I hear sound and for a minute I think I’ve really spaced out, created a whole tropical island movie with a soundtrack, then the voices get louder.

  Women’s voices. Then a bang—someone putting something down.

  Light under the door. From the kitchen.

  A scream.

  A real scream.

  CHAPTER

  29

  Ramsey said, “I need a bite, do you mind if we go in the kitchen?”

  Nerves making him hungry? Petra said, “Not at all, Mr. Ramsey.” Good chance to see more of the house.

  She followed him as he switched lights on, illuminating terrible lithos, big furniture. Veering into exactly what Petra expected: six hundred square feet of pseudo-adobe walls and rustic-beamed ceilings, white Euro-cabinets, gray granite counters, brushed-steel appliances, copper rack full of lethal weapons hanging from the beams. On the counters sat an array of food processors, toasters, microwaves. A greenhouse window provided a view of stucco wall. The eastern border of the house. A side door.

  In the center of the kitchen was a long, narrow wooden table, old heart pine, scarred and buffed to a satin finish, the scars shiny dents. Probably a genuine antique, country French. Petra saw it as a monastery piece. Nice. But the eight chairs around it were chrome Breuer types with rawhide leather slings, so discordant she wanted to scream. Whose idea of eclectic, his or Lisa’s?

  Ramsey opened the fridge on the left. Fully stocked. A bachelor who made himself at home. He took out another Diet Sprite and a carton of cottage cheese with chives.

  “Gotta watch the tush,” he said, locating a spoon. “Sure I can’t get you anything? A drink, at least?”

  “No thanks.”

  He sat down at the head of the pine table and she took a side chair.

  “This must look weird,” he said, lowering the spoon to the cheese. “Eating. But I haven’t eaten all day, could feel my blood sugar drop.”

  “Hypoglycemic?”

  “There’s diabetes in my family, so I’m careful.” He began eating cottage cheese, wiping white flecks from his mustache. Not caring what he looked like in front of her. Maybe she’d been wrong about the Don Juan thing. Or maybe he turned it on and off. She watched him take a swallow of soda, two more spoonfuls of cottage cheese, got his attention by taking out her pad.

  “Okay, that night,” he said. “I told you I was in Tahoe, didn’t I? The first time you were here.”

  Petra nodded.

  “Scouting locations for next season,” he went on. “We’ve got a double script with some casino episodes, trying to figure out where we want to do it. We’ll be shooting in a month or so.”

  “Who was with you on the scouting trip?”

  “Greg and our locations supervisor, Scott Merkin. We looked at some properties by the lake, visited a few of the casinos, had dinner at Harrah’s, and flew home.”

  “Commercial flight?”

  He put the spoon down, drank some more. “All these details. So I’m a suspect?”

  No surprise in his voice. The unspoken final word to the sentence: finally.

  “It’s just routine, Mr. Ramsey.”

  He smiled. “Sure it is. I’ve said the exact same thing tons of times to suspects—on the show. ‘Just routine’ means Dack Price is gonna go after the guy.”

  Petra smiled. “In real life, routine means routine, Mr. Ramsey. But if this isn’t a good time to talk—”

  “No, this is fine.” The pale eyes locked in on Petra’s. Ramsey ate more cottage cheese, raised the soda can to his lips, realized it was empty, and fetched another.

  “I guess it makes sense, my being a suspect. Because of the . . . incident. That was the slant the news put on it.”

  Staring at her.

  Rope. She could visualize it uncoiling, like a cobra.

  “This whole thing,” said Ramsey. “The way people are thinking about me after those news broadcasts. No, it wasn’t a commercial flight, we went by private charter, we always do. Westward Charter, we use them all the time. Our usual pilot, too. Ed Marionfeldt. I like him ’cause he was a navy fighter pilot—real Top Gun. We flew out of Burbank, everything’s recorded in Westward’s log. Out around eight A.M., back by eight-thirty P.M. Scott drove home, and Greg brought me back here. He usually drives when it gets late, because my night vision isn’t all that great.”

  “Eye problems?”

  Though his mustache was clean, Ramsey wiped it again. “Early stages of cataracts. My ophthalmologist wants to laser me, but I keep putting it off.”

  Telling her he couldn’t have driven Lisa to the park at night?

  “So you don’t go out much at night?”

  “I do, it’s not that bad, lights just bother me.” He smiled. “Don’t give me a ticket, okay?”

  Petra smiled back. “Promise.”

  He dug the spoon into the cottage cheese again, looked at it, put it down. Petra noticed looseness around his mouth. Mottling behind the ears and several fine lines that had to be tuck remnants. Gray hair sprouted from an ear. In the bright light of the kitchen, every wrinkle and vein was advertised.

  His body starting to fail him. Blood sugar. The eyes.

  The penis.

  Appealing to her sense of sympathy? Hoping for female tenderness sarcastic Lisa hadn’t offered?

  “So Greg drove you home,” she said.

  “We got here around nine-fifteen, nine-thirty, did some paperwork, then I just crashed. Next morning, Greg was up before me, working out by the time I got to the gym—I’ve got a home gym. I did a little treadmill, showered, we had some breakfast here, decided to practice some putting, then head over to the Agoura Oaks Country Club for eighteen holes. Then you showed up.”

  Sorry to spoil your day, Herbert.

  “Okay,” said Petra. “Anything else?”

  “That’s it,” said Ramsey. “Who knew.”

  She closed the pad and they hiked back to the front door.

  “How’re the cars?” she said, passing the glass wall.

  “Haven’t thought about them much.”

  Petra stopped and peered through the black glass. Was the Mercedes parked in its allotted space? Without light, visibility was zero.

  Ramsey flicked a switch. And there it was. A big sedan, gunmetal gray.

  “Toys,” said Ramsey, turning off the light.

  He walked her to the Ford, and when she got behind the wheel, he said, “Give my regards to Greg.”

  Petra’s turn to stare. He gave her a small, sad smile. An old man’s smile.

  “I know you’ll be verifying the alibi,” he said. “Just routine.”

  CHAPTER

  30

  Feeling guilty and useless but making sure to look calm and sharp, Stu tightened his tie and put on his suit jacket. Five hours of phone calls; no cases resembling Lisa Ramsey’s. Or Ilse Eggermann’s.

  He didn’t know what to make of the German girl’s murder; wasn’t getting any help from the Austrian police or Interpol or the airlines. Tomorrow he’d try U.S. customs and passport control. Asking them what? To keep an eye out for Lauch? Good luck. He stared at the Viennese mug shot. A conspicuous-looking guy, but it was beyond needle-in-the-haystack.
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  Maybe Petra was having some luck with Ramsey.

  Maybe not. It was hard to care . . . he cleared his desk and locked it, walked across the squad room. Wilson Fournier was on the phone, but just as Stu passed, the black detective hung up scowling and reached for his own jacket. Fournier’s partner, Cal Baumlitz, was out, recuperating from knee surgery, and Fournier had been working alone for days and showing the strain.

  “New call?” said Stu, forcing himself to be social.

  “Poor excuse for one.” Fournier was average-size and slim, had a shaved head and a bushy mustache that reminded Stu of one of the actors he’d seen on Sesame Street back when he’d worked nights, had mornings to spend with his kids.

  Fournier hitched his holster and collected his gear, and the two walked out together. “Life sucks, Ken. You and Barbie get Lisa Ramsey, celebrities up the ying, and I get an end-of-shift, maybe-prowler/rapist/burglar gig with stupid overtones.”

  “You want Ramsey?”

  Fournier laughed. “Yeah, yeah, I know fame has its price.”

  “What kind of a maybe-prowler/rapist?”

  Fournier shook his head. “The rapist thing is crap—’scuse me, deacon, manure. We’re supposed to be working homicide, for God’s sake, and on this one, no one got hurt, let alone dead, so why’s it my business? Meanwhile, I’ve got four open 187’s and pressure from the boss. Goddamn brain-dead chief and his community policing manure.”

  A few steps later, just to be polite, Stu said, “What exactly happened, Wil?”

  “House on North Gardner, two lesbians come home from a week in Big Sur, find someone’s been in their kitchen, scarfed food, used the shower. They walk in on it—the shower’s still going—freak, run screaming out the front door, and the perp rabbits out the back.”

  “What was burgled?”

  “Food. Part of a pineapple, bologna, some soda. Big bad burglary, huh?”

  “So where’s the rape?”

  “Exactly.” Fournier gave a disgusted look. “Lesbians. A big pile of mail at the front door. Gone an entire week, do they think of putting a stop on it? Or leaving some lights on? Or getting an alarm or a Rottweiler or a poison snake or an AK-47? Man, Ken, what kind of folks still think they can count on us to do a damn thing about crime?”

  CHAPTER

  31

  Routine. Am I a suspect?

  Was he playing with her?

  She called Stu at the station. He’d checked out an hour ago, and when she tried his house, she got no answer. Out with Kathy and the kids? Must be nice to have a life.

  Back in L.A., she bought some salads at a mom-and-pop grocery on Fairfax, ate them at home while watching the news—no Ramsey info. She tried Stu again. Still no answer.

  Time to simulate a life for herself.

  Changing into acrylic-spattered sweats, she put on Mozart and squeezed paint onto her palette. Hunched on a stool, she worked till midnight. First the landscape, which was responding a bit, she felt in the groove, that hypnotic time contraction. Then another canvas, larger, blank and inviting. She laid on two coats of white primer, followed by a luxuriant layer of Mars black, and, when that dried, began a series of hastily brushed-in gray ovals that became faces.

  No composition, just faces, scores of them, some overlapping, like fruit dangling from an invisible tree. Some with mouths parted innocently, all with pupilless black eyes that could have been empty sockets, ghostly discs, each one portraying a variant of confusion.

  Each face younger than the last, a reverse aging, until she was painting nothing but children.

  Perplexed children, growing on an invisible child tree . . . her hand cramped and she dropped the brush. Rather than get psychological about that, she laughed out loud, switched off the music, snatched the canvas off the easel, and placed it on the floor, face to the wall. Stripping naked and tossing her clothes on the floor, she took a long shower and got into bed. The moment the lights were off, she was playing back the interview with Ramsey.

  Almost positive the guy was manipulating.

  Not knowing what to do about it.

  She woke up Wednesday morning still thinking about it. The way he’d flicked on the garage light, showing her the Mercedes, as if daring her to probe further. All those sympathy ploys—blood sugar, cataracts. Not much night driving.

  Poor old guy, falling apart. But there was one health problem he’d never bring up.

  One that could motivate some serious rage.

  And still no lawyer, at least not out in the open. Some kind of double bluff? Ask the wrong question and in come the mouthpieces?

  Or was he just feeling confident, because he had the perfect alibi?

  Don’t get sucked into it, no frontal assault. Go for the flanks. The underlings. Find Estrella Flores, have a chat with the charter pilot, though that wouldn’t prove anything—there’d been plenty of time to get home, leave, pick up Lisa, kill her. Last but not least, Greg Balch, faithful lackey and likely perjurer. Petra was certain Ramsey had phoned the business manager the minute she drove off, but sometimes underlings harbored deep resentment—Petra remembered the way Ramsey had turned on Balch during the notification call. Balch standing there and taking it. Used to being a whipping boy? Put a little pressure on, ignite some long-buried anger, and sometimes the little people turned.

  She reached her desk at 8 A.M., found a note from Stu saying he’d be in late, probably the afternoon.

  No reason given.

  She felt her face go hot; crumpled the note and tossed it.

  The flight manager at Westward Charter confirmed Ramsey and Balch’s Tahoe trip and the 8:30 P.M. Burbank arrival. Ed Marionfeldt, the pilot, happened to be in and she spoke to him. Pleasant, mellow, he’d done tons of trips with The Adjustor, no problems, nothing different this time. Petra didn’t want to ask too many questions for fear of making Ramsey the prime suspect. Even though he was. She could imagine some defense attorney using Marionfeldt’s testimony to illustrate Ramsey’s normal mood that day. If it ever got to a trial—dream on.

  A phone call to Social Security verified that Estrella Flores was indeed legal, her only registered address Ramsey’s Calabasas house.

  “So any checks would go there?” she asked a put-upon SSA worker.

  “She hasn’t filed for benefits, so there are no checks going out.”

  “If you get a change of address, would you please let me know, Mr. . . .”

  “Vicks. If it comes to my attention I’ll try, but we don’t work with individual petitions unless there’s a specific problem—”

  “I’ve got a specific problem, Mr. Vicks.”

  “I’m sure you do—all right, let me tag this, but I have to tell you things get lost, so you’re best off checking in with us from time to time.”

  She called Player’s Management. No one answered; no machine. Maybe Balch was on his way up the coast to Montecito. Taking some downtime to obliterate evidence at the boss’s request.

  Next came the Merrill Lynch broker. Morad Ghadoomian had a pleasant, unaccented voice, sounded prepared for the call.

  “Poor Ms. Boehlinger. I suppose you want to know if she had any financial entanglements. Unfortunately, she didn’t.”

  “Unfortunately?”

  “No entanglements,” he said, “because there was nothing to tangle.”

  “No money in the account?”

  “Nothing substantial.”

  “Could you be a little more specific, sir?”

  “I wish I could—suffice it to say I was led to expect things that never materialized.”

  “She told you she’d be investing large sums of money but didn’t?”

  “Well . . . I’m really not sure what the rules are here in terms of disclosure. Neither is my boss—we’ve never dealt with a murder before. We do get deceased clients all the time, estate lawyers, IRS reporting, but this . . . suffice it to say Ms. Boehlinger only came by my office once, and that was to fill out forms and seed the account.”

 
“How much seed did she sow?” said Petra.

  “Well . . . I don’t want to step out of line here . . . suffice it to say it was minimal.”

  Petra waited.

  “A thousand dollars,” said Ghadoomian. “Just to get things going.”

  “In stock?”

  The broker chuckled. “Ms. Boehlinger’s plans were to build up a sizable securities account. Her timing couldn’t have been better—I’m sure you know how well the market’s been doing. But she never followed through with instructions, and the thousand remained in a money market fund, earning four percent.”

  “How much did she say she was going to invest?”

  “She never said, she just implied. My impression was that it would be substantial.”

  “Six figures?”

  “She talked about achieving financial independence.”

  “Who referred her to you?”

  “Hmm . . . I believe she just called on her own. Yes, I’m sure of it. A reverse cold call.” He chuckled again.

  “But she never followed through.”

  “Never. I did try to reach her. Suffice it to say, I was disap-pointed.”

  Financial independence—Lisa expecting a windfall? Or just deciding to get serious as she approached thirty by banking Ramsey’s monthly support check and living off her editor’s salary? A surplus of eighty grand a year could add up.

  A reduction in the eighty would have upset Lisa’s investment plans.

  Had Ramsey balked after Lisa got a job, threatened to take her back to court, and was that why she hadn’t followed through?

  Or was it something simple—she’d chosen another broker?

  Not likely. Why would she have left the thousand sitting there with Ghadoomian?

  Was money another issue between the Ramseys?

  Money and thwarted passion—no better setup for murder.

  She spent an hour on the phone talking to civil servants at the Hall of Records, finally located the original Ramsey divorce papers. The final decree had been granted a little over five months ago. No obvious complications, no petitions to alter support, so if Ramsey had balked, he hadn’t made it official.