“No, no, no,” I quickly replied. “The box was still under my desk. I had such a difficult time getting home last night, I wasn’t going to leave that box behind.”
Wes and Holly just stared at me.
“You mean it’s here?” Wes asked.
“Yes!” Holly yelled, suddenly remembering. “I brought it into Mad’s room when I took in her suitcase.”
“I’ve been weeding through the documents for the past few hours, reading every paper, checking out every receipt. But for the life of me, I couldn’t find anything there that is truly shocking or juicy. Just a lot of private junk.”
“Wait now,” Wes said, his posture perfect, as always. “That would make Grasso even more clever, wouldn’t it? What if he did break in, but he was careful to just pick out the one folder or photo that was the most sensitive and then left the rest? It would be much less suspicious. See? You would notice if the box was missing. Of course you would mention it to the police. But how would you ever notice if one slip of trash was gone?”
“To be honest, Wes, it didn’t look like anyone had been in our office. And the box was exactly where I left it.” I bit my lip, trying to remember.
“Maybe we should all go through the papers, Maddie,” Holly suggested, her voice still subdued. Holly had taken the news about Sara Jackson terribly hard. Naturally. Like me, she felt responsible for Sara ending up at my house. After all, if not for Holly and me, that young woman would not have been at that very wrong place at that very wrong time.
“I think we need to turn it over to the police,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind having a copy of everything in case Grasso claims I stole anything. But otherwise—”
“Why don’t I run over to Kinko’s?” Holly offered, jumping up from her mattress on the floor. “There’s one near the Grove.
“I’ll just copy every damn thing in the box and we can go over them more thoroughly, later.”
“Well…” It didn’t sound like a bad idea to me at all. “And I guess I could call Honnett and tell him about our theory.”
Wesley gave me a look, like he had heard this sort of thing from me before, and more important, he remembered, even if I didn’t, the “high” regard Honnett held for my impressions of his cases. It was true. In the past, Honnett and I had had our share of encounters over his work. He was usually kind, but pretty unimpressed with my little notions of crime and punishment in the City of Angels.
“I’ll get him to listen,” I said, sounding defensive even to my own ears. “And this isn’t even his case. I would just feel a little safer if a cop was hearing this and taking over the evidence.”
“Fine,” Wesley said. “But you might get further if you called the detective you told us about. The one who is in charge.”
Holly returned from the bathroom, changed back into her black pants and white camisole, the outfit she’d been wearing the previous night. It reminded me of Sara Jackson and I suddenly felt queasy.
Luckily, Holly hadn’t seen what I had seen. I went and retrieved the carton of papers from the guest bedroom and Holly left, taking the keys to Wesley’s new Jaguar.
“What’s wrong?” Wes asked.
“Nothing. Just…Wesley, the last girl wearing that exact outfit who borrowed a car, she ended up…” I shook away the memory. He came over and joined me on the love seat.
Wes was nothing short of six-foot-three, and he was thin and sinewy, with not an ounce of extra fat as far as I could tell. Still, when he held me in his arms, I found a spot on his shoulder that wasn’t entirely bony. And I let a tear dampen the collar of his snowy pajama top.
“We look like twins,” he said, changing the subject.
“Where on earth did you get so many identical pairs of pajamas?” I asked, my voice not sounding entirely natural.
“Oh, Lord! My mother sends me a new pair each Christmas,” he said. “And they’re all still practically brand-new. I never wear them.”
“Do you sleep in the—”
“Maddie! No. I wear a pair of knit boxers or something.”
I giggled, letting another tear escape. “I can’t believe we are sitting here talking about your underwear.”
Wes stood up and said, “All the better to get those other scary images out of your head, my dear.”
“Why don’t you just tell your mom not to send them anymore?”
“It would break her heart. She somehow got this notion that I love them.”
“Somehow,” I chided. I knew Wes was a big softie and I could imagine he thanked his mother profusely that first Christmas. This was typical Wesley.
There was a knock at the door.
“Holly? Back so soon?” I walked over and opened the door.
But it wasn’t Holly at all. It was a tiny blonde with a tight face-lift. Caroline Rochette, Albert Grasso’s lady friend, stood in the glare of the sun, smiling. “May I come in?” she asked.
I looked back at Wes, who was just finishing folding up the deflated inflatable mattress.
“Sure,” I said, so surprised I automatically went into my default “gracious” mode when I had every right to be flat-out pissed off at this absurd woman.
“Thank God,” said Caroline. “I just simply have to talk to you. I’m in terrible trouble.”
“Hello, Goodbye, Forget It”
Caroline Rochette suggested we take a walk around the grounds of Wesley’s fixer estate so we could have a little privacy for girl talk. I was stunned she had found me there. Who could have told her where I’d be?
But then, I was dying to question her about Albert Grasso. To see if my theories might be substantiated. How could it hurt to walk around Wesley’s backyard, in broad daylight, as long as he kept an eye out the bay window of his guest cottage? I quickly changed into my old faded jeans and a black T-shirt from my little suitcase and met her in the garden.
It didn’t seem an enormous risk, after all. We were not exactly in some abandoned alley, and we were hardly alone. Noisily performing demolition work on the main house were two Hispanic men I’d gotten to know on some of Wes’s other projects. They were now pulling rotting shingles off the roof.
“Hi, Cesar!” I waved.
Caroline shaded her eyes with one hand and looked up. I think she got the point. I had men all over this property who were keeping their eyes open. Not that I was frightened of her. Aside from a nasty tendency to wear false eyelashes in the daytime, Caroline Rochette didn’t scare me. Much. But naturally, I was a little jumpy with all the horrible things that had happened.
“I’m so sorry for all the…fuss last night,” Caroline said, jumping right into the end of the conversational pool in which I most wanted to paddle around with her.
“Fuss?” I almost spit the word out. “You and Mr. Grasso behaved horribly.” I looked her right in the eye. She was balanced upon four-inch heels, and still I had to look down a little. “You both made terrible accusations. None of it was true. And all I had wanted to do was to be helpful.”
“It was an odd…thing,” Caroline said, with a friendly chirp to her voice. She had a distinctive speech pattern, where she picked and chose odd words and gave each a separate inflection. Sort of like someone who is not terribly talented at conversation. Or lying.
“Odd. Yes. What sort of trouble have you come here to discuss?”
“It’s as you…guessed. About the papers.”
We had stopped walking in front of a stone garden bench at the far end of the yard, well away from the large formal pool. Beyond the far fence stretched an incredibly green fairway and one of the holes of the Wilshire Country Club golf course. The day had been warm and the shade of a jacaranda tree, just bursting with pale blue flowers, gave us a bit of a break.
I waited for the story and she went on.
“About Albert’s…files.” She batted ultrablack eyelashes against sharp little cheekbones. “Well…I know who took them.”
“It wasn’t me!” I said, staring her down.
“No, no. I know t
hat. It was actually me.”
“You?”
“Oh, damn.” In an outburst of fluttering lashes Caroline sat down hard on the bench.
Now this was pretty interesting stuff.
“Look,” she said, “you have to give me all of Al’s papers. Please.” She searched her tiny designer bag for a cigarette. Then a lighter.
“Well, excuse me for pointing this out, Caroline, but those papers don’t belong to you.”
“But…that’s…just…I mean, you can’t…” Eyelashes went ballistic. Cigarette waved in one hand, remaining unlit.
I stood there, waiting for her mouth to coordinate with the quick-excuse centers of her brain, but she was clearly not up to the fast retort, so I swooped in with a question of my own. “Why on earth did you take Mr. Grasso’s personal papers, Caroline?”
Perhaps the shock of my flat-out accusation got her going. In any event, she began speaking rapidly. “It was nothing like you must think. It was simply…innocent. I was planning a surprise for Albert’s birthday.” As she explained, she lit her cigarette and took a sharp drag. “He is a hard man to shop for. Someone gave me this terrific idea. I was going to get him a new…briefcase to replace the horrible old one he’s been lugging around for years. He likes a certain kind of leather case and I didn’t want to get it…wrong. I was told I could simply bring in the old one and let the luggage store order one just like it.”
“You wanted to buy him a briefcase,” I repeated. I stood there on the flagstone path, looking down on her. She was dressed in a tiny St. John knit suit. Pink, white, and baby blue. Size 0.
“So yesterday morning, Saturday, I borrowed the briefcase and walked on down to my car, which I had left parked…on Whitley. Your street.”
Parking could be very problematic in my neighborhood. She’d had to park down the hill.
She took another quick puff on her cigarette, leaving a cotton-candy-colored lipstick print around the filter end, and went on. “I got to the luggage store and thought I would…die. I wanted to die. I couldn’t find Al’s briefcase. I searched through my Mercedes and it just…wasn’t…there.”
“Imagine that,” I said.
“I drove back. I swore at myself. Really, over and over. I retraced my route. I finally got back to Whitley Avenue. You can’t imagine how I was…cursing. Yes, cursing. And then I got to Whitley, and half a block from where I had parked my car earlier I saw Albert’s briefcase.” She tossed her cigarette to the stone walk and crushed it with a jab of her pointy-toed shoe. “It was lying against the curb, almost under a parked car, cracked open. And then I remembered. I had rested the briefcase…on the top of the car. I placed it there while I was opening my car door. I must have left the damn thing there, right on the roof, and driven off. And then…it must have fallen off into the gutter and cracked open. I can only imagine that the papers inside were scattered about. That must have been near your house.”
“You mean you took Mr. Grasso’s briefcase without his knowledge and then accidentally drove off, causing the case to crash open in the street?”
“Basically…” she said, looking terribly upset. “Yes.”
“Then—forgive me for speaking bluntly, Caroline, but what was all the bullshit last night at the Woodburn gala about calling the police and accusing me of theft?”
“Oh, I would never have called the police,” she said, putting her gold lighter up to the tip of a second slender cigarette. She inhaled deeply and continued: “You’re a woman, Madeline. You know men! I couldn’t tell Albert what had happened to his papers. Believe me, I was reeling from shock to discover they had been…found, after all.” She took another puff of nicotine. “Albert told me all about the little talk the two of you had, when he got back to our table. He was much more upset about all the missing papers than I had even imagined. So you see, I just couldn’t go into the whole ghastly story right then. Of course I plan to…tell him. Someday. When the timing is right. But he was really amazingly angry.” She exhaled a tight, white stream of smoke.
I was willing to put aside how easily Ms. Rochette had served me to the lions, the night before, to save her own surgically enhanced neck, if I could get her to reveal a little information about the contents of that briefcase. “That’s the part of your story that concerns me the most. Why do you think Mr. Grasso was so very unhinged? Did he say anything to you about what exactly he thought might be missing among those papers?”
“No, dear. Not a word. But he was so angry and worried he insisted we leave the gala almost at once.”
I hadn’t noticed them leaving. “Did you go directly back to Mr. Grasso’s house on Iris Circle?”
“I had left my…car parked there, yes. I wanted to make him a drink, put on some music. Albert loves to listen to his stars, as he calls them. He has coached the world’s best voices, you know. He has CDs by everyone you can imagine and he deserves much more credit than he ever gets.”
“I’m sure. But he didn’t relax last night?”
“I’ve seen him upset before, but never like this. He refused to let me console him. Can you imagine? I was willing to do anything to make him feel better, but no.”
“He told you to leave?”
Caroline’s short blond bob was sprayed so stiffly that not a hair moved as she nodded her head. “Al said he planned to go over his office with a fine-tooth comb. He needed to figure out exactly what was missing. He said if the computer had been taken, he could live with that. He had a system to back up his hard drive or something and he kept the backedup discs off-site. But he said if the briefcase was gone he was as good as dead.”
That got my attention. I was certain I was on the right track. Albert Grasso must have suspected some very important, very incriminating document was missing. That was the only explanation for his extraordinary overreaction.
Caroline noticed my interest. “See what I mean? I just couldn’t tell my sweetie I had done such a dizzy thing. Anyway, I’m sure he’ll calm down when he gets his papers back. But in the meantime, last night at the ball I was in a pinch. I had to play along with him, you know? I had to pretend you were the…scoundrel. But I just knew you would understand it all when I told you what happened. We chicks have to hang on to our men, don’t we?”
“I don’t have a man,” I admitted, meeting her eye. “And I don’t think I would value one who required lying to.”
Caroline laughed a pretty laugh and tossed her spent cigarette down on the flagstones next to its mate, crushing it with the pointed toe of her pink pump. “That is simply because you are so young and so pretty. You think you will remain this way forever. I know. I thought that, too. Just wait.” She winked at me with one extra-thick artificial lash. “But I want to make up for last night. I think you do deserve a reward, dear. And I’ve brought…” She looked in the tiny pink bag she had hanging from her shoulder and brought out a stack of green. “Here. A thousand-dollar reward. For the return of Albert’s papers and files. That should make up for the unpleasantness last night, right?” Caroline held up the crisply folded bills, which I ignored.
“I would like some information.”
“Like what?” She looked at me shrewdly, her sweet-thing mask slipping.
“Does your friend Albert have a gun?”
“A what?”
I waited.
“Where is this coming from?” she asked. “Are you afraid he might come after you? Oh, no, no. That’s absurd.”
“He has a gun, then.”
“There is one in the house, if that’s what you mean. For protection. Everyone has a gun, don’t they?”
“I don’t.”
Caroline Rochette squinted at me as I stood there with the sun behind me. “You don’t? You should. This is Los Angeles, for heaven’s sake. You never know when you’re safe or when you’re in danger here.”
“I don’t think I’m a gun sort of person,” I replied.
“No? Well, you must be the only one in this town who isn’t. How do you feel safe at ni
ght? No man. No gun. Do you have a dog?”
I gave my head a defiant shake.
“Foolish things happen to foolish girls,” she said.
Was she threatening me? And why had I just admitted to this infuriating woman that I didn’t have a prayer of a chance to defend myself? I just had to show off how self-reliant I was. Damn. I made a mental note to get a boyfriend, a dog, and a gun. Soon. I covered up my annoyance at myself by asking another question: “Do you know if Mr. Grasso went out again last night, after you left him?”
“Well, how would I know that? I didn’t speak to him later, if that’s what you’re asking. What’s this all about?”
“Perhaps I’m trying to judge how sincere you are. You admit to lying last night, so why should I trust you now?”
“Okay. But no more questions about Albert.”
“I’m curious to know how you found me here,” I said.
“Oh, that was just so easy. I went to your home on Whitley first. But there were policemen on the street and they wouldn’t let me drive up. I figured you called the cops about Albert’s missing paperwork. Naturally, I didn’t want to have to explain anything to any nosy cops. But I saw Nelson Piffer, one of your neighbors. He was out walking his weimaraner.”
“You know Nelson?” He was a dear man who lived two doors down from me. Nelson was a retired studio art director and I had heard he resented William Wegman deeply for getting the idea of photographing weimaraners posed in human clothes first.
“Oh, yes. Nelson walks Teuksbury up on Iris Circle. Albert and I like to take walks around the neighborhood, too, and we always comment on the fact that Nelson has taken to dressing up the dog in short-sleeve sweatshirts. He loves that dog. And he’s worried she gets cold now that she’s getting older.”
I hadn’t known that. I made a mental note to get Teuksbury a sweater next Christmas. “Okay, so you know Nelson Piffer.”
“Yes. And Nelson didn’t know what was going on at your house, but he said if you weren’t home I should try calling your partner. Well, I made a few calls among the Woodburn women and got Wesley’s name and it was very familiar. I’m a realtor, you know.”
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