The Trials of Nikki Hill

by Christopher Darden; Dick Lochte

  She looked at him.

  “I’m offering you a seat at the table,” he said.

  She tried not to show her surprise. “You don’t have that authority.”

  “Let me amend my statement. I will recommend to Joe that you be my second chair. Considering the confidence he has in you, I don’t believe he’ll say no. Especially if your reports indicate we’re on the same wavelength.”

  He was leaning forward, the tips of his fingers touching his desk as a form of delicate balance. She could feel his eagerness. He needed her support. She needed the career boost a high-profile trial would provide. Once again she would be getting into bed with the weasel, metaphorically speaking of course, thank the Lord. This time would be a little different. This time it was she who had the D.A.’s ear. This time she knew a good deal more about how the game was played.

  “We’ll give it a try,” she said.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Goodman moved along the antique brick walkway from the two-story house to the street. He double-timed it, ignoring the well-tended shrubbery and little islands of exotic, multihued plants. He could feel the eyes of Nita Morgan, the angry lady of the house, boring holes in his back. She’d called him a series of imaginatively obscene names and threatened to sue him, the LAPD, and every other law enforcement entity in Los Angeles, including the highway patrol and the FBI.

  Adding to her intimidation quotient was Goodman’s memory of her as a terrifying vampire in a popular television series of the sixties. (Madeleine Gray’s folder had IDed her as “Batgal.”) He kept flashing on her in pale white makeup, hair a mass of black and white strands, inch-long fingernails the same color as the blood coating her vampire fangs.

  He shivered, jerked the passenger door open, and lowered his weary bones into the sedan. His neck felt red and hot.

  Batgal had been his third visit to a Madeleine Gray “client.”

  The first two had been just as unpleasant and unproductive.

  Morales hummed a little tune, smirking.

  “Okay, damn it,” Goodman said. “Walden was right and you were right. This is not only a waste of time, it is a fucking embarrassing waste of time.”

  “Maddie’s killer ain’t in those files,” Morales said, starting the car.

  Goodman had no evidence to the contrary. Nor did he have the heart to rattle the cages of the rest of the people on the list. “Okay,” he said. “Screw this. Let’s go get the gold bracelet and visit some jewelers.”

  It was a good suggestion, but they weren’t able to act on it. When they opened the box marked “Gray, Madeleine” in the evidence room, and spread out the assortment of items on the table, the gold bracelet was missing.

  Goodman checked the evidence logs. There it was, neatly typed. “1 bracelet, gold, w. lion charm & inscription, ‘M. We’ll always have Paris. Love, J.’ ” The entry included the date and time the object was logged in. It had not been logged out.

  The officer in charge of the evidence room was quick to note that only authorized personnel had access to the boxes. “If something’s missing, whoever took it was here on official business,” he told them defensively, indicating the visitor sign-in sheets.

  Goodman flipped through the top few pages. So many crimes had been committed since the Gray murder that an army of people had trooped through the room. “Looks like a roster of the LAPD and the D.A.’s office,” he said glumly. “Useless.”

  “Hard to believe somebody in law enforcement must not be as honest as you and me, partner.”

  “At least they left us the ring,” Goodman said. He picked the bauble from the box and examined it. “I wonder why?”

  “So we got a ring,” Morales said. “Big deal.”

  “Could be. Remember what Arthur Lydon said about Maddie not wearing jewelry. The bracelet is jewelry. This is jewelry. Maybe the killer gave her this and the bracelet.”

  Morales shrugged. “Before we go running around to jewelry stores, let’s show this to little Arthur first, huh? Make sure he don’t recognize it.”

  “I’ve got his number written down somewhere.”

  Morales groaned. “You really think this ring’s gonna open any doors for us?”

  “At least it’ll keep us in motion,” Goodman said as they walked toward the front of the building. “Always better to keep moving.”

  “We that desperate, huh?”

  “We’re at a dead end,” Goodman said. “We got no suspects. We got Corben and the D.A. shouting in our ear. We seem to have lost, misplaced, or been robbed of our most important piece of evidence. So, yeah, I’d say ‘desperate’ covered our situation.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  According to Arthur Lydon’s answering machine, he was spending the day working at the house in Laurel Canyon. Goodman and Morales arrived there to find a bored uniformed policeman sitting in the front room listening to a Walkman. He was young and eager and nearly ripped off his ear removing the headset when he saw them.

  He recovered quickly enough to explain he’d opened up for Lydon an hour and a half earlier. Though Goodman and Morales were well acquainted with the layout of the house, the young policeman felt he had to act as their guide to Lydon’s office.

  To his dismay, the little man wasn’t there.

  They found him in the upstairs office, seated at Madeleine Gray’s desk, pecking at the keyboard of her computer. He gave them a nervous smile when they entered.

  Goodman scanned the room, pausing at the dented filing cabinet from which the files had been removed. He didn’t know what he was looking for. The area had been gone over thoroughly. “You’re not supposed to be up here, Mr. Lydon,” he said.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” Lydon closed down the computer and stood. He was wearing a butter-yellow shirt and tight orange jeans. With his spiky hair and big eyes, he reminded Goodman of the little cartoon bird who keeps seeing a puddy-tat.

  “I explained to you, Mr. Lydon,” the young policeman said, “that you were supposed to limit your activity to your office area.”

  “I misunderstood,” he said, walking past them, heading for the door.

  “What sort of work were you doing up here, Mr. Lydon?” Goodman asked.

  “Maddie’s uncle, Clarence Justus, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, asked me to put her affairs together for him. He’s requested that her remains be shipped to Ann Arbor for burial there. The people at syndication are furious. They’d hoped for a big Hollywood thing at Forest Lawn. They’re repackaging her old shows for cable.”

  Goodman had interviewed several of the people at the syndication company. While he considered none of them serious suspects, they seemed to be very callous invidiuals who, like her technical crews, felt it unnecessary to pretend to have liked Maddie Gray. “They can always bury her in effigy,” he said.

  “I doubt that Mr. Justus would allow it,” Lydon replied, not realizing the detective was being facetious. “He’s taking a very proprietary stand concerning Maddie and her work.”

  Justus was, Goodman knew, the dead woman’s only known relative. He had been phoning Lieutenant Corben daily, demanding progress reports. He’d made such a pest of himself that Corben had the Ann Arbor PD check the guy out to make sure he hadn’t been in the Southern California area on the night of the murder.

  “That’s why you were up here in the forbidden room, pounding on her computer? Putting things in order for the uncle?”

  “Why else?” Lydon turned and made his way down the stairs, followed by his police guard. Goodman watched him go, feeling almost as frustrated as the puddy-tat.

  He went to the computer, turned it on. It whined, hummed, and clicked. Little numbers began spinning on the left-hand corner of the monitor. Eventually, a full color photo of Maddie Gray appeared on screen. A recorded voice, presumably Maddie’s, said, “Get to work, bitch, the rest of the world is gaining on you.”

  “It passed me by a long time ago,” Goodman mumbled to himself.

  “Huh?” Morales asked.

 
“Nothing.”

  “Let’s show Mr. Sweetie the ring an’ vamoose,” Morales suggested.

  Goodman, who knew less about computers than he did about women, tapped a few keys. Maddie Gray’s picture was replaced by a list of numbers from one to twenty. He typed the number nine and the enter key.

  A message appeared on the screen: “The drive or network connection that the shortcut ‘9’ refers to is unavailable. Make sure that the disk referred to is properly inserted or that the network server is available and try again.”

  The message might as well have been written in Farsi.

  Goodman turned off the machine and led Morales back down the stairs.

  Lydon was at his own desk. The young policeman was on a couch against the wall, evidently determined not to let him out of his sight again.

  The little man studied the ring from several angles, then announced, “It’s not at all tacky, like that bracelet you showed me. Rather nice, actually. Very pricey, I’d say.”

  “Ever see it before?” Morales asked.

  “No. Should I have?”

  “It wasn’t Ms. Gray’s?” Goodman asked.

  “I told you, Maddie didn’t wear jewelry. Certainly not on her hands. She had beautiful hands. Big, but beautiful.”

  Goodman took back the ring and thanked Lydon for his help. He asked the policeman to walk them out.

  At the door he told the young cop, “Don’t let him leave here with anything he didn’t come in with.”

  “He brought a briefcase. Want me to search it?”

  “That’s probably a good idea.”

  “Want me to search him?”

  Morales grinned. “Lydon might dig it.”

  “And he might not. I’d just give him a visual,” Goodman told the young cop. “Be on the lookout particularly for a computer disk.”

  “Will do, detective.”

  In the car, Morales said, “We’re not that far from Big Boss Burger. One Big Boss with the hot sauce comin’ up.”

  He started the engine and was rolling down the canyon road when Goodman shouted, “Stop!”

  “What’s up?”

  Goodman pointed at the home about a hundred yards from the Gray house. It was a ramshackle wooden cottage with a shake roof, wedged in among the rock outcroppings. A dusty Jeep Cherokee was in the drive and a man in his late twenties or early thirties was extricating a large wooden carving of what appeared to be the Madonna from the rear of the vehicle. “The Palmers are back,” Goodman said. Stephen and Caitlin Palmer were the only neighbors of Madeleine Gray’s who had not been interviewed. Their place had been shuttered since the murder.

  The two detectives were waiting for Stephen Palmer when he returned to the Cherokee for more wooden statuary. He looked younger the closer you got, Goodman decided. Definitely still in his twenties, with curly black hair and a pleasantly bland face. He was wearing khaki pants and shirt and pale yellow desert boots. They flashed their badges. He didn’t seem too surprised to find two policemen in his driveway.

  “I guess you’re here about Maddie?” he said.

  “That’s right,” Goodman said. “Is Mrs. Palmer with you?”

  “Inside, unpacking. We just got back from TJ.”

  The Palmers, it seemed, traveled to Tijuana every so often to stock a shop on Melrose where they sold Mexican artifacts. “Not the kind of junk you can get on Olvera,” Palmer was quick to point out. “High-end merchandise.”

  He led them inside a small but high-ceilinged house filled with rough-hewn furniture, statues of saints, candles, elaborate horned and fanged masks, and one whole wall devoted to Day of the Dead gewgaws. To Goodman’s amusement, Morales seemed very uncomfortable in the presence of the artifacts, eyeing the plaster skeletons and devil masks suspiciously, as if he expected them to claim his soul at any minute.

  Caitlin Palmer was a willowy brunette wearing a white cotton blouse that had been wilted a bit by the drive, designer blue denims tight enough to have been painted on, and thick, cork-soled clogs held to her feet by rainbow-colored straps. Glasses with extra-large round lenses perched near the end of her handsome aquiline nose. She was at least ten years older than her husband, maybe more.

  Her gray eyes focused on Goodman over her glasses as she said, “It’s a horrible thing. We just heard about it yesterday. We’d been in a little village named Tuscana. About forty miles out of Tijuana. Heard of it?”

  Goodman looked at Morales, who shrugged.

  “They have this marvelous craftsman—”

  “Darling, these guys aren’t here to talk about arts and crafts,” her husband said.

  Her expressive eyes flashed, then froze. “No, of course not. You’re here about Maddie.”

  “Did either of you know her very well?”

  “As neighbors know one another, I suppose,” Caitlin Palmer said. “To say hello. We’ve never been invited inside her house. Have we, dear?”

  Her husband gave a vague shrug.

  Goodman was trying to place her accent, the crisp articulation, the almost musical speech pattern. Not quite British or Irish, but somewhere in between. Probably the never-never land of Affectation. “Ever meet any of her friends?” he asked.

  “I can’t imagine we have. Except for her little fairy, of course.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “She means her assistant. Art Lydon. He’s been by the shop.”

  “I’m sorry, lover,” Caitlin Palmer said to her husband. “No offense meant.”

  “None taken, precious,” Stephen Palmer replied through clenched teeth.

  Another Hollywood Couple of the Year, Goodman thought. He asked, “What time did you leave for Tijuana?”

  Caitlin frowned. “About five P.M.? Wasn’t it about five?”

  Her husband nodded in agreement.

  “Either of you hear or see anything odd before you left?”

  “I was too busy getting ready. Stephen, you were out front.”

  Stephen shrugged. “Nothing...out of the ordinary.”

  “Thank you both for your cooperation,” the detective said.

  “Come back anytime,” Caitlin Palmer said. “You, too,” she said to Morales.

  Stephen walked them back to their car. Before getting in, Goodman asked him, “What did you mean by ‘nothing out of the ordinary’? What was ‘ordinary’?”

  “Oh, just... Maddie had a temper and she liked to shout.”

  “So you heard her shouting the evening of the murder?”

  “Art told me it was her favorite way of talking.”

  Morales slid across the car’s front seat, the better to hear Palmer.

  “Was she shouting at Art?” Goodman asked.

  “Not Sunday. I don’t know who it was. Somebody in a very nice beige Jag convertible. Not the true classic, the, what was it, the XK 140. God, that was a stunningly beautiful car. The smooth lines. The old hood ornament. Not that tacky medallion.”

  “But it wasn’t an XK you saw,” Goodman said to put him back on track.

  “It was more sixties. An XKE, maybe. Still pretty handsome.”

  “You saw the car but not the driver?” Morales asked.

  “The ragtop was up when it passed, traveling very fast.”

  “Did you hear what Ms. Gray was shouting?” Goodman asked.

  “Just ‘fuck you’ over and over again.”

  “No name?”

  Palmer thought about it. “Not as I recall.”

  “And she sounded how? Playful? Mildly angry? Furious?”

  “Like she had a real burr up her ass. She’d have to have been furious to wish the other person dead.”

  “That’s what she did?” Goodman asked.

  Palmer frowned. “I’m sorry. Yeah. In point of fact, she was shouting ‘Fuck you. Die. Fuck you.’ But, like I said, she shouted a lot. And whoever it was left while she was still alive and vocal.”

  “Tha’s the beauty ’bout cars like that Jag,” Morales said, almost mockingly. “You turn the wheel and they can t
ake you right back where you came from.”

  Palmer straightened. “Well, it didn’t return while we were here,” he said brusquely.

  He made an abrupt about-face and returned to the cottage. Goodman shooed Morales back to his side of the car and got in.

  “How many tan XKE convertibles can there be in Southern California?” he wondered aloud as his partner steered them down the canyon road.

  “Don’t know,” Morales answered. “Not my favorite kinda wheels.”

  “Let’s put somebody on the phone calling dealers and car clubs,” Goodman said. “Shouldn’t take too long to locate the car.”

  “Then, amigo, we’re gonna have to prove the Jag came back here later. That might take a little longer.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  As a result of a telephone call she’d made several days before, Nikki was having lunch with a young woman named Sue Fells whom she hadn’t seen since law school. Sue, who’d been an overweight, bookish grind while a student, had matured into a trim, handsome power player. Most of that transformation had occurred while she was working her way up from a clerk to a junior partner of the firm of Jastrum, Park, Wells.

  Sue’s hazel eyes surveyed the quiet tearoom that she had chosen for their secret meeting as she said, “You know, Nikki, I wouldn’t have taken this risk for another soul.”

  “I appreciate that,” Nikki replied, using her fork to poke at the weird-looking potato mess on her plate. “What do they call this?”

  “Shepherd’s pie,” Sue said. “Supposed to be good here.”

  “Yeah? Well this one they can give back to the shepherd.”

  Sue laughed. “Still the same old Nikki,” she said.

  “Not hardly.” She took a sip of tea that was too hot and said, “So give, Sue. Tell me about the great Jesse Fallon.”

  “I know from experience that our living legend is an insufferable, arrogant asshole who treats his clerks like dog shit.”

  Nikki grinned. “Don’t hold back. Tell me what you really think.”

  “I owe you big time,” Sue said. “You all but dragged me through first-year law. But I would have done this just to get back at Fallon.”