Pie A La Murder

by Melinda Wells

  I didn’t think the article could get any worse for Nicholas, until I read the next paragraph, about the murder of “fellow Chronicle reporter, Gretchen Tully.” The Observer referred to her as “a rising young journalist rumored to be moving in on D’Martino’s crime beat territory.” The story concluded with this: “An unnamed LAPD source who was not authorized to speak on behalf of the department stated that D’Martino had not been taken into custody because the investigation was ongoing.”

  My cell phone rang again. Just as I answered and heard Liddy’s voice, the landline started to ring again, too. I ignored it.

  “Did you see that awful story?” Liddy asked.

  “Yes, but you’ve got to remember that paper’s in competition with the Chronicle, so they’re trying to make Nicholas look bad.”

  “They succeeded. Where did they get all that information?”

  I told Liddy my belief that Roxanne Redding had sold the photos, probably for a lot of money, and that Celeste had talked about personal matters while she was being photographed. “Either Roxanne put a negative spin on whatever Celeste said, or the Observer reporters did.”

  “At least they called you ‘glamorous,’ ” Liddy said.

  “I should be flattered?” I said dryly. “I doubt whoever wrote it has ever seen me. Somebody throws in a bit like that to make their sleazy story a little more titillating.”

  “I’m going to send an e-mail to the editor telling him that this story is so disgusting I’m never going to read their rotten paper again.”

  “You’re wonderful, Liddy. Go get ’em.”

  “I will. I can be very stern when I see an injustice being done.”

  “Oh, I just realized—I should call Olivia Wayne about this. She may not have seen it.”

  Olivia had seen it, and had already been on the phone with the Observer’s owner.

  “Why go to the editor, when I can try to scare the hell out of the person who has much more to lose in a lawsuit?” she said.

  “Are they going to retract this libelous story?”

  “The problem is that they’ve stayed just this side of libel, quoting unnamed sources and only implying that Nick is a murderer. The piece was vetted by a lawyer before it went to press. I couldn’t win a case against them in court, but I persuaded the paper’s owner that I could make enough trouble for him—and cost him enough to make me go away—that he agreed to have the paper do a positive story about Nick.”

  “What good will that do? This is so frustrating! People who read this will think Nicholas killed Redding, and maybe even poor Gretchen.”

  “The public tends to remember only the last thing they read,” Olivia said briskly. “The moment the real murderer is caught, or there’s a new celebrity scandal, Nick will be forgotten. Until then, just keep your head down. Don’t talk to anyone from the Observer. You’ve got a live show to do tomorrow night, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Look on the bright side: You’ll probably get a bump up in ratings from this,” Olivia said. I could imagine her wry smile.

  There were three messages on my landline; two were from Observer reporters wanting to interview me. I erased those. The third was from Eileen. She left the number of our little bakery in Hollywood, Della’s Sweet Dreams. When she answered she sounded breathless.

  “Hi, partner,” she said. “We’re selling out here today, and it’s not even a holiday week.”

  “Do you need me to come down and help?”

  “No, we’re handling things. I called to tell you about the e-mail you got from Harmon Dubois.” One of Eileen’s duties was to read my business e-mails and deal with whatever she could.

  Harmon Dubois. My mind blanked on the name for a moment, but then I remembered: Harmon Dubois was the spry, eighty-year-old, poetry-writing student from my Saturday afternoon adults’ cooking class. Eileen had nicknamed him “the suck-up” for his habit of bringing me flowers from his garden and following me around in class, offering to help.

  I asked Eileen what he wanted.

  “He said it was going to be a surprise, but then he thought he’d better warn you.”

  Oh, Lord, what now? I said, “To borrow a line from Dorothy Parker: ‘What fresh hell is this?’”

  “Actually, it’s kind of sweet,” Eileen said. “Your whole cooking class got tickets for the live show tomorrow night, but Harmon decided to break their ‘code of silence,’ as he put it, so that the sight of them there wouldn’t throw you off. But he wants you to ‘act surprised.’ ”

  “That is sweet,” I said. “I appreciate them wanting to come to the show. Please e-mail him for me, thank him, and tell him I promise to act absolutely stunned.” I debated whether or not to tell Eileen about the Observer piece, and decided that I should.

  “There’s an article in today’s Los Angeles Observer—”

  “I saw it,” she said. “It’s sold in one of the machines on the street outside the shop. A customer brought it in.”

  “What did you think?”

  “Two things. First, them calling you a ‘glamorous TV chef’ can only help our business. Second, that Daddy’s going to be furious when he reads it and learns somebody in the department is talking to the press.”

  For a moment, I was taken aback, but then I thought, It’s true, what I’ve always believed, but was too upset to remember earlier: People view things through the prism of their own self-interest. Eileen saw the article as helpful to our shop. John would want the LAPD leaker exposed. Maybe Phil Logan’s mantra—“there’s no such thing as bad publicity”—was right, and that ultimately Nicholas wouldn’t be damaged.

  “Tanis has gone berserk,” Nicholas said.

  I’d taken Tuffy on a long walk and was on my way up Eleventh Street, heading home, when Nicholas drove down from the opposite direction and flashed his lights at me.

  “Get in,” he’d said. “A guy from the Observer is parked in front of your house. When I spotted him I drove on past and turned around. I figured this time of night, you might be out with the big Tuff.”

  “You’re a good detective.”

  “Not as good as you,” he said. “You’re the one who found Gretchen’s car.”

  “How do you know about that?”

  “Weaver told me; I was at the cop shop when you talked to him. Detective Keller had pulled me in again for questioning. That didn’t last long, because he hasn’t been able to shoot holes in my alibi for Gretchen’s murder.”

  Nicholas turned into the alley behind my house, parked outside my back gate, and cut the motor. We sat there in the darkness with Tuffy in the rear seat.

  “What do you mean about Tanis going crazy?” I asked.

  “That picture of Celeste on the Observer’s front page. Reporters have been calling Tanis at the hotel. They want to do a ‘mother’s perspective’ on both the Redding murder and on ‘the corrupting effects of Hollywood on young girls.’ Those vultures.”

  In the moonlight, I saw him gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles were white.

  “I’m so sorry.” I reached out in a gesture of comfort and found his forearm muscles as tight as steel cables. At my touch, he relaxed a little, letting go of the steering wheel and taking me in his arms.

  “Thank God for you, Della.” He sighed, released me, and leaned against his driver’s side door. “The only good thing about today is that Celeste has come back to me. She said Tanis is hysterical, Freddie is having anxiety attacks, and the phone was ringing so often Tanis told the hotel to hold all their calls.” Nicholas’s lips curled in a hint of a smile. “The grand duchess in Vienna got through on Freddie’s cell. Celeste said she could hear the old woman screaming in German because Freddie had to hold the phone away from his ear.”

  “How did she find out about the picture?”

  “She saw it—it’s on the Internet. The Observer publishes an online international edition. They referred to Celeste as the ‘wild-child future stepdaughter of a prince.’ With the subhead ‘A
nother Pretty Commoner Disgracing the Royals?’ ” He grunted. “It’s—I can’t call it journalism—it’s filth. But their kind of repulsive sensationalism has resulted in the Observer having a larger circulation than the Chronicle.”

  “But if it’s just for this issue—”

  “No, hon. I haven’t told you because I didn’t want you to worry, but since that rag started publishing here, it’s consistently outselling my paper by thirty percent. We’ve lost advertising dollars and had to cut staff. Next month we’ll be putting out fewer pages, and the size of the paper’s going to be slightly reduced. The bosses are hoping our readers won’t notice, but they will.”

  “Oh, Nicholas . . . you don’t think the Chronicle’s going to go out of business, do you?”

  “I’m afraid I do. For a decade, we haven’t had any local competition. I used to think that because of our record of integrity and political fair-mindedness, we could survive despite the availability of online news options. But ever since the National Enquirer gained credibility and the New York Post expanded its reach, readers are voting with their dollars. They’re signaling that they want a livelier read than we’re giving them by our choice to stay on the so-called high ground. What’s left of it.”

  “ ‘The post of honor is a lonely station. . . .’”

  “That sounds familiar.”

  “I think it’s from Cato,” I said. “What are you going to do?”

  “Long term, if the Chronicle folds, or lets me go—I don’t know. All over the country, papers are tanking, jobs for reporters are drying up. I don’t like the news-lite bits on TV. Are people making money writing blogs?”

  “I think they can if they get advertising,” I said.

  He gave a short bark of a laugh. “Can you imagine me trying to sell myself to an advertiser?”

  I had to admit that I couldn’t, and said with a smile, “Your charm is an acquired taste.”

  “Like eating haggis—thanks a lot. But I can’t think about the future right now. I should get home to Celeste. She wanted to go to a club, ‘to be seen,’ she said, but I told her absolutely not. We’re going to stay home tonight and start getting to know each other. High time. I’ve already missed her first eighteen years.”

  We kissed good night, deeply, and with passion that left us both wanting more, but when we came up for air, Nicholas said, “That’s going to have to last us for a few days.”

  “It’s a good thing we’re mature enough not to need instant gratification.”

  “Speak for yourself,” he said. “I want you so much I’d make love to you even if it meant I would be hanged for it in the morning. But right now . . .”

  “I know,” I said. “Go home to your daughter.”

  Tuffy and I got out of the car. Nicholas watched us until I unlocked the back gate and we were safely inside.

  Listening to his car start up and the silver Batmobile drive away, I felt a wrench in my heart. What would Nicholas do if the Chronicle went out of business or if he were let go?

  43

  Thursday morning, after we had breakfast and I walked Tuffy, Eileen and I drove to the market with our reusable grocery bags to buy the large number of items I needed to prepare food in advance of the TV show. The two main dishes and the dessert would be made on-camera during the one-hour broadcast, but I had to do a lot of work at home today in order to have enough for members of the audience to sample at the end of the show.

  After we’d managed to separate two shopping carts from the line of them that had been jammed tight together, Eileen looked at her half of the shopping list. “I can’t figure out what your theme for tonight is.”

  “I’m calling it ‘Budgeting Your Calories.’ The idea is that you can eat a high-calorie dish—in this case it’s going to be the sweet potato pie dessert—if the rest of the meal is low-calorie. Same principle as budgeting money. If you want to spend more on one thing, you should spend less on others.”

  “Sweet potato pie . . . yum. I wish you could make your friend Mira Waters’s recipe. The sweet potato pie she sent us last Christmas was the best I’ve ever had, but when we called to tell her, she said it had a secret ingredient she wouldn’t reveal.”

  “She was just joking,” I said. “Several months ago she sent the recipe and permission to make it for the show, but this is the first time I’ve been able to do that.”

  “What’s her secret ingredient?”

  “Rum,” I said. “Not enough for anyone to be aware of it specifically, but it enhances all the other flavors.”

  I gave Eileen half of the reusable bags and we pushed our carts through the automatic doors.

  Inside the store, I said, “I’ll start picking out the produce. You find whole wheat tortillas.”

  After we got back to the house and lugged in the heavy bags of groceries, Eileen went off to oversee our retail shop, and I set to work in the kitchen.

  The chopping, cooking, baking, and wrapping would consume most of the day, leaving me just enough time to take a bath and put on some makeup. My bruised face had healed so well I didn’t need Liddy’s expertise tonight.

  I had to bake the pies first. They needed time to cool thoroughly before they could be packed. The low-calorie tortilla wrap main dish sandwiches would be made later, and kept fresh in tight envelopes of foil.

  The first step in Mira’s recipe was boiling the sweet potatoes in their skins. I filled four big pasta pots with water and put them on the stove. Then I set sticks of butter and the eggs I’d need out on the counter so they would get to room temperature by the time the sweet potatoes were cooked and cooled enough to peel.

  As I worked, I thought about Mira Waters; I’d missed her since she’d moved from Los Angeles to Florida a few years ago. An actress, and a good one, she had appeared in a lot of television shows, and had played Muhammad Ali’s wife in The Greatest. I made sure to catch the movie whenever it played on TV.

  I do my best thinking when I’m cooking, and I should be thinking about who might have killed Alec Redding. And Gretchen Tully. So why am I thinking about Mira?

  Because I’m boiling a ton of sweet potatoes?

  No. It’s something else. . . .

  I let my mind bounce around—free associate images of Mira in the parts she played . . . images of other actresses . . . movies I’d seen. . . .

  Then one image came to the center of the pack, like a movie special effect that sent an object zooming to the forefront of a scene. I remembered a shot of Mira in one of her roles. A close-up on her eyes. In that moment I noticed something going on behind the mask of her lovely face. Unspoken. A communication without words.

  In my head I did a freeze-frame on the expression in those eyes. Then, without my conscious direction, another picture was superimposed onto it. Another actress, another unforgettable emotion—a message—in the depths of her eyes. I squeezed my own eyes shut and focused on that new photograph. Gradually, the camera in my head moved back to reveal the whole face, and I saw it was a picture of the British actress Judi Dench from one of her early roles . . . Lady Macbeth. What was I seeing in those eyes? Intelligence? Strength? Yes . . . and a need so intense that behind the intelligence was a flicker of madness.

  It jolted me to realize that I’d noticed that same look in another pair of eyes. Not in a still picture, or from an actress’s performance. I’d seen it in someone I knew. It had been there for just a moment, but my brain had registered it, and filed the impression away. . . .

  Suddenly, on the “screen” in my mind all three of those images merged and became one particular pair of eyes.

  Roxanne Redding’s.

  I’d glimpsed that Lady Macbeth flicker the day I met her, at the Film Society luncheon, when she came to our table to take Alec away because a studio executive wanted to talk to him.

  Here in my kitchen, standing over pots of boiling sweet potatoes, steam frizzing my hair, I knew with certainty that Roxanne Redding had murdered her husband. I didn’t have any idea whether or not sh
e’d killed Gretchen. Maybe I wasn’t going to get more than one blinding revelation in this lifetime.

  Any sane person was going to tell me that my belief in her guilt wasn’t evidence. Of course it wasn’t, but the picture in my mind of Roxanne hitting Alec on the back of his skull with the white stool was so real that I could see it, as if in a hologram. It was as vivid to me as if I’d been in the room when it happened.

  But that’s a vision; it’s not evidence.

  I had nothing concrete to present to the police. Despite our years of friendship, John was likely to laugh if I told him I knew Roxanne Redding had killed her husband because I’d seen a deadly spark in her eyes weeks ago and now I’d had a vision. This wasn’t some kind of psychic gift. It wasn’t a paranormal experience. Ordinary people could feel an event sometimes. I felt this one.

  If I tried to explain it to John, I’d be lucky if he didn’t lock me up in the psychiatric wing at UCLA on a seventy-two-hour hold.

  I felt helpless, and frustrated, knowing something but not being able to prove it. One thing was sure, though: When I kept my appointment with Roxanne tomorrow morning to review the pictures, I was not going alone. I would try to persuade John to go with me. Or Hugh Weaver. Or maybe John would arrange to let me take Officer Willis—Downey’s partner—whom Olivia described as a tough cookie. In desperation, I might even ask Detective Keller to come. Whoever I had to drag along in order to feel safe, I was not going into the Redding house by myself.

  44

  When John returned my phone call, I told him about my appointment to go over photos with Roxanne Redding, but that I didn’t feel comfortable going alone.

  “Why not?”

  “I believe she killed her husband.”