I said, “I got it.”
The door handle jangled, and Valentine and I looked tensely to see which detective would reenter.
Sally leaned in, one hand riding the lever. “Better get the handcuffs on. We need ’em for the cameras.”
Light-headed, I stood. Static dotted my vision, then cleared. Valentine cinched metal around my wrists and steered me forward. My feet felt dead, like blocks of wood.
Sally took a deep breath, and I could see, beneath her unflappable facade, that she was rattled. As I approached, those flat eyes appraised me. “Ready for your close-up, Mr. DeMille?”
CHAPTER 34
“Let’s start putting this thing together,” Sally said.
After being assailed by news crews and camera flashes, I’d had the relative calm of the sedan ride to try to settle down and focus. The helicopters tracked us, compounding my headache until the bullet-proof door of the station sucked closed behind us, silencing the thumping. I never thought I’d be relieved to be taken into custody. I was now backstage in a tiny office overlooking the interrogation room, on the cop side of the two-way mirror. It was private, unoccupied, and—aside from the various recording decks and closed-circuit units—as sparse as my shared Northridge office. Swivel chair, cup of coffee, TV on a mount—a casual, just-friends approach to keep the information flowing. The view into the interrogation room with its foreboding wooden chair, sporting rings for handcuffs, was a reminder of where I would wind up the minute I stopped being useful.
Pay It Forward was a distant memory; I’d wound up playing the wrong role in Body Heat.
Sally clicked on a digital camera and swung it from its usual angle through the two-way so it pointed at the three of us, sitting like colleagues spitballing a case.
I was still winded from being hustled upstairs, past the too-long stares of the other cops. “Has someone reached Ari?”
“We believe so,” Valentine said.
“Where is she? What’d they tell her? Is she all right?”
“I don’t know,” Sally said, “and you have other concerns at the moment.”
“I need to know that my wife is—”
“You don’t have that luxury,” she said sharply. “The captain of Robbery-Homicide is bending the chief’s ear as we speak, and unless we find a crack in this case and turn it into a fissure, Detective Sweetheart will be back to arrest your skinny ass and throw it in Men’s Central. So fucking focus.”
Valentine caught me numbly staring at the news crawl beneath the live helicopter footage of Hotel Angeleno, and he reached up and slapped the muted TV, which clicked over to a soap. “Where were you at nine P.M. on February fifteenth?” he asked.
I closed my eyes, fought for clarity. Monday, two days ago . . . “Driving out to Indio to meet Elisabeta. Why?”
“Do you have anyone who can corroborate that?”
“Of course not. They told me not to . . .” Dread formed a lump in my throat to match the one in my gut. “Why? What happened?”
“We responded to a vandalism report at Keith Conner’s house. Someone spray-painted ‘LIAR’ across his fence, then scaled the gates and left a dead rat on the windshield of one of his cars. A security camera picked up some footage of the intruder on the grounds, in the shadows. The guy was about your build, but his face was obscured because he was wearing—”
I said quietly, “A Red Sox cap.”
“Right. It’s not our jurisdiction, but we got pulled in because—”
“Conner assumed it was me. Of course. I’d gone to see him a few days before.”
“Not a friendly visit, we heard.” Valentine flipped through his notepad. “Left a bad taste in Conner’s mouth. He filed a complaint the morning before the break-in at his house.”
“So he and I did exactly the dance they hoped we would. Me charging over there, him documenting my erratic, aggressive behavior.”
“Yeah, and his counsel advised him to start a paper trail.”
“That’s why you came to see me at work. To follow up on the complaint.”
Sally said, “Given your and Conner’s grudge, we had to do some prying, see if you were keeping both oars in the water. At first we considered that Conner had invented your visit just to smear you, but then we found a paparazzi guy who confirmed you were there. Pictures, even.”
Joe Vente.
“And afterward we spoke to the head of security at Summit, your boy Jerry Donovan, who told us how you were trying to get Keith Conner’s address. The bartender at the Formosa has you drinking the brown stuff at breakfast time.”
“Great,” I said. “Unstable, drinking, obsessive.” I drew in a breath. “Here’s what’s gonna come out next. The murder weapon? It belongs to me. It’ll be the same club I threw at the intruder in my backyard. Also, I’ve been having problems at school—missing classes, conflicts with students. I have a paranoid view of government agents, as evidenced by my screenplay. I even tore my house apart in a delusional fit, looking for imaginary planted bugs.”
“Your wife can confirm that they were there,” Sally said. “The bugs.”
“Right,” I said, “an unbiased witness.”
“After we filled Jerry Donovan in about the break-in at Conner’s, he told us about the surveillance equipment he inspected at your place and about the transmitters he found in some of your clothes. So there’s one independent confirmation.”
Jerry must’ve really thought I’d posed a threat to Conner if he’d come clean about his clandestine visit to our house. I said, “But for all he knows, I could’ve planted all that stuff myself as part of some elaborate cover story.”
“Okay . . .” Sally’s cheeks were flushed. “If you clubbed Keith Conner to death, why was there no spatter on your hands or clothes?”
“That’s angle-dependent, and two out of four expert witnesses will get the math right. Or wrong. Plus, did the crime-scene guys check the U-pipe under the hotel-room sink?”
Sally and Valentine looked at each other. “Yes,” she said slowly. “Traces of blood.”
“Which will prove to be Keith’s. Which shows I washed off what spatter there was after killing him.”
“Which side are you arguing here?” Valentine asked.
“I’m arguing the facts. I’ve got no copies of the discs or e-mails, and the Web sites have vanished, leaving me with only ten-second cell-phone-recorded bursts of secondary footage I could’ve generated myself. Then I steal out of bed late at night, having lied to my wife, to break in to Hotel Angeleno. I even ducked past a staff member, making sure to look conspicuously furtive.”
“You build a convincing case,” Valentine said.
“I’m the perfect fall guy. Angry, discontented. All they had to do was push the blinking buttons and I charged right down that road.”
A news flash cut in over the soap opera, a picture of Keith Conner with the dates bookending his life, then footage of me being led from the hotel, anguish written across my gray features, my teeth bared like a chimpanzee simulating a human grin. I didn’t remember anything of that walk but flashbulbs and photographers shouting my name to draw my focus. My name, my face, out over the morning airwaves. The East Coast was already reading about the whole sordid affair. My parents, over their Maxwell House. I was now one of those creepy, unhinged assassins, men with vacant stares and odd fixations and grievances lovingly nursed to bloody fruition. It hit me powerfully, devastatingly, that nothing in my life could ever get back to normal again.
But Valentine gave me scant room for self-pity. “Since you have all the answers, why don’t you tell us why anyone would bother to frame you.”
“This isn’t about me. It was about killing Keith.”
“Or having you go down,” Valentine said.
“There are easier ways to take down someone like me than killing a movie star.”
“Yes,” Sally said, “but maybe none this nasty.”
Valentine said to me, “Explain.”
My head was lowered, bu
t I could feel them studying me. Through the muddle of my terror, I’d forced myself to work out at least this. “They wanted Conner dead, so they looked around for someone with a good motive. They didn’t have to look far. He and I had a well-publicized dispute, not to mention the outstanding lawsuit and battery charge.”
Anyway, I figured the lawsuit was still outstanding; to my knowledge, my attorney had never received the settlement offer from the studio. Had a resolution ever been close, or was that just another way I’d been strung along? Was the legal back-and-forth even related to all this? Given the barrel I was currently staring down, I didn’t want to sidetrack Sally and Valentine for something so vague, at least unless my lawyer could wrangle some concrete information out of the studio.
Valentine broke me from my thoughts. “If this whole thing wasn’t about you, why go to these lengths? Why have you jump through all these hoops?”
“Think about it,” I said. “Does any case anywhere in the world get the kind of attention that a Hollywood murder trial does? Every footprint, every timeline, every scrap of expert testimony is laid bare for public consumption. And with a star as the victim? This is going to be the most closely scrutinized case since the one that invented the genre. Every base has to be covered. Even then you guys usually can’t get a conviction.”
“So you’re saying they needed more than a fall guy,” Sally said. “They needed a fall guy they could operate, who they could steer into the ideal frame-up.” She chewed the cap of her pen. “Robbery-Homicide’s been known to get tunnel vision when they lock on to a suspect. The guys framing you knew if they could make the case look like an open-and-shut, that would prevent a thorough investigation.”
I said, “So the question is, what would a thorough investigation lead to?”
“Someone else with motive. Who else has motive to kill Keith Conner?”
“Movie critics,” Valentine said. He weathered Sally’s look. “What’s it always come down to? Money. Sex. Revenge.” A nod in my direction. “Your spat with him involved all three.”
That tripped a memory. I snapped my fingers, excited. “That paparazzi guy, Vente, told me that Keith got some club girl pregnant and that there’s a pending paternity suit. If Keith winds up dead, his money might go to that woman and the baby.”
Sally flipped the page in her notebook, kept scribbling.
“A guy like Keith,” Valentine said, “there’s gotta be more stuff like that.”
“Yes,” I said. “Plenty. Someone’s got to look into his business dealings, if he owed the wrong people money, fucked the wrong wife, whatever. Whoever did this is still out there. You have to make sure the DA doesn’t treat this as a closed case. You’ve got to help me.”
Sally and Valentine just looked at me, their faces tense and, I feared, helpless.
A door slammed somewhere in the building. A muffled shout grew louder—“I know he’s here”—and then Ariana lunged into the interrogation room through the looking glass, flinging her arm as if she’d just twisted free of someone’s grasp. “Where is he? Where?”
Two beat cops followed her in, the scene unfolding as if the two-way mirror were a big-screen TV. Ari’s sudden appearance in this context was disorienting; the whole thing felt somehow removed in time and space, a vision of Christmas present.
Her face was flushed, her fists clenched. She got the table between her and the cops, and they squared off over the surface. “I want to see him. I want to see that he’s okay.”
Reality slammed me, and I heard myself shouting, “Ari! Ari! I’m right here.”
Soundproofed.
I scrambled to my feet, but Sally placed a surprisingly powerful hand on my shoulder. “No,” she said. “Not until we get separate statements.”
We stood there an instant, watching my wife despair, me and two cops. I grabbed for the intercom. “I’m not gonna let her—”
Valentine had my arm twisted back across itself so hard I let out a grunt. “We haven’t filed on you yet, but if you push it, we will. You want to keep chatting or take out a third mortgage to cover a bail bond?” He set me firmly back into my chair. “You will listen to what you’re told.”
Inside the interrogation room, Ariana’s shoulders curled forward and then she shuddered, and I realized she was on the verge of weeping. The resolve had drained out of her. One of the cops circled the table and took her by the arm. “Ma’am, you’ll come with me now.”
The other cop was casting nervous glances at the mirror, at us. Ari, of course, picked up on it immediately. “Patrick? He’s there? He’s back there?”
She moved toward the mirror, the cop letting her arm slide through his grasp. “Patrick, why are you back there? Are you okay?”
She leaned forward, putting her face to the two-way, trying to peer through. She was looking right at us.
Sally made a noise in her throat, and Valentine said, “Christ.”
I pressed my hand to the glass, touching Ariana, the outline of her palm. There was nothing else I could do.
The cop took her again by the arm, and she let him lead her out.
My face burned, and I bit down on my lip and willed my breath to freeze in my chest. All the time we’d wasted on our petty problems, and here I was, reduced to observing my wife through an interrogation mirror, she unable to see me, I unable to talk to her. The symbolism, oppressive enough for a student script. My voice came gruff and uneven. “You’ve got to keep me out of jail.”
Sally said, “Then you’d better give us something.”
“I don’t have anything. They have me dead in the water.”
“We’ve got no time for you to feel sorry for yourself. The men behind that size-eleven-and-a-half Danner boot bet on you being nothing more than a second-rate screenwriter. You lapped up what they laid down. If you want to save yourself, you’re gonna have to come up with your own material.”
Valentine: “Is there anyone besides your wife who can corroborate that they—whoever they are—exist?”
I tapped my head with the flat of my hand, prodding myself. “Elisabeta got an e-mail claiming that someone wearing a Red Sox hat would pay her a visit, but an e-mail’s pretty thin. Wait, though. Doug Beeman. They recorded him also. He got DVDs, too.”
“It could be argued that you recorded him.”
“He’d been getting them for months. We could compare our schedules to prove I couldn’t have made them. Plus, he still has the footage from that high-school basement.”
“Give us an address.”
I jotted it down.
“Your job is to get your head clear, go over the last nine days inch by inch, and think of anything else we can use. And you’d better do it fast.” Sally ripped the address off the pad. “In the meantime we’ll see Beeman.”
“He’ll confirm my story.”
“You’d better hope so,” Valentine said, and they walked out.
I sat for a long while, shuddering, gazing at the oblivious rectangle of the muted TV up on the mount. Color and movement. Shapes. The soap gave way to a commercial about a new razor with five blades, which to my dulled brain seemed like four too many. Squeezing my eyes shut, I tried to relive everything that had happened, starting with my stepping out onto the porch in my boxers that cold Tuesday morning, but my thoughts kept crashing off course. Prison. My marriage. What was left of my reputation.
I crossed to the door. A uniformed cop slumped against the wall just outside, flipping through a magazine. Not surprising. His eyes flicked up and held on me. I took a step out into the hall. He came off the wall. I retreated a step. He leaned back against the wall.
I said, “Okay,” closed the door, and returned feebly to my chair.
Elisabeta was on the television.
Yes, that was her, sitting on a white couch, legs crossed, curtains billowing behind her.
For a moment my brain couldn’t catch up to what I was seeing. Had reporters somehow uncovered her link to me? Already?
But no, there was advert
ising script across the screen. I stood, took a few halting steps forward, and went on tiptoe to raise the volume.
Elisabeta was saying, “—high-fiber drink mix that keeps me regular and decreases the risk of heart disease.”
No accent. It was startling, bewildering, as if I’d tuned in to an interview to find Antonio Banderas speaking in a Jamaican patois.
Now she was walking over a grassy rise, a canary yellow sweater draped across her shoulders, smiling. A purring voice-over said, “Fiberestore. For a healthy digestive system. And a healthy life.”
A smiling close-up. That face, the slightly crooked nose, those Everywoman features—if she could benefit from increased fiber in-take, so could you.
My lungs burned; I’d forgotten to breathe.
Elisabeta. In a TV commercial. Sounding as if she hailed from Columbus, Ohio.
An actress. Hired to play a part.
Which meant that Doug Beeman, my last good hope, was probably no longer my last good hope. I pictured Sally and Valentine, speeding toward that apartment this very minute. A fool’s errand.
Dazed, I backed away from the screen and sat, nicking the edge of the seat and landing on the floor, the chair toppling over behind me. Still, I couldn’t tear my eyes from the TV, though it had long returned to the soap opera.
The door opened briskly, and Kent Gable entered with a small entourage of suited men. Slacks, holsters bulging beneath jackets, badges gleaming on belts. Robbery-Homicide Division, right down to the assured lockstep of the loafers. Gable cocked his head to look down at me. Beneath my hands, the cheap floor tiles were as cool as death, as cool as the chill that had crawled into my bones.
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