by Dianne Emley
His voice was dusky and melodious. Vining thought it was the voice he might use after he’d talked a young model into a couple of cocktails and was now trying to convince her to come upstairs. As she took the card, his cologne, which had loitered in the air, hit her full force.
He introduced himself. “I’m Mike Rahimi, the assistant manager. Mr. Getty is out of town. I can try to contact him for you. Can I inquire what this concerns?”
Vining saw his eyes glint over her left hand, seeking a wedding ring. “Mr. Rahimi…”
“Mike, please.”
She smiled. “Mr. Rahimi, a close friend of Mr. Getty’s has died.”
“Oh, no…”
“Did he ever mention a woman named Catherine Engleford? Goes by the nickname Tink?” She took out the photo of Tink with the three other Ramona Girls that she’d taken from Tink’s home. She folded it so that only Tink’s face was visible.
Rahimi arched one of his eyebrows as he looked at the photo. They looked better plucked and shaped than hers. His rounded and buffed fingernails were certainly better manicured.
“Mr. Getty has many lady friends,” he said with admiration.
She smiled. “I hear he’s very charming.”
“I don’t recall seeing this woman or hearing about her. Catherine Engleford, you say?”
She leaned toward him, getting another blast of spicy cologne. “Yes.”
“I don’t recall that name.” He handed the photo back.
“It’s very sad. She died under suspicious circumstances.”
“How terrible.”
“Her family is desperate to find out what happened to her.”
“You can’t possibly think that Mr. Getty had anything to do with it.”
“Of course not, but he was one of her friends, and he might have information that could be useful to us. Since we drove all the way here in traffic from Pasadena, it would be great if we could at least see Mr. Getty’s apartment. We can follow up with him on the phone later. We only need five minutes,” she added, smiling more broadly.
Vining saw the flirtatiousness in Rahimi’s eyes fade.
He tapped a key on a laptop on the desk, waking it up. “Let me call Mr. Getty on his cell phone.”
Kissick had wandered away to look at a wall hanging, but now meandered toward them.
Vining asked, “Detective Kissick, will you please get the crime-scene tape?”
“Crime scene?” Rahimi said with alarm. “But there was no crime here.”
“Unfortunately, we have to seal Mr. Getty’s apartment. When he returns, we’ll meet him here and we’ll enter the apartment together.”
“Seal it?” Rahimi asked. “Seal it how?”
“You’ve seen that bright yellow tape.” Kissick opened his thumb and index fingers to show how wide it was. “Says ‘Crime Scene—Do Not Cross.’ We’ll put it across the door.”
The detectives had no legal right to seal Getty’s apartment. Vining was betting on Rahimi wanting to be finished with them as soon as possible and to avoid having to answer questions from nervous residents.
Rahimi took a key from his pocket and unlocked a door in the desk that was lined with keys. “I’ll take you to the apartment. I can accompany you?”
“Of course,” Vining said.
Rahimi removed a key from a hook. On the desk, he set out a wooden triangle affixed with a plaque that said BACK IN TEN MINUTES.
The elevator door quietly opened and Rahimi gestured for Vining and Kissick to enter ahead of him. Vining did. Kissick held his hand against the door, high above Rahimi’s head, and said, “After you.”
Rahimi pressed the button for the twenty-first floor, then yanked his shirt cuffs so that they extended a half-inch beyond his jacket sleeves.
“So, Mr. Getty’s quite the ladies’ man.” Kissick gave Rahimi a smile that was nearly a leer, like they were just two guys talking.
Rahimi drew a rounded shape with both hands, raising his shoulders. “Beautiful women, all the time. He’s a lovely man. A world traveler. Speaks five languages, including a little Arabic. I’m Persian, but I speak Arabic.”
“Sounds like a great guy,” Kissick said straight-faced. “What’s Mr. Getty’s line of work?”
“Investor. Movie producer.” Rahimi waved a hand as if to indicate that there was too much to put into words. “He travels a lot. He’s rarely here. When he’s in town, he always has a beautiful woman on his arm. Models. Playboy playmates. He got me an invitation to a party at the Playboy Mansion.”
“Really?” Kissick smiled. “Go Kingsley. When’s the last time you saw him?”
“Last week. He said he was going on a business trip. Would be back in a few days.”
Rahimi led the way from the elevator and down the corridor. They walked on thick Berber carpeting. Each set of walnut double doors was flanked by a pair of brass wall sconces. Vining heard only silence. Only those with money could afford that most rare commodity in L.A.
As Rahimi walked ahead of them, Kissick sang under his breath, “Just a gigolo, da, da, da, dada…”
Vining elbowed him.
Rahimi stopped at the last set of doors at the end of the hall and fit his key into the lock. He dramatically pushed both doors open.
The first thing that Vining noticed was the light. It was a corner apartment with vast windows and glass doors that opened onto a wraparound terrace. The apartment was as silent as the rest of the building.
The furnishings were minimalist chic of glass, chrome, and stone mixed with Asian cabinets, tables, and art. Past a white travertine tile entry was a large living room. The dining room and kitchen were through an opening lined with two pillars. Vining walked to one of the sliding doors, unlocked it, and stepped outside. The roar of traffic along busy Wilshire Boulevard filtered up. Noise, at last.
She walked back in to see Kissick scoop up a handful of mail from a round table in the entry and casually look through it as he asked Rahimi, “We understand that a woman named Marisa de Castellane owns this apartment.”
“Countess de Castellane.” Rahimi smiled. “Yes. She stays mostly in her homes in Europe.”
“Does Mr. Getty rent from her?”
Rahimi raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know what financial arrangements Mr. Getty has with the countess.”
Vining walked into a large kitchen. It had all the requisite top-of-the-line appliances, plus a few that seemed to have some specialized function she couldn’t figure out. Copper pots and pans and anodized cookware hung from an oval iron rack above an island cook station. A steel basket there held two overripe bananas and a couple of dried-up oranges. A wooden butcher block was crammed full of knives.
Her eyes lingered briefly on them. The creep who had stabbed her had used a knife pulled from a butcher block on a similar kitchen island in a different type of lavish domicile. She kept moving.
The cabinets held what Vining would have expected in a bachelor’s apartment: dishes, glassware, and flatware that were nothing fancy. A drawer was crammed with the residue of many take-out meals: plastic cutlery sealed in cellophane; single servings of soy sauce, ketchup, and salt and pepper; chopsticks in paper wrappers.
The contents of one cabinet mirrored what she’d found in Tink’s kitchen—it was crammed with Berryhill brand vitamins and supplements. She found the same Berryhill cookbook that Tink had. Unlike Tink’s, which was splattered with food from being used, Getty’s looked brand-new.
She turned to the title page. Georgia Berryhill had signed it in black pen in her distinctive angular handwriting: “To Kingsley, our new friend. Welcome to The Method. To your best mind/body health, Georgia.” She hadn’t dated it.
Hearing Kissick chatting with Rahimi in the other room, keeping the assistant manager busy, she checked out the refrigerator. There were plastic containers of ground almond butter and peanut butter from Whole Foods. Sprouted grain bread. Three kinds of tofu. Nonfat organic yogurt. Egg whites. Heart Beat margarine. A jar of strawberry preserves fro
m France. The expiration dates were current.
There were packages of whole roasted coffee beans from Jones Coffee in Pasadena—a local place on Raymond Avenue. She wondered if Tink had put Getty onto it. There was a jar of Beluga caviar and two bottles of Veuve Clicquot champagne, the same brand of champagne they’d found by Tink’s pool. The vegetable bin held broccoli, carrots, and spinach that were past their prime, and several apples.
She closed the refrigerator door and opened the one for the freezer. In it were a bottle of Ketel One vodka, two shrink-wrapped lobster tails, and a package of mixed berries from Trader Joe’s.
She was curious about this caviar- and tofu-eating male.
She found the trash can. It was empty.
She headed down a hallway off the kitchen, passing a laundry room. She entered an office. Protruding through a hole in a built-in desk were computer cables and power cords, suggesting that a laptop computer had been plugged in there. On the desk was the same brochure from the last Georgia’s Girls fund-raiser that she’d found in Tink’s office.
The cabinets and drawers held nothing unusual except boxes of Crane’s stationery and note cards of heavy cream-colored paper, embossed with “Kingsley Getty” in a sedate masculine font in navy-blue ink. The envelopes had this Wilshire Boulevard address on the back flap.
Magazines were scattered across a coffee table in front of a leather couch. On top was the current People with Gig Towne, Sinclair LeFleur, and Georgia Berryhill on the cover that Vining had bought at the supermarket. A well-thumbed copy of The Berryhill Method was there, along with books about the Civil War, biographies of John Adams and General Douglas MacArthur, and Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.
At the end of the hallway of the huge apartment were a guest room and bathroom. Both were clean and without personal items.
She returned to the living room, where Kissick and Rahimi were still talking.
“How long has Getty lived here?” Kissick asked him.
“About two years,” Rahimi replied.
“Have you ever seen this man here?” He took out a printout of a photo. “His name is Vince Madrigal.”
“Madrigal. I think I’ve seen him on TV. Was he in the news?”
“You haven’t seen him here?” Kissick folded up the photo.
“No.”
She handed Kissick the photo of a younger Cheyenne, Trendi Talbot, and the unknown third girl, Fallon.
As Vining entered a hallway off the living room, Kissick asked Rahimi, “Have you ever seen any of these girls before?”
Vining entered a vast master suite. The two his-and-hers walk-in closets together were as large as her entire bedroom. One closet was empty. The other held a small collection of expensive men’s clothing and shoes. There were also well-worn athletic shoes, golf shoes, tennis shoes, deck shoes, a bag of golf clubs, tennis rackets, and a case with fishing poles. There was also a smaller oblong case that wasn’t familiar to her. She opened it to find the two halves of a billiards stick tucked inside a velvet-lined holder.
“Aren’t we the man’s man?” she mused aloud.
A king-sized bed was made up with a fluffy silk duvet and pillow shams in masculine shades of cocoa and cinnamon. Everything was as neat as a pin but the flat surfaces had a light coating of dust, as if a week had passed since the housekeeper had visited.
She was finished and about to leave when she decided to look inside the nightstands, often receptacles for little secrets like sex toys, sleep medications, and dirty magazines. She first went to the nightstand on the right side of the bed, where there was a digital clock on top. The drawer held nothing but a sleep mask to block out the light and a plastic box of silicone earplugs.
“Come on, Getty, thought you were the king. Where’s your goodie stash?”
She walked around the bed and opened the drawer in the other end table. Inside were newspaper clippings and printouts of online articles. Vining was jolted when she recognized a photograph. It was of her.
She grabbed everything from the drawer and sat on the bed. All the materials were about her. Some were from seven years ago, when she’d shot a has-been rock star to death in self-defense. Some were from two years ago, when the creep had stabbed her after she’d responded to that suspicious-circumstances call. Some were recent, detailing her final confrontation with the creep, whom she’d revealed as a serial killer of policewomen.
As she looked through the articles, a buzzing noise started deep inside her ears. Sentences had been underlined, mostly quotes of things she’d said. The materials were public, in the news. Yet they felt too personal to be stashed in this strange man’s bedroom drawer.
The buzzing in her ears grew louder. Her hands felt limp. She had an impulse to ball up the papers and throw them away. She fought her impulses. Best if Getty didn’t know that she knew this about him. She put everything back inside the drawer.
She headed for the bedroom door and was about to leave when she spotted the indentation in the duvet from where she’d been sitting. She went back and smoothed it until no trace of her was left except for what was in the nightstand drawer, immortalized forever on the Internet.
Back inside the Crown Vic parked on the street, Kissick said, “Telling Rahimi that we’d have to put crime-scene tape over the doors was fast thinking, Nan.” He cranked the ignition and looked at her. “Something wrong? You seem quiet.”
She frowned. “In Getty’s bedroom nightstand, there was a drawer full of dozens of articles about me.”
“What do you mean, articles?”
“Newspaper articles. Clippings and stuff printed off the Internet.”
She could tell he was jarred by the news.
“What do you make of it?” she asked.
“Maybe Getty’s doing research for a screenplay or book.”
“He’d better not write about me.”
He pulled the car from the curb into traffic.
“You’re okay with thinking he’s doing research for a screenplay?” she asked.
“I don’t know what to think, Nan.”
Neither did she.
FIFTEEN
It was late afternoon, and traffic was sluggish as Kissick and Vining made the trip from congested ballsy West L.A. to the affluent refined hamlet of La Cañada Flintridge, nestled below the San Gabriel Mountain foothills northeast of Pasadena. They were surprised that it only took forty minutes.
While La Cañada Flintridge and Pasadena shared a short border, Pasadena P.D. rarely had reason to go there on police business. La Cañada Flintridge contracted with the L.A. County Sheriff’s for law enforcement, but the city was so safe that some residents didn’t lock their doors.
Kissick took the Angeles Crest Highway exit off the 210. “My sons are going to be impressed that I met Gig Towne and Sinclair LeFleur. What about Emily?”
“I have little clue anymore about what she considers hot or stale.” Vining was using the browser on Kissick’s iPhone for map directions. “You should have made a right.”
“You told me left.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You told me to turn left, Nan.” He found a place to turn around.
She wondered whether she had told him to turn the wrong way. They, like many detective partners, acted like an old married couple. Given their romantic entanglement, their conflict had an emotional aspect.
“If I did, I apologize.” She was sorry for her mistake and the tension. They were facing a long night after what had been a long day. During the drive from the Westside, she’d been thinking about Tink, a woman she’d maligned over the years for her frivolity, her concern with appearances, and the flaunting of her nouveau riches. She understood Tink’s search for solace after the blows of losing her husband and son so closely together. Her last stop had been The Berryhill Method. Vining wondered whether The Method had helped.
“I’m surprised there’s so much traffic,” he said.
As they drove on, the pines and sycamores grew denser and the houses wer
e farther apart. They rounded a bend, entering Gig Towne and Sinclair LeFleur’s neighborhood, and came upon a mob. News vans with satellite dishes were crowded onto the narrow street. Clutches of TV news crews and fans stood along the unpaved roadside. Sheriff’s deputies from the Crescenta Valley Station had barricaded the street and were turning away cars.
As Vining and Kissick idled in traffic, a couple of reporters who worked the San Gabriel Valley crime beat recognized them and rushed over. The detectives cracked the car windows and said they couldn’t comment.
Kissick stopped near one of the deputies and held up his badge. “What’s with the crowd?”
The deputy ordered the reporters to move out of the street and said to Kissick, “This gal who worked for Sinclair LeFleur was murdered last night.”
“You mean Trendi Talbot?”
“That’s her. Worked as a secretary or something.”
Kissick thanked him and drove on, having to slam on his brakes when a man nearly walked into his car. He was wearing a skeleton costume with a rubber mask that covered his head and was carrying a stake with a large handmade poster. On it was a black-and-white publicity headshot of Trendi with a message in dripping red paint: “Berryhill killed Trendi.”
After they passed the police barricade, the street became quiet. They spotted the address on a vine-covered wall beside a set of wooden gates across a driveway. The vines had been clipped to expose four square tiles with hand-painted numbers.
Kissick parked behind a navy-blue Crown Vic. “This is déjà vu all over again. That’s the car the LAPD detectives who interviewed your mom this morning were driving.”
Some paparazzi had gotten through and were loitering around the gate.
Vining and Kissick grabbed their jackets from the backseat. They made their way to the call box in the wall beside the driveway, ignoring the questions lobbed at them and not making eye contact.
A male voice came through the speaker. “A family representative will make a statement at seven o’clock. Please respect the privacy of Mr. Towne and Ms. LeFleur.”
