Nevada Rose

by Jerome Preisler

  The crime lab was quiet now. Fireball Baker had gone home hours ago, leaving behind his biological samples and a somewhat thinned-out group of reporters still garrisoned in the parking lot. Grissom and Sara had left in a hurry soon afterward, heading off on some sort of emergency having to do with the Green Man affair. In short, nothing much was happening.

  All Warrick could do for the moment was hang out until Catherine got off the horn with the NYPD, after which the two of them planned to head out to Vista Towers for another talk with Mrs. Samuels, during which they would confront her with some new and very interesting tidbits of information Cath had acquired thanks to Super Dave’s penchant for sanitary, unsoiled toe tags on the bodies in his morgue room.

  Restless, Warrick strode over to the water cooler, filled a Dixie cup, drained it, and then crunched it into a ball in his hand. He’d just backed up to hook it into the wastebasket with a midrange jump shot, when he saw a guy he didn’t recognize out of the corner of his eye, heading up the corridor from the general vicinity of the reception desk, accompanied by one of the uniformed cops who manned the front desk.

  Dressed in an eggshell sport coat, brown trousers, and loafers, the civilian was maybe thirty or thirty-five years old, brown-haired, fit-looking, and walking alongside the cop with what seemed to be a very purposeful stride.

  Warrick stood near the cooler and watched them, mainly because he was bored senseless and there wasn’t much else around to grab his attention. Then, as the pair approached, it suddenly dawned on him that he might very well be the reason for their unexpected presence.

  As they reached Warrick, the cop stopped and nodded toward the brown-haired guy. “Got somebody here wants to see you,” he said, confirming Warrick’s assumption that he was indeed why these men were now sharing the hallway with him. “Says it’s urgent.”

  Warrick looked at the guy in the sport coat, saw that he had an adhesive visitor’s pass on his breast pocket.

  He took in the name on the pass at a glance. Kyle Gibbons.

  It sounded familiar. Then he remembered when he’d heard it before.

  “You’re…Mark Baker’s trainer, right?” he said, thinking Baker had mentioned he’d had a regular workout with him the Sunday after his birthday party at Club Random. And that he’d actually been meaning to give him a call.

  The guy had extended his hand. “Good to meet you, Mr. Brown,” he said. “Fireball told me you’d talked to him at the golf tournament.”

  Warrick nodded at him, and they shook, Gibbons looking firmly at Warrick, Warrick returning the look, sizing the trainer up there in the hall, wondering what his reason might be for coming to see him at this relatively late hour of the night.

  His eyes still on Warrick, Gibbons said, “Is there a place we can talk? In private, if you don’t mind.”

  Warrick nodded, increasingly eager to find out what the guy might want from him. He would just have to stick his head into Cath’s door, tell her that something had come up and he’d need a few minutes. Not that he had any reason to believe those New York badges would rush to get anything done for her over the phone in the next few minutes.

  After thanking the cop for bringing Gibbons over, he motioned down the corridor to his office cubicle.

  “Sure, there’s a place,” he said. “Follow me.”

  There was a large crowd gathered in front of Charlie Belcher’s mobile home when Grissom and Sara pulled up to it at a little past ten o’clock, their police accompaniment right on their tail, jamming their brakes down hard so as not to crash into one another’s bumpers. At least fifteen, twenty residents of the trailer court, by Sara’s quick estimate. They were in shorts and T-shirts and robes, in socks or slippers or, in some cases, barefoot, looking shocked and confused, as if they had rushed out of their places and left their lights and televisions on, left their snacks and late suppers and beers sitting on tables and nightstands, left the kids back in their beds with orders to stay put—in short, looking as if they’d abruptly stopped whatever they were doing to come running out to Unit 24, where—as the CSIs and uniforms would later find out—they had heard the awful racket.

  The screaming, the crashing, and the gunshots.

  Sara looked out at the Belcher trailer. The lights were on inside. It appeared as if every single light in the place was on. Brightness leached out between the slats and frames of the window shutters. Brightness spilled from the partly open front door.

  Sara wasn’t sure why, but she found the stark radiance pouring out of the place into the darkness of night deeply, viscerally disturbing.

  She turned toward Grissom, her face taut with worry and dismay. “Gris,” she said. Swallowing dryly. “What do we do here?”

  He sat thinking a moment, glanced in his rearview. Behind him, the cops were out of their cruisers now, talking to the people who’d come dashing out of their homes when they heard all the noise, wanting to see what the hell was going on at Charlie Belcher’s place.

  “Let’s wait a minute,” he said, shifting around to face her from behind the steering wheel. “See what information they get out of those peop—”

  Sara grabbed his forearm, staring out the windshield. Straight out the windshield at the trailer, her mouth dropping wide open. “Gris,” she said, nodding in the trailer’s direction.

  He turned, looked, Sara’s fingers still clamped around him, digging hard into his arm.

  The trailer’s front door, ajar a moment ago, had been flung wide. And standing there inside the entry, bathed in the light streaming through the entry, all that light coming from what had to be every bulb in the place, was Charlie Belcher.

  Covered in blood, he was holding a gun to his head. A revolver—Sara thought it was a .38-caliber but couldn’t be positive. Between the blinding glare inside the trailer and the blackness outside, she couldn’t get her eyes to adjust, and it was tough to see for sure.

  Not that it made a difference what kind of gun it was. If it was loaded, and Charlie Belcher pulled the trigger with its barrel pressed against the side of his head, the end result would be the same.

  Sara swallowed without moisture again.

  The blood all over Charlie—splattering his face, shirt, and pants—gave her a powerful reason to believe that the gun was damned well loaded.

  A moment passed. Sara’s heart knocked. She shifted around to glance out the rear window, saw two of the cops who’d tagged along from headquarters crouched behind the open driver and passenger doors of their cruiser, their own pistols out. Behind that first patrol car, the other pair of unis was busy handling the crowd of bystanders, clearing them from the scene.

  Sara faced the trailer again. Charlie stood there, bloodied from head to toe, the gun barrel pressed to his temple.

  Suddenly, she let go of Gris with one hand, her other lunging for her door handle.

  “Sara,” he said at once. Grabbing her arm now. “What are you doing?”

  Her head whipped around in his direction. “Going out,” she said.

  He kept his eyes on her. “No.”

  “Gris—”

  “You can’t do it.”

  “The police have him covered,” she said. “They’ve got two guns on him.”

  “They can have ten guns, twenty, all he needs is time to fire his at you once,” Grissom said, and shook his head. “I won’t let you out of this car, Sara. I mean it.”

  They looked at each other for a moment in silence, Grissom’s hand locked around Sara’s left arm, her right hand on the handle of the passenger door.

  “Please, Charlie won’t hurt me,” she said.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes, I do,” Sara said, and as he began shaking his head again she released the door handle and gently, softly placed a hand on his cheek.

  “Sara—”

  “I know, he won’t, trust me,” she said. And smiled. “Gris, what do you see?”

  Another moment passed. Their eyes still connecting. The two of them joined by their ga
zes there in the closeness of the car.

  And then Grissom let go of her arm, and she turned back toward her door and got out of the car.

  “Charlie,” Sara said, standing outside the car now. “Put the gun down.”

  He stood in the doorway facing her, the revolver not moving from his head.

  “She killed Darlene,” he said. Angling his head back toward the inside of the trailer. “Shot her with this gun. Shot her.”

  Sara looked at Charlie. Sensing the police crouched behind their open cruiser doors behind her, their guns trained on him.

  “It won’t help if you die, too,” she said. “It won’t help Darlene or anyone else.”

  Charlie opened his mouth, closed it, his eyes bright in his blood-smeared face.

  “Was her that killed Adam,” Charlie said. “I was gonna take the blame. But it was her.”

  Sara inhaled, exhaled. “Gloria,” she said. “Your mother.”

  He made a snorting sound. “My mother,” he said. It came out sounding like a curse. “She…she tried to meddle with the museum deal, said me an’ her ought to get a bigger share of the cash for the Nevada Rose. Claimed I’d done more ’a the work than Adam and deserved more a the profits. But I didn’t…I knew I didn’t…” His voice faded.

  “Charlie, listen,” Sara said. “It would be better if you tell me this after you put away the gun.”

  “No,” he said.

  Another deep inhalation. “Charlie, I’m listening to you, I really am,” she said. “But the gun—”

  “She always told me I was the son that loved her the most,” he said, breaking in. “Who’d take care a her when she was old. An’ then when you an’ your friend showed up askin’ questions…when that happened, she blamed it on Darlene. For no reason.” He paused, sucked in a breath. “She said that Darlene informed on her. Led you to our doorstep. That Darlene was plannin’ to take me and the Nevada Rose away from her an’ that we’d leave her to fend for herself in the world.”

  “It wasn’t true,” Sara said. “You know it, and I know it. You can’t blame yourself.”

  “Who else am I supposed to blame?” he said, keeping the revolver where it was against his head. That damned revolver against his head. “If I’d been at the camp when she confronted Adam, I could’ve stopped her from smashing him with that rock. If I’d been here when she came after Darlene tonight, accusin’ her, tossin’ things all over the trailer, threatenin’ her with this gun…if I’d been here when Darlene called me for help instead a drivin’ out to see you…make up a lie to protect her…spare her from gettin’ blamed for what she did to Adam…if I’d been here—”

  He broke off, his voice clogging up, tears flowing from his eyes, mixing with the blood on his cheeks as they flowed down his face.

  Sara suddenly remembered the dead air on her phone when he’d called from his truck. The brief call-waiting lull. It had been Darlene contacting Charlie, she thought. Darlene phoning to tell him that Gloria was flying into one of her rages, asking him to come defuse it. And Charlie had changed his plans about confessing, doubled back around to head for home…

  And arrived there too late.

  “Charlie, I think you trust me,” Sara said. “Is that right?”

  He nodded slowly, crying. “I killed her,” he said. “Pulled the gun out of her hand an’ killed her.”

  “I don’t want to talk about that,” she said. “I just want to talk about you now. You can’t take on the guilt for your mother going out of control. For what she did—”

  “She killed Adam,” he said. “And Darlene.”

  Raising his voice to a near shriek.

  Pushing the gun barrel against his temple with such force it made his head tilt sideways.

  “Charlie—”

  “She goddamned killed us all…”

  “Charlie—“

  The roar of his pistol as he fired it point-blank against his temple cut her short.

  Moments later, rushing into the trailer behind the police, Sara and Grissom found the bodies of Gloria Belcher and Darlene Newell.

  It was not a pretty sight. But then, Sara thought, time after time, night after night on the job, the only constant was that they never were.

  10

  “LOVERS,” CATHERINE WILLOWS said, thoughtfully tapping her lip with a pencil. “Fireball Baker and his trainer.”

  “Gibbons, yeah.” Warrick gave a nod from where he sat across her desk. “They’ve been in a monogamous relationship for a few years now. Three, four, something like that.”

  Catherine tapped her lip some more. It was now almost ten-thirty, getting along into the night, and she still wanted to make it over to Vista Towers before Eleanor Samuels tucked herself under the covers. Nevertheless, Warrick’s account of his conversation with Kyle Gibbons had her nailed to her chair.

  “And Baker’s affair with Rose Demille?”

  “Nothing but a sham,” he said. “Or to put it another way, his latest attempt to conceal his homosexuality by being seen in the company of beautiful, sexy women.”

  “Some way for a person to have to live,” she said.

  “What else could Baker do?” Warrick replied. “An athlete of his status—a famous baseball player—for him to be revealed as gay would be a disaster in his macho world.”

  “Therefore his photo-op sightings with Rose…”

  “…their public carrying on…”

  “And the tens of thousands of dollars Baker paid Rose to be his cover,” Catherine said. “It took a lot of courage for Gibbons to come see you tonight.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And love, too.”

  “Yup. The guy put everything on the line,” he said. “He knew that if Baker found out he’d taken things into his own hands and opened up to us about their secret—and if we decided to go public—it’d probably mean the end of their relationship.”

  “Because Fireball would feel betrayed.”

  “Yeah,” Warrick said. “Wouldn’t you?”

  Catherine mulled that over, holding the pencil eraser against her lip. “Can’t decide,” she said. “It’s hard for me to relate.”

  “To being in the closet?”

  “To hiding my lifestyle from people or worrying about being judged,” she said. “I suppose it’s just something I’ve never done.”

  Warrick chewed on that a bit, grunted. “Makes me think of something Gibbons said when we got into my office,” he said.

  “Which was?”

  “That it was better for Baker to face the consequences of the truth than go to prison for living a lie,” he said. “I didn’t follow him at first…I mean, that was before he told me about the two of them.”

  Catherine glanced at the clock. They would have to get going any minute now.

  “So the night of Fireball’s party, he left Club Random, dropped off Rose, and went straight home just like he claimed,” she said.

  “Only not for the reason he claimed,” Warrick said.

  “That he had a workout scheduled for the next morning.”

  “Yup.”

  Catherine got his meaning. She sighed, slipped her pencil back into its holder, and rose from behind her desk.

  The night after the party, when Baker’s public charade with Rose Demille concluded, he had hurried home to be with Gibbons so they could celebrate their secret love together.

  Eleanor Samuels’s apartment in the stratospheric heights above the city. Eleven o’clock at night. Eleanor sitting on her plush red living-room sofa, Catherine and Warrick alongside her in the very spots they had occupied during their last visit.

  Her face scrubbed for bed, hair pulled loosely back in a ponytail, Eleanor was wearing a citron yellow silk kimono that closely matched the color of the cactus blooms on the large Georgia O’Keeffe opposite them.

  “It could be a coincidence,” Eleanor was saying in response to what Catherine had just told her. Her right leg crossed over her left knee under the flap of the kimono. “I don’t see how you c
ome here at this hour with these accusations…”

  “Mrs. Samuels, we’re not making accusations,” Catherine said.

  “Well, whatever you want to call it,” she said. “Come here drawing conclusions, then…”

  Catherine looked at her. “Your husband developed and pioneered the use of succinylcholine,” she said. “After noticing hypodermic syringe marks between Rose Demille’s toes, where they would be very difficult to notice, the coroner reexamined tissue samples from Rose’s brain tonight and found unusually high concentrations of the drug’s breakdown products.”

  Eleanor just stared at her. “I don’t know what you want from me,” she finally said, sighing. “You should be talking to Layton, if anyone, about this. I’m not the one who was having an affair.” She shifted against the backrest of the couch. “Besides, say what you will about my husband, it’s absurd to suggest he would kill that woman.”

  “She really had him hooked,” Warrick said.

  Eleanor shot him a look. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “You tell us,” he said. “Those were your words when were here just a few hours ago. You said he was hooked, said they were soul mates…”

  “I believe I also said Layton seemed to accept Rose Demille’s…appreciation, shall we say, for other men.” Eleanor’s lips tightened at the corners. “Especially those closer to her age.”

  The CSIs were quiet a moment, Catherine thinking it was time to pull out the stops.

  “Mrs. Samuels,” she said, “we happened to come across some information about your first husband while conducting routine background checks.”

  Eleanor looked at her, sitting up very quickly. “Why bring Carl into this conversation?” she said. “What does he have to do with anything that’s gone on here?”