Christietown (28 page)

’d have to go down to the dance studio, though. Lou was in

the middle of something and couldn’t get away.

I looked at the clock on my dashboard. Three fifteen. Wren’s preliminary hearing was just two hours away. It would take me thirty minutes to get to Santa Monica, another forty to get to the courthouse downtown. I did the math, then told Lou I’d be there as fast as I could.

Which apparently wasn’t fast enough.

By the time I got there, the blinds had been drawn, the door bolted, the blinking
P
ALAIS DE
D
ANSE
sign turned off. I rapped on the window but there was no reply. The stoop was awash in soggy take-out menus, one of which had caught on the heel of my boot. It came off in shreds, which I deposited in the trash can at the corner. I didn’t have time for this.

Putting my hands up to the glass, I peered through the gap in the blinds. Last time there had been two people embracing behind the screen: Lou and Liz—or so I’d thought, married twenty-two years and still in love. This time there was nothing to see. The lights were off. I wanted to call Lou. I wanted to
find out where he’d gone in such a hurry, but there was no pay phone in sight. I couldn’t wait much longer. I didn’t want to be late. There might be traffic.

Then I remembered the back door.

The alleyway smelled like rotting food. Looming park
ing structures on either side meant no air, no light. Near the Dumpster, half a dozen homeless men were sitting on pieces of wet cardboard, playing cards. Their perfunctory request for spare change made me sad, like they’d given up twice over.

I smiled. “When I come out, okay?”

“Whoa,” said the oldest, also the grimiest. “Pretty lady like you. We should pay you for brightening our day.”

“Thanks.” The back door had a sign on it reading
E
MPLOYEE
E
NTRANCE
. I banged on it, then stepped back. Nothing. I turned around at the sound of an approaching car. As it rum
bled past, I tried to peer inside but the windshield was too fogged up.

“Something wrong?” the old man asked.

I reached into my purse and pulled out a dollar. “Just look
ing for a friend. Have you seen anybody go in or out of here today?”

“You got a dollar for me, too, lady?” asked one of the others.

“Shut up,” said the first man. Then, turning to me, “Mr. Slick, is all. Came in this morning, been sitting in there all day in the dark.”

At that, I started banging for real. “Let me in, Lou. Right now!”

“That ain’t no job for a lady,” said the second man.

When I nodded, he and his friends clambered to their feet and made a tremendous racket, yelling, pounding, hooting. After a couple of minutes, the heavy fire door creaked open.

The old guy said with a bow, “I give you Mr. Slick.”

Lou ushered me inside as the door swung closed behind us. He’d cleaned up a little since the last time, but he still looked like hell.

“Why were you hiding from me?” I asked.

We passed through the narrow corridor leading into the studio, Lou kicking a couple of empty cardboard boxes out of the way. “No reason.”

“You knew I was on my way here.”

“Sorry.”

The light switch was by the music. I clicked it up and down a few times, but the room stayed dark.

“Don’t bother,” Lou said, tugging nervously on his lips. “City turned off the lights.”

“Why?”

“I told them to. I’m not paying for something I’m not using.”

In front of the screen was a large red suitcase. I looked at Lou and asked, “What were you in the middle of before, when you were so busy?”

“Just what it looks like. Packing up, getting out of here.”

“So that’s it? You’re leaving? Closing up shop?”

“There’s nothing more for me here,” he said. “Not without Liz.”

I went over to Liz’s desk and sat down in her chair. “We need to talk, Lou.”

“Okay.” He hesitated for a minute, then pulled up a fold
ing chair. He sat on the other side of the desk, drumming his fingers on the cluttered surface. “Mind if I smoke?”

“Go ahead.”

He reached for the pack on the desk. There was one ciga
rette left. He put it in his mouth, then got up to look for

matches.

“I found out something today,” I said.

He sat down and pulled the brimming ashtray closer to him. His long, thin fingers were twitching in anticipation.

“Wren didn’t kill Liz,” I said.

“I knew that.” He lit his cigarette, closing his eyes as the nicotine flowed into his bloodstream.

“The fact of the matter is, nobody killed Liz. But then, you knew that, too.”

He took another long drag, then exhaled. The sound rever
berated in the empty space. “I’m an idiot. I don’t know any
thing.”

“Don’t make me say it, Lou.”

He looked at me. It was dark, but I could see his eyes. They were glittering. “Why don’t you say it, Cece?”

I didn’t want to.

He tipped the ash onto the floor. “C’mon. I dare you.”

I wasn’t one to back down on a dare. “Liz killed herself.”

“Go to hell!” He leapt to his feet and his chair went crash
ing to the floor. “She wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t leave me behind.” He made a low sound in his throat.

I got up and walked over to where he was standing, his face turned to the wall. “She didn’t want to,” I said. “Leaving you was the last thing she wanted to do. But she found out about you and Wren.”

“I loved her. We were supposed to grow old together.” He was crying now, pounding his fist against the wall. Chips of old paint fluttered to the floor.

“You slept with another woman,” I said. “You betrayed your wife. What did you expect?”

“Not this,” he said, turning around. “I wanted a chance to explain.”

“The thing is, her dying wasn’t the worst of it, was it?”

“Shut up,” he said, wiping away a tear. “Just go now.”

“The worst of it,” I pressed on, “was that she didn’t mean for it to happen.”

“I need another cigarette.” He started rooting around the room, pulling things apart, tearing the calendar off the wall, tossing plastic cups onto the floor.

“She wanted you to find her in time. She wanted you to bring her back home.”

He went around to the other side of the desk and yanked open the drawers like a wild man. “What is all this? Stupid books!” He threw the drawers onto the floor. Yellowed paper
backs, old bills, tissues, sticks of gum went flying. He knelt down to sort through the chaos. “Where are the damn ciga
rettes?” In a fury, he grabbed one of the books and threw it across the room. It hit the wall with a smack.

Postern of Fate
.

Tommy and Tuppence have acquired a lovely house in the small English village of Hollowquay. They are content. They’ve grown old together.

If Agatha didn’t have it in real life, she’d be damned if she didn’t have it in fiction.

If Liz didn’t have it, what then? How far had she been will
ing to go? I knew. Lou knew.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he cried. “She read them all so carefully. She was so diligent. Learned her lessons. All about poisons and faking your own death and punishing the people you think needed punishing.”

Liz had been a good student, but she’d learned all the wrong lessons.

“It was such a waste, Cece,” he whispered.

A terrible waste.

Liz was going to make everyone think that Wren wanted her out of the way, badly enough to poison her. Wren would be caught. She’d go to jail. She’d be out of their lives forever. And Liz, well, Liz would survive. She could survive anything with Lou at her side. He’d come charging to her rescue, like a knight in shining armor. Liz had worked so hard. She’d looked so beautiful. She wasn’t going to take any chances. She wanted her husband to know exactly what he was giving up. And maybe—just maybe, if the stars were on her side—he’d change his mind.

Her big mistake had been consulting Javier. What a won
derful coincidence to have a new friend who was a gardener. Pretending to be Wren, she’d chat with him about foxglove and get the information she needed, incriminating Wren in the process. But Javier knew plants, not poisons. He’d thought it took months to kill somebody with foxglove. Liz must have figured out how to distill the leaves and mixed up enough to kill anybody—even a survivor like herself— within minutes. When I’d talked to Javier this morning, he was despondent. The last thing he meant to do was cause any harm.

The truth is like fiction, only badly constructed.

Ariadne Oliver, Agatha Christie’s alter ego, a mystery novel
ist and friend of Hercule Poirot, once said that.

“You’ve known about this for a long time, haven’t you?” I asked Lou.

“Yes.”

“You could’ve saved Wren a lot of anguish.”

“That’s not true. How could I save Wren when she won’t save herself?”

“What you couldn’t do was admit you’d failed your wife,” I said. “So you failed both of them.”

He knew it was true. But was he ready to accept the respon
sibility for it? Until he did, I had nothing. He had all the miss
ing pieces.

“There’s no going back now,” he said.

“It’s too late for Liz,” I said. “But not for Wren.”

“She can tell them the truth herself.”

“She won’t. She’s afraid.” The words I didn’t want to say were the words he needed to hear. What choice did I have? None. “Wren is where she is because she loves you,” I said. “Do for her what you can’t do for Liz.”

And with that, the wall he’d so painstakingly erected crum
bled, like the ash at the end of his cigarette. He rose to his feet, walked back over to the suitcase, unzipped it, and pulled out a red wig—the same one I’d bought at Lola’s.

“Here,” he said, pushing it toward me. He was looking down at his feet. “I found it mixed up with the dancing cos
tumes. That’s where Liz must have hidden it.”

I checked the clock on the wall. It was 4:30 now.

“Will you come with me, Lou?”

I held out my hand and he grabbed for it, like a drowning man grabs for a lifeline.

C
HAPTER
4
7

e exited the freeway at Temple, entering the evil maze of

one-way streets that is downtown Los Angeles.

Looming skyscrapers, sterile subterranean concourses, deserted private plazas, Skid Row to your left, loft conversions to your right. I prayed for clarity. One wrong turn and I’d have to go all the way to Little Tokyo before I could pull a U-turn.

“We’re not going to make it,” said Lou, tossing his cigarette out the window. “Look at the clock.”

It was 5:12. He was right.

“Call McAllister,” I said, handing Lou the detective’s card. “Tell him we’re on our way with urgent information.”

Lou punched the number into his phone, waited, shook his head. “Machine.”

Wren would be stuck in jail for another night. I slapped my hands against the steering wheel.

If only I’d found Lola’s sooner.

If only Lou had opened up the door when I’d first arrived.

If only.

But then we drove past a street called Hope (between Grand and Spring), and I felt something jolt through my veins.

“Oh, yes, we’re going to make it,” I said to Lou. “Today is your lucky day. I feel it in my bones.”

The Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center is a cement monolith on the corner of Temple and Spring, named for the suffragette from Indiana who’d become the first prac
ticing female lawyer. Lou and I gave each other high fives as we pulled into the parking lot next door with less than ten minutes to spare.

“Sixteen bucks,” said the attendant, not looking up from the TV. I studied the sign. Three dollars every fifteen minutes; sixteen dollars maximum. No in-and-out privileges. Lost ticket results in death and dismemberment.

“Do I have to pay in advance?” I asked. “We’re not going to be long.”

“Sixteen bucks,” he repeated.

I riffled through my purse, but could find only nine dollars.

The attendant ripped open a bag of chips. “This is a place of business. You parking or not?”

“Do you have any money, Lou?”

He went through his wallet and handed me a five and a one.

“Can you live with fifteen?” I asked, putting the car into Drive. I’d meant it as a rhetorical question.

The attendant shook his head.

I put the car back into Park and turned my purse upside down. I came up with thirty cents and some cracker crumbs. There was somebody behind us now, honking impatiently. “I gotta get to court!” he yelled.

I leaned out my window. “Do you have seventy cents I can borrow?”

“Jesus,” said the attendant, who motioned for the guy to go around me.

Lou pointed to the clock. It was 5:23 now.

“Is there a bank machine around here?” I asked, at the end of my rope now.

The attendant pointed to a big, black building sandwiched between two other big, black buildings. “B of A.”

“Wait here,” I said to Lou, unbuckling my seat belt.

I sprinted over to the bank. There were two machines, one of which had an Out of Order sign taped to it, the other a line consisting of at least a dozen Japanese tourists wearing Disneyland shirts. I was getting ready to take my chances and abandon my car exactly where it was when a tour bus pulled up and honked its horn. The tourists started to cheer, then did a group about-face and left. Now there was only one person between me and my seventy cents. Unfortunately, he was unfa
miliar with ATMs. He apologized, explaining that the ones in Norway were different. I looked back toward the parking lot. Lou was getting out of the car. What was that about? I helped the Norwegian get $200, $20 of which he offered me as a tip. I shot another glance Lou’s way. Lou was now waving a fist in the attendant’s face.

I took the twenty and ran.

After paying the attendant his blood money, we flew up the wheelchair ramp only to be confronted with a security line snaking from outside the building to the metal detector. It was bad. They were frisking people.

“It’s after five thirty now,” said Lou.

“I’m sure they’re running late.” I removed my belt and shoes. I hoped my underwire bra was not going to be a problem.

“You’re probably right.” It was the first halfway positive
thing Lou had uttered in days. “Gum?” he asked, shoving a piece in his mouth. He couldn’t smoke inside. I took a piece to be polite.

“Arraignments and prelims?” I asked when we got to the front of the line.

“Check at information,” the security guard said.

“Judge Velasquez,” said the information officer. “Hoo, boy.”

We took the elevator up to the third floor. I scanned the corridor for Gambino, but he was nowhere in sight. My heart sank, then I remembered why we were there. Determined, I threw open the door to Department 35 and shoved Lou in front of me. I wasn’t sure he wouldn’t hightail it out of there otherwise.

Judge Dina Velasquez looked up, her face framed by a pair of black cantilevered glasses and a spiky crew cut. At the sight of us, she frowned disapprovingly.

“Where’s Wren?” asked Lou, slipping into the last row of seats. “I don’t see her. When are they bringing her out?”

“I’ll find out.” I made my way up the aisle. Mariposa and McAllister were seated in the front row, which was reserved for police officers. There were signs everywhere, for those who didn’t know how to behave in polite company:
TURN OFF BEEPERS, NO SMOKING
,
NO CELL PHONES, NO GUM CHEWING
. I swallowed my Juicy Fruit. Mariposa didn’t seem to care about the rules. He was on the phone. Maybe cops were exempt. I tapped McAllister’s shoulder.

“Ms. Caruso,” he whispered. “What are you doing here? And Mr. Berman,” he said, spying Lou in the back.

“Is Ms. Lee here for the defense?” intoned Judge Dina. She’d have made an excellent baritone.

“On her way,” said the clerk.

“Ms. Lee is getting exactly ten minutes,” the judge said, removing her glasses with a sigh.

The bailiff got up and started jangling keys.

The stenographer adjusted his chair.

The clerk pulled out a thick file and tapped his fingers on it.

“Where’s Wren?” I whispered.

Mariposa hung up the phone and turned around. “Zipping up her party dress.”

I suppressed the urge to slap him and asked, “Is that the prosecutor up there? What’s her name?”

She was in her late twenties, a mousy blonde, skinny. She looked like she was playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes.

“A D.A., Clara Webber,” said McAllister. “Don’t be fooled.”

“Ms. Webber,” I hissed. “Ms. Webber, I need to talk to you.”

“Well, shit,” said Mariposa. “You’re not kidding. Stop both
ering the woman and come with me.” He took my arm and marched me down the aisle, McAllister following.

“Join us,” I said to Lou, grabbing him on the way out.

We sat down on a wooden bench outside the courtroom.

“This had better be good,” said Mariposa.

What a terrible lot of explaining one has to do in a murder, I thought, paraphrasing Christie. “I don’t know where to start.”

“Contempt charges sound good?” asked Mariposa. “’Cause that’s where you’re heading.”

“Liz wasn’t the glamorous type,” I began.

“Unlike you,” said Mariposa. “Can you do the beauty-queen wave?”

Extend your arm out to the side, bend your elbow to ninety
degrees. Slightly cup your hand. Without moving your fingers or wrist, rotate your hand from the forearm. The point is no underarm jiggle. But why was I letting Mariposa distract me? We didn’t have all day.

“On the day Liz was murdered,” I said, “her nails were done, her makeup was perfect, her hair was styled, she had on a great suit.”

“The jacket had a peplum,” said McAllister.

“They don’t call you Pretty Boy for nothing,” said Mariposa.

“Will you shut the hell up?” said McAllister. “You never know when to stop!”

Mariposa looked surprised. Usually he was the one doing the slapping down.

“She wanted to look beautiful for her husband,” I said.

“She was dolled up for the play,” Mariposa was muttering. “Opening night, so to speak.”

“No,” I said. “You don’t spend all that time on gorgeous hair when you’re about to put on a wig.”

A lightbulb went off over Mariposa’s head. “No shit?” I nodded.

“She staged the whole thing?” asked McAllister. “She killed herself ?”

“She didn’t mean to,” interjected Lou. “It was an accident. She didn’t want to die.”

“Lou was supposed to find her before it was too late,” I explained. “He had her inhaler. She knew he’d come looking for her. He’d find her, and fall in love with her all over again. Only he didn’t make it in time.” I glanced at Lou. He was holding up well.

“What about Wren?” McAllister asked.

I told them how Liz had framed her, hoping Lou would lose interest in someone capable of murder. Liz dressed up as Wren to buy the foxglove, then called Javier, pretending to be Wren, to find out about how much to use, dumping the used plants into Wren’s trash.

“It’s quite a story you got there, but how are we supposed to prove it?” asked Mariposa.

I turned to Lou, who held out the red wig. “I found it in Liz’s things. It’s what she wore that day.”

“It’s a start,” I said.

“There’s more, Cece.” Lou stuck his hand in his pocket and pulled out a small brown paper bag.

“What’s this?” I asked.

Inside were some broken capsules and what looked like pot
pourri. “I found a mess in the bathroom that afternoon when I came home from Christietown. Even then, I guess I knew what she’d done. I just didn’t want to admit it.”

Another missing piece.

Just then, a tall, angry-looking Asian woman came barrel
ing down the hall. “Excuse me,” she shouted. “I’m running late. Out of the way!”

I got up and blocked the door. “Ms. Lee, I presume?”

“Yes?”

“Ms. Lee,” I said, “today is your lucky day.”

Lou said, “Believe it. She feels this kind of thing in her bones.”

A few minutes later, a now-jubilant Ms. Lee threw open the door to Department 35. I caught a glimpse of Wren sitting in the front of the courtroom in her state-issued orange jumpsuit. I hadn’t realized the other day how close it was to the color of her hair. As the door flew open, she turned around. She didn’t
react to me, but when she saw Lou she broke into a smile that

rippled across her entire body.

Lou returned the smile, if not the depth of emotion.

Still, I hoped they could take care of each other, at least for a while.

After Lou went inside and the door slammed shut, my new best friend sidled up to me.

“So you gonna solve the Holtzman case for us, too?” Detective Mariposa asked.

I looked up at the clock in the corridor.

“That depends,” I said. “Can you give me an hour or two?”

C
HAPTER
4
8

he onlookers huddled around the rosy-cheeked man in
the guayabera, laughing and joking. He exhaled, steadying his hand. They grew quiet, serious. Taking a step backward, he rotated his shoulder deeper into its socket, then pulled it back sharply, sending his first silver-tipped dart on its lightning-quick path toward the board.