Fairstein, Linda - Final Jeopardy (31 page)

The topic was world geography Mike and I could split this one down the middle, but I figured he was already on his way to the bar with Maureen. The Final Jeopardy answer was: “A town in France, famous for its tapestry, which was in fact an embroidered chronicle of the Norman Conquest.”

Alex Trebek began to go on about the tapestry not being an actual tapestry, but rather an embroidery made of coarse linen. I was sssshing him through the television screen as I tried to concentrate as hard as his contestants, who appeared to be as puzzled as I was.
Alengon? Cluny? I probably would have bet my whole stash for the evening on a topic I figured I was pretty good at, but I was actually stymied by the time the stupid music of the jingle stopped playing. I made a last-ditch stab at Aubusson.

“No, I’m sorry. Aubusson is not the right answer,” Alex gently rejected one of the players who had come up with the same guess as I had. Player number two had just left her card blank, shrugging her shoulders and shaking her head. Player number three, an obese musicologist from Indianapolis with one arm and five children, surprised Trebek with the right question: “What is Bayeux, France?”

“That’s absolutely correct, Mrs…” I clicked off the television before I could hear how much money she had won and picked up the ringing phone at the side of my bed.

It was the polite, slightly Southern accented voice of FBI agent Luther Waldron, greeting me with a “Hello, Alex, I never thought I’d find you at home tonight.” Well, I might ask, why did you bother to call me here then? But I didn’t.

“Hi, Luther. I’m just on my way out the door.”

“Wanted to let you know I’m in town. I’ve arranged for some of Isabella’s disgruntled suitors to be here for interviews.”

“Yes, I’ve heard.” as “ Course none of them look quite as likely as that character you had yourself mixed up with. That was certainly a kc shocker. Next time you get serious with somebody, you let me help you with a little background check, young lady.”

I’ll just ignore that one for the moment.

“How can I help you, Luther?”

“Just thought you’d like to know I was in on this. Your Homicide guys may do fine with street criminals, but I’m not sure they know how to carry off the interrogation of Hollywood types, businessmen. You know, the more intelligent kind of suspect. I’m staying right on top of it.

“Couple of other items. Just tried to pass them along to Chapman, but he’s out in the field. I’ll brief him when I see him tomorrow.”

“What are they?”

“Well, for one thing, Burrell’s back into the ice. Cocaine.

We’ve got a snitch in Boston who says his main man made a delivery to Burrell’s hotel room the same day Isabella checked out. You add that to his secret trip to the Vineyard, spice it up with his rage at her, and who knows what he did, without ever planning it in advance. We’ll be talking to him before the end of the week, and I hear he’s mighty nervous already.“

“What else?”

“One of our L.A. agents tracked down the local psychiatrists whose names were on the pill bottles in Isabella’s bathroom. Three of them had been fired over the years for not giving her the ups and downs she wanted. The current guy seems pretty cool, but he’s pulling all kinds of patient-doctor privilege stuff now. You know, he can’t divulge things Isabella said to him because she was his patient. Claims he has no information about her that has anything to do with the murder anyway. Wants to confer with his lawyer first to find out, legally, whether the privilege survives her death. How can he know what’s relevant to her murder without knowing half the details we know? The only thing he’d give up was that the lover she was talking to him about sorry, but we figure that’s Segal he’d had an experience with a stalker, too. That’s one of the reasons she was so comfortable with him. The shrink’ll talk about Segal says that he wasn’t the patient, so there’s no privilege with whatever things he told Isabella. He never met with Segal directly -just says Lascar told him Segal had also been stalked by some woman while he was running for political office.
Did you know about that?”

“Yeah, we did.”

“We’ll keep working the psychiatrist, Alex.”

“Okay, Luther. I’ve got to run.”

“Hey, got a couple of jokes for you, Alex. Heard them at Quantico the other day right up your line of work, so I saved them for you.”

The guy just doesn’t get it, I guess.

“Anybody down there tell you the one about FBI agents about why each male agent has a hole in the end of his penis?” I asked him, cutting him off at the pass, before he had another chance to offend me.

“No,” he replied cautiously, ‘haven’t heard it yet.“

“So oxygen can get to their brains.” Have a nice day, Luther.

“See you tomorrow.”

I put out my lights and locked the door behind me as I went off to meet one more of the men who might have had a motive to take the life of Isabella Lascar.

CHAPTER

I walked into Rao’s a few minutes before eight, while Tina Turner was asking the gathering of diners what love has to do with it, and reminding me once again, as if the lessons of the last week had not been enough, that it was a secondhand emotion. There was no sign of the Gorilla, but I got a warm hello from Joey Palomino when I reintroduced myself to him and said I was happy to wait at the bar. I walked over and sat on one of the handful of stools, next to a very attractive black woman Maureen Forester who was sipping white wine, while her date Mike Chapman was working on what looked like a vodka and tonic.

The bartender was opening a bottle of wine at Woody Alien’s booth, so I began to make small talk with the couple sitting beside me at the bar while I waited for him to return to take my order.

I’ll bet you twenty dollars you don’t know the answer to tonight’s question,“ I said, leaning across Maureen and grinning at Mike.

“What’s the subject?”

“World geography.”

“You’re on.” n I knew I had a winner. I gave Mike the final answer, but before I could sit up straight, he came back at me with s Bayeux.

“What’d you do, call your mother?” Mike’s widowed L mother was glued to the television most of the day and ;t night in her little condo in Bay Ridge, and she was his shill ;r when he couldn’t count on seeing the show.

“No. I swear to God, that was an easy one.” Il “Bullshit. How’d you know?” I couldn’t believe it. And I Luther’s worried that Mike’s too unsophisticated to inter, I view a cokehead producer, an illiterate stunt man and a ‘I cheating businessman.

He laughed.

“I was there in ‘94 fiftieth anniversary of D-Day. Bayeux was the first French city liberated by the Allies. June 8, 1944.” Mike and his military history.

“Went with my uncle Brendan, who landed with the invasion force, remember? The only other thing in town is the tapestry museum. Had to take Aunt Eunice through it twice. Relax, blondie, you can pay up tomorrow.”

Vie came back behind the bar, shook my hand, told me he was sorry he couldn’t remember my name but he was dead straight on the drink order.
Maureen and I pretended to become acquainted while I waited for my host to show up. She complimented my outfit and thanked me, under her breath, for getting her out of the fleabag hotel where we stashed our recalcitrant witnesses during trials.

We three chatted about the music, the changing weather, and what the prospects were for the Knicks this season.

About ten minutes later the door pushed open and Johnny Garelli stood in the frame, striking a pose and waiting to be fussed over by Joey. He was big and solid, as good-looking as the magazine photos, but with the most awful hair plugs dotting the front half of his head.

“Jesus, Mo, would you take a look at those implants?

How’d she ever get in bed with that guy?“

“Now, now, now, Alex. You know better than that. A man’s hair is like his penis they get very sensitive about comments like that. I’ve had at least three domestics’ men who killed their wives ‘caused by fighting over that kind of insult about hair. Be nice to the man.”

Joey and Johnny finished embracing each other, and I walked toward Garelli as Joey pointed in my direction. He had put us in the second booth Woody had the best table, of course and Johnny gave me the once-over as we made our way to our seats. I didn’t think I was exactly his type, but at least my hair was my own.

“Nice of you to call. How’d you know I was in town?”

“Actually, one of the cops told me, when he was talking to me this morning. I’ve been interviewed by them a lot, too.”

“I forgot what you do. Are you in soaps? Acting?”

“No, I’m a lawyer.”

“Like a defense attorney, that kind?”

“Sort of.” Not exactly that kind, but then, he’s not really an actor either, if you want to be truthful.

“D’you know Isabella for a long time?”

Longer than you, I thought to myself.

“About three years.

I gave her some help back then, when she was starring in Probable Cause. We became friendly after that.“

Johnny and I reminisced for a while over our drinks, and by the time Vie brought him his second Ketel One martini, Joey was ready to take our dinner order.

“No menus here. You gotta tell Joey what you want.”

“Yes, I know.” Rao’s had the best roasted peppers I had ever eaten, so I chose them for an appetizer, while Johnny got both Ls the baked clams and the seafood salad for himself. Joey Ier suggested the shells with cabbage and sausage, and the lemon chicken. Johnny added another pasta and some salad, as if he had been pumping iron without eating for five days.

“So did Iz talk about me a lot?”

“She told me a lot about you, yes.”

“Good things, mostly?” he said jokingly.

“We had some good times together, her and me.”

The English major in me winced. He may have been great in bed, but his syntax was as atrocious as his manners. He was shoving the bread in his mouth each time he came up for air, rinsing it down with the vodka.

“Did Isabella tell you how we met and everything? We was a hot ticket for a while.”

Enough about me, now let’s talk about what Iz thought about me. This was going to be a long evening.

Garelli wanted to make sure I knew all about his career.

The appetizers came and he inhaled his clams without missing a beat, taking me through his days in the Marine Corps. Stallone was his role model; he’d discovered Garelli when he got out of the service and cast him as a soldier of fortune in one of those blockbuster summer movies that I would have paid dearly never to have to see in my life.

“He was good to me, man, still is. Semper Fi.”

“Did you have to learn all that technical business about guns for the movie?” I asked, realizing as soon as I did that it was not the most subtle approach for the nature of the investigation.

His head was apparently thicker than his deltoids ‘cause he didn’t seem to get the connection at all.

“Are you kidding?

Didn’t Isabella tell you how I taught her to shoot when we were in Central America making that Clancy movie? Man, I grew up on that stuff, from G.I. Joe right to the Marines.“

“No, she just talked about your romance.” That had been nearly enough to make me question her sanity. I suppose I hadn’t asked too many more details.

“We used to sit around at night, drinking and making love. There wasn’t much else to do down there. I tried to teach her how to shoot.
We’d set up the empty vodka bottles on a tree stump in the jungle and blast them to pieces.

Some day what do you call those guys archaeologists?

Someday, one of ‘em will come along and do a dig right on that movie set. Iz used to say they’d think the Aztecs had invented Absolut, there’d be nothing but fragments of glass buried there.

“Then I could really make her laugh when I could nail one of them snakes, you know, like when they were moving?

Man, she hated those snakes. Green mambos. Those jungles were full of ‘em. She used to say she never wanted to see another snakeskin shoe or pocketbook in her life. I could spot those suckers as soon as they came out in the daylight to sun themselves and I could blast ’em in half while they tried to slither back into their holes. It used to be quite a game. Iz had a nice reward for me every time I killed her a green mambo.“ He winked at me, so I was sure to know that Isabella was taking good care of Johnny’s snake whenever he played sharpshooter.

To me it seemed like quite a skill. Not one that I wanted to master, much as I hated snakes. But Garelli had to be pretty good with a gun to hit that kind of skinny moving target. ey Plates were exchanged for other plates, Maureen continued to ply the jukebox with dollar bills so that fine music constantly flowed out of it, and Johnny sluggedvodka as if it were the last time he would ever have rer anything to drink. he “Why do you think the police want to talk to you?” I asked naively.

“Do you know anything about Isabella’s murderer ”Clueless, Alice, I am really clueless.“

I didn’t correct him on my name. He was pretty drunk, and I guess his mind was on the dancer he was due to meet in another hour.

“They ran me through every conversation I had with her lately, wanted to know about the man she was with all week, wanted to know which of her lovers she’d fought with. I guess they’ll do the same with you,” I suggested to him.

“Well, they’ll get shit from me excuse my language, sweetheart. She and me didn’t see each other for weeks.

We talked on the phone, she was some kinda tease, but if these motherfuckers think they’re gonna dredge up my past and try to knock me outta the box, they got another thought coming.“

“You got a lawyer?”

“No way, man. I mean I got a lawyer back home, I got plenty of lawyers. But you walk into a police station with a lawyer, those cops know you did something wrong. I can go in by myself, tell ‘em what they wanna know, and take the Fifth when I feel like it. I’m not payin’ some sleazebag to tell me, ”You don’t have to answer that, Johnny.“ I been around the block a few times. No problem.”

Garelli was working the tortoni now, for dessert, and Rick had brought over a bottle of anisette to place on the table.

The espresso was thick as mud and delicious, but Johnny cut his with the syrupy liquor, as though he needed more fuel. He lit a cheap cigar, leaned forward and eyeballed me.