Perfect Sax (25 page)

Wesley signaled to me that our truck had been loaded and we needed to split. I had never been so grateful to leave one of my own parties in my life. I told the women I had to go.

Caroline Rochette did not stick around an instant longer. Zenya stood in the middle of her empty backyard, almost alone. Her son, Kirby, walked up to his mom, hanging his head as he hugged her.

“Things always work out, Kirby my boy,” I heard her saying to him as I walked away. Whether from a natural talent for bouncing back up, or a lifelong habit of putting a sunny spin on every bad turn in life, Zenya had her soft smile back in place, ready to cheer up her son.

“I called Uncle Dex,” Kirby said. “He’s coming right over.”

“Good boy,” she said, rubbing his hair.

“Mom. What are we going to do?” Kirby’s strained voice could be heard even as I walked across the lawn.

“We’ll improvise, sweetheart,” I heard Zenya say to her
jazz-playing son. “You’re so good at that. You’ll teach your mom.”

When I reached Wesley at the front of the house, he looked grim. It had been an unprecedented party. We’d never had a hostess lose her husband in the middle of the meal before. First time for everything.

“It’s okay,” I said to Wes. “I think Zenya is ready to hear the truth about Bill now. She has some big shocks ahead. But I think she’ll be able to roll with them.”

“Mad,” Wes said, ignoring my words. “I just got off the cell. They’re letting Bill Knight go.”

“What?”

“Rich men get a different kind of justice, right? Bill Knight’s lawyers have already raised the roof. Since this is just a suspicion-of-insurance-fraud arrest, with no priors, they’re letting him go on his own recognizance.”

“But, Wes! The murders of Sara Jackson and—”

“I know, Mad. The cops don’t have any evidence to make that sort of charge right now. I just talked to Honnett, who was calling for you, by the way. They didn’t find Knight’s fingerprints in your house or in Grasso’s house. They have no witnesses that place him at the scene. He said he was home with his wife on the night of Sara Jackson’s murder.”

“But he
wasn’t
!”

“I’m just telling you what Honnett told me. The police don’t have any real evidence.”

“Shit. This is all taking too long. I can’t stand it. Zenya said Bill went out early Sunday morning, after the Woodburn ball. And now the cops are going to need more time to pin down everything that asshole has done.”

“You’re right,” Wes said. “Look, I need to return the rental tables. What are you doing?”

That was an extremely good question. I felt that too-familiar
clawing of fear in the pit of my stomach. What was I going to do now? A murderer was very likely going to be out on the street in a few hours and I was pretty sure who he would come after.

Me.

I
was in serious trouble. I ran all the way up the path to Wesley’s guest house and used my key to enter. Bill Knight was about to be released. My name would have been mentioned a lot. Tracking down the valuations from LACMA and talking to the cops. Telling his mistress, Caroline, about his ulterior motives. Letting his wife know about his affair with Caroline. Sticking my nose into every horrid secret the jerk had tried to get away with. Bill Knight might figure that if he eliminated me, he would be home free. Or he might just want payback.

It was maddening. There wasn’t much evidence tying him to the murders of Sara Jackson and Grasso and they wouldn’t lock him up for good until they had some. I had to find more proof fast. If I waited for the cops to do it, I might be dead first. It was only a few strides to get to the guest bedroom.

Inside, I stepped out of my shoes and changed into a clean pair of shorts. Then I pulled open the nightstand drawer and touched the Lady Smith .38. I had no holster or other method of carrying it safely, but I didn’t care. I grabbed the loaded gun, shoved it into my big Hawaiian-print bag, and slung it over my shoulder, trying to calm myself down. Trying to chill.

When I got back out into the main section of the guest house, I noticed something odd. I must have missed it earlier when I raced to my room. Holly’s shoes were kicked off in the corner of the kitchen. The silver open-toe wedgies she’d been wearing at today’s party. It wasn’t unusual for Holly to stop by Wesley’s after a gig. It was a tradition, really. But where had she gone?

“Holly?” I walked through the little cottage. The bathroom door was open. It was empty. The other rooms were silent.

I opened the front door of the guest house and looked across the pool to the main house. The chandelier light was on in the empty living room, but I hadn’t seen Rolando’s truck outside today. Holly must have gone over. While I knew Wes could be delayed returning the rentals, I would feel much safer hanging with Holly.

Outside, I barefooted it across the warm grass. The French door that led to the sunroom was unlocked. Wes had told the crew to lock up when they left the site for the day, but maybe Holly let herself in with the key and forgot to relock it.

I had the sudden high-school-girl urge to surprise Holly and scare the heck out of her. I crept along the sunroom and into the main hall. The house was a shambles of dust and drop cloths. A ladder leaned against one wall. I edged along the hall to the front foyer. I was about to yell, “Surprise,” when I heard a voice. Holly was talking. Maybe I shouldn’t give her a heart attack while she was talking on the cell phone. Maybe it was Donald. She’d been missing him a lot since he’d been out of town. The good angel won out over the bad. I would eavesdrop before I pounced, hiding in the entry closet. Inside the tiny space, I couldn’t hear a thing.

So I gave it up. I came out of the closet and headed for the
arched doorway that led into the step-down living room. The large empty space was covered in hideous cranberry-colored deep-pile carpet. Wes planned to tear it out and refinish the hardwood floor underneath. With my bare feet, I noiselessly entered the room.

When I turned the corner, I froze.

Standing in front of the gigantic fireplace in the middle of the room, facing me, was Holly. Standing with her back to me was the woman with the red shag haircut. The one who had followed me in her Honda Accord through Hollywood, and shown up to spy on me on Dexter’s deck. She was now pointing a hand at Holly, a hand holding a 9mm semiautomatic handgun. I remembered it from the charts.

I ducked back out of sight, my heart pounding out of my chest. Holly had seen me. I was certain she must have. But she hadn’t reacted at all. Oh my God. What did that woman want with Holly?

I tried to move silently as I rushed out to the back sunroom. Who was that woman, anyway?
Who was she?
I had to do something to rescue Holly. I opened my shoulder bag and saw the .38, heavy at the bottom. I blanched, frozen for a moment, unable to think clearly. I reached past it and grabbed my cell phone, quickly dialing Honnett’s number, resenting the sounds of the little beep tones as I hit each number. Several rings, and then his machine. I despaired. I left him voice mail. I called 911 and waited for the second ring. They would pick up. They would—

“Drop it!”
a woman’s voice said.

I jerked around. The red-haired woman stood in the doorway of the sunroom, her gun pointed at me.

“Drop it right now or you are dead.”

I let the cell phone hit the tile floor.

“Kick it over here. Now!” she yelled.

I had a frantic panic that she had killed Holly, but I tried hard to control the fear. I hadn’t heard a gunshot and her weapon didn’t seem to have noise-suppression equipment. I prayed Hol was all right. The woman snapped off the power button on my cell phone and dropped it back onto the floor.

“What did you do to Holly? Who are you?” I stared at her. She had fair skin and faded looks, like she had been pretty at one time. Close up, I could see that despite her good bone structure, her skin looked worn, covered with many fine lines. She would have looked a lot better if she had been wearing some makeup. With her sparkless looks, it was hard to see a resemblance, but her coloring was similar to Sara Jackson’s—the same dark red hair and freckles.

“You really have no idea who I am,” she said, amazed.

“Are you related to Sara Jackson?”

She shook her head, amused.

I couldn’t help staring at the gun in her hand. She held it firmly and capably, two-handed for support. I had the fleeting thought that Andi, my gun trainer, would be impressed.

“Why have you been following me?” I asked, trying to stay calm. “Do you know Dexter Wyatt?”

“I have the gun, so I’ll lead this conversation, okay?”

She acted like a pissed-off cop.

“Which reminds me,” she continued, “I want my thirty-eight back.”

Her
.38? The gun Honnett had lent to me, the engraving had included an initial.
S
perhaps. And a former cop. Sherrie? Sherrie Honnett. Oh my God.

“This can’t be happening,” I said, my brain swimming. Honnett’s wife. The age was right. As a cop, she’d be familiar with firearms. But what the hell was she doing pointing a Beretta 9mm at my heart? “Sherrie, put the gun away.”

“Finally,” she yelled at me. “I’ve known about you for a long time, and now you finally know me. Perfect.”

“What are you doing here?” We stood in the empty sunroom and I was becoming more alarmed by the minute. “What did you do to Holly? Did you hurt her?”

“Your girlfriend is sleeping in the other room.”

Sleeping! My stomach jumped. I steadied myself and tried to follow what she was saying.

“I let myself into that little cottage where you live, looking for my revolver, and I found your friend instead. She began yelling and getting hysterical, so I brought her to this house, where I could leave her for a while. My plan was to come back and wait for you. But I took too long, didn’t I? And here you are.”

“I don’t know why you’ve been following me, Sherrie. Or why on earth you think you’re entitled to break into my house or hurt my friends. But you have got to wake up now. You can’t get away with this behavior.”

“I don’t intend to,” she said, in disgust. “I’ll take responsibility for it all. You don’t know me very well, but you’ll see.”

The woman was completely irrational. I kept the anger out of my voice this time. “You must be very upset, Sherrie,” I said, making eye contact with her. “You’ve been sick. You need your husband by your side. I know that now. I’m aware of everything now.”

“You, little girl, know nothing. You have no idea what you are talking about.” Sherrie Honnett looked like she would like to spit on me. Or shoot me. “Sit down on the floor,” she ordered. “Over in the corner. Now. Move.”

I sat down where she told me to, and she followed my actions with the gun, carefully settling herself on the floor ten feet away from me, resting the Beretta on her knee, pointing it right at my chest.

“I know you must love your husband,” I said, trying again.

“You have no idea what I feel,” she said, still gravely annoyed. “He is the most honorable, exceptional man you have
ever met, Madeline Bean. You don’t appreciate that, of course, because you are a class-one bitch. But that man is the best there is.”

Her eyes were gleaming. Her voice was harsh.

I kept quiet, trying not to obsess over the opening of the unblinking gun barrel as it stared at me.

“I met him ten years ago when I was working at the Hollenbeck Division,” she said. “Chuck served his probationary period there, but he wanted more excitement, so he moved to the Seventy-seventh Street Division in South Central. Did you know any of this?”

I shook my head.

“Figures. You take up with a man and know absolutely nothing about him. What do you care, right?” Her eyes challenged me.

“I do care,” I said, wondering if this was what she wanted to hear, trying not to piss her off any further.

“Then you’ll be delighted to learn that Chuck was a favorite out there. He tried new things. I was so damned proud of him in those days. They would always pick Chuck first to work the dangerous undercover assignments. He did good work.”

I had no idea how I was going to get out of the corner of this dusty sunroom alive. I had no choice but to keep Sherrie talking, and she clearly had a lot more she wanted to tell me.

“Is this cop stuff boring you, honey?”

I shook my head no. “What happened next?”

“He worked the South Bureau Narcotics Task Force and was part of some amazing busts. In time, the department knew how much trust they could place in Chuck. He was given the ‘problem probationers’ ready to be fired for various things in their performance as cops. Chuck would turn these cops around and keep them from being fired. Do you
have any idea what sort of man this is, Madeline, this man you have treated like crap?”

Wait. Was Sherrie angry with me for getting involved with her husband or for treating him like crap? Hold on. “What about your career?” I asked, trying to get it just right. “You were a great cop.”

“My own career with the PD was minor league. I always worked hard, but Chuck was the star in the family. He was on the gang task force until June 1998, when he was handpicked to be the senior officer in the Robbery Homicide Division. Do you understand what sort of man he is?”

The level of hero worship combined with the intensity of her feelings were enough to frighten anyone. The unwavering gun barrel scared me even more. “Sherrie. Please, let me talk. When I first met Honnett, I had no idea he was still married.”

She actually laughed at me. And why shouldn’t she? “You saying he lied to you, like some common scumbag? You’re talking about Lieutenant Charles W. Honnett of the Los Angeles Police Department,” she said. “This man doesn’t lie, kid. Do you actually think you’re going to sell that story? He doesn’t lie.”

She was right. Technically, he hadn’t lied to me. He just never went into the details. And to be 100 percent fair, I had never asked for a detailed review of his previous relationships. I thought men hated to be quizzed. I had been trying to be a free spirit. For all the good it did me.

“Sherrie, he said he had been married before. That was all. Married before. And this was a long time ago, at a time when the two of you were separated. How could I know? Then, later, when he told me more about you, about how he was getting back together with you, of course he and I split up. That was it. I know he loves you, Sherrie.”

A tear fell from her eye. I was shocked I had gotten through. I kept talking. “There is no need for you to get into bigger trouble over a…a misunderstanding, really. No need for guns or any of this. Men sometimes make mistakes with women, no matter how good the guy might be. The important thing is that Honnett loves you and he went back to you when you needed him.”

“Shut up,” she said. The gun never wavered in her hands. She had years of training on pistols, I realized. And this was, after all, her service gun.

I thought of her other gun, the expensive .38 Honnett brought to me after I’d begged him for his help. He never told Sherrie, of course. Probably hoped she wouldn’t notice it missing. That was Honnett’s style of honesty. Never say too much. Never explain. Right.

“He came back to you, Sherrie,” I said, trying to convince her she had nothing to fear from me.

“Chuck never would have come back to me if I hadn’t told him about being sick. He said…” Her calm monotone became ragged and she sobbed once, then pulled it together. “He told me he’d met someone. He said you weren’t like us. You were different. Some sort of cook. Young and liberal and all of that. Kind of like some arty bohemian. I asked him if this new girl had any idea what kind of hero he was. And do you know what he told me? He said you didn’t pay much attention to what he did on the job.” She shook her head, remembering. “This great cop, but what do you care about any of that? It was all wrong. I worshiped that man, but he wanted you. I didn’t know what else to do. I had to get him to pay attention to me again, so I told him about the cancer.”

“I heard you’ve been sick.”

She shook her head. “You heard wrong.”

“You don’t have cancer?”

With one hand she pulled off the red wig she had been wearing, keeping the other hand, the one holding the Beretta 9mm, steady on me. Beneath the thick shag wig, her own brown hair was pinned up under a net.

“We’d been living apart for over a year. He kept drifting farther away. I had to tell Chuck something. So I bought a wig and told him I’d been going through chemo.”

This woman was so seriously nuts.

“That’s when he paid attention. He realized we needed to work out our troubles,” she said. “ ‘Cause he thought I was dying. Not because he wanted me.”

I stared at her.

“It was no good, you see? You had ruined him by then. He wasn’t mine anymore. Nothing I tried made any difference. He asked the therapist we were seeing how long she felt I would need his support. She told me that one night after a session. I knew he would be leaving me any day to go back to you.”