Pie A La Murder (13 page)

“You haven’t dismissed me as your attorney, so our relationship is still in place. Anything you tell me is confidential. We won’t discuss it in this call, but I got it when you said that
you
have no motive. Where are you and Nick right now?”

“I’m at a pay phone on Westwood Boulevard. When I left Redding’s a few minutes ago, Nicholas was sitting in the back of a patrol car. John O’Hara told me to go to the Butler Avenue station to write my statement. An officer is going to drive Nicholas there. Listen, Olivia, I know in my heart that Nicholas didn’t do it.”

“That’s sweet as sugar,” she said in a tone laden with sarcasm, “but I can’t put your heart on the witness stand. I’ll meet you at Butler as quick as I can.” As usual, dispensing with pleasantries, she hung up.

I’ve always thought that the building housing the West Los Angeles police station at 1663 Butler Avenue, just south of Santa Monica Boulevard, had an oddly tropical look, that it should be surrounded by swaying palm trees with leafy fronds fluttering in the breeze. It’s painted in beige and cream, with its entrance framed in red tiles as bright as hibiscus blossoms, which is a color scheme that strikes me as more appropriate to Hawaii than to this gray green and brown section of West Los Angeles.

The facade of the police station may have suggested fruit drinks with paper umbrellas stuck in them, but none of the two- and three-story apartment houses in the neighborhood looked festive. The general atmosphere was one of younger tenants on their way up, or older ones whose dreams hadn’t been realized.

Law enforcement had two parking lots on Butler, one next to the station house, but that was closed off with an iron gate. In the lot across the street, that also contained the division’s private gas pump, I spotted three or four empty patrol cars. The rest of the fleet was probably out on the streets, cruising for criminals.

I drove a few yards past the station’s entrance, turned right at the corner, and found a parking place on Iowa Avenue.

In the time since I had been here last, the department had installed an ATM machine inside the building. The big sign out front advertising its location was impossible to miss. I’ve never used an ATM because of the general lack of security around them, but I was pretty sure that this ATM was the safest one in California, if not the entire country.

Tom Leland, the silver-haired desk sergeant on duty, was a man I’d known for years, all the time I was Mack’s wife. After his initial expression of surprise at seeing me in front of him, and at night, he said, “Hey, Della, what brings you here? Everything okay?”

“I stumbled onto a crime scene. John O’Hara asked me to come by and write a statement.”

He gestured toward the detectives’ squad room. “You know the way. Take any empty desk. Come ask if you need anything.”

“Thanks. And, Tom, someone’s coming here to meet me. Her name is Olivia Wayne and she’s—”

“I know who she is.” His warm smile vanished. “I’ll send her in.”

After eleven o’clock at night the detectives’ squad room was nearly deserted. A boyish man in his early thirties, unshaven, wearing a sleeveless sweatshirt and a shoulder holster, sat typing at a computer in a far corner of the room. He didn’t look up when I came in.

A man and a woman at facing desks against the wall and nearest the table with the coffeemaker on it had their heads bent over stacks of file folders. The man appeared to be in his sixties, and looked vaguely familiar. Then I realized I’d met him five years ago, when Mack and I gave a Christmas party at our house for his detective colleagues. He shot me a quizzical look, gave a quick nod of recognition, and went back to concentrating on the files. I’d never seen the woman before. She seemed young enough to be his daughter, but judging from the holstered weapon hanging over the dark jacket on the back of her chair she must be his partner. She gave me a brief glance, didn’t seem to find anything about me of interest, and returned to reading a file. I had the thought that when I was a bride, most of the police officers and detectives I met were older than I. Now half of them looked too young to carry a badge.

The pair of desks against the wall on the opposite side of the room had been John and Mack’s. John still sat there because I could see the framed photo of his wife, Shannon, and their daughter, Eileen. I supposed that Hugh Weaver had the facing desk, but there were no pictures on it. I’d heard Weaver had been married and divorced more than once, but I knew him to be essentially a loner. John was probably his closest friend. Maybe his only one. In spite of Weaver’s dyspeptic personality and his former habit of grinding out his cigarette butts in the grass on my front lawn, I’d become fond of him. No one would ever describe Weaver as charming, but in his work he was smart and, whatever his personal feelings about a suspect, he could be fair.

I chose an empty desk in the center of the room, and settled in the chair that faced the entrance.

It didn’t take long to write my statement because I kept it strictly to the immediate facts: I’d arrived at Redding’s door at approximately nine twenty PM, found it open, went inside, and discovered Redding lying facedown on the floor of his photographic studio with blood on the back of his head and an overturned stool nearby with what looked like bloodstains on its edge. Nicholas D’Martino had arrived shortly before I did. Nicholas checked for a pulse to be sure that Alec Redding was dead, but neither of us touched anything else in the room and backed out of it immediately. I added that we were about to dial nine-one-one when we heard a patrol car’s siren. Officers Downey and Willis arrived. We gave them our names and contact information and told them how we happened to discover the body.

The statement was true, as far as it went.

The only possible wobbler was my saying Nicholas had arrived “shortly” before me. Had he got there one minute earlier? Or ten? Or . . . ? To myself, I had to admit that I didn’t know. But however much longer he was there in the house, I refused to believe he had killed Redding. I wished I’d thought to feel the hood of his car when I arrived. If it had still been warm . . . But I’d been in too much of a hurry to think to do that.

I’d just finished reading the statement over, dating it, and signing my name at the bottom of the page, when I heard footsteps and looked up to see Olivia Wayne coming into the squad room. A head-turning blonde with long legs, she may have been good-looking enough to be on the cover of a
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue, but she radiated an attitude so intimidating that I would have bet muggers crossed the street to avoid her. Nicholas had referred to her once as “Xena, the warrior princess.” Except that she didn’t have dark hair, didn’t wear leather and metal, and didn’t brandish a sword, I thought it was a pretty accurate comparison.

Olivia closed the distance between us in a few strides, pulled a chair from the nearest empty desk, and sat down close to me.

Indicating the sheet of paper in my hand, she said, “Your statement?”

“Yes.”

Olivia took it, read it, folded it into quarters, and slipped the page into her handbag.

“No statement until I hear everything. Start with how well you and Nick knew Alec Redding, and why you went to his house tonight.”

I glanced about and saw that the unshaven young man at the computer was still typing, but the man and woman were watching us.

“Forget them,” Olivia said. “Give me the story, but keep your voice down.”

I started by telling her that Nicholas had an eighteen-year-old daughter.

Her eyebrows rose and a slight smile flickered at the corner of her lips. “That studly Sicilian is full of surprises.”

I repeated what Nicholas had told me about his divorce, and told her about my meeting Celeste, Celeste’s later meeting Alec Redding, his offering to shoot photos of her for her acting portfolio, and the resulting seminude shot with the pie that had enraged her mother and Nicholas.

“How do you know the mother?”

“She came to my house and accused me of being responsible for Celeste meeting Redding, when actually Celeste and I met Redding at the same time—at the Film Society luncheon.”

“Was she mad enough to commit murder?”

“I can’t give you an opinion on that because I’ve only met her once. She was upset because she thinks that picture of Celeste, if it gets into print or on the Internet, will harm her plan to marry a man with a title and a conservative family.”

“What kind of title? CEO or Duke of Windsor?”

“Prince. According to Celeste, he’s descended from a princess of Bavaria.”

Olivia shrugged dismissively. “Sounds like Eurotrash. So, O’Hara thinks Nick killed Redding to get the picture of his daughter?”

I shook my head. “John doesn’t know about the photo. I didn’t tell him, and Nicholas certainly won’t. If John has interviewed the wife—Roxanne Redding—she might have told him about it, but she was so upset, or seemed to be, that John wasn’t sure he’d be able to talk to her tonight.”

“Do you think Nick is acting like he is, deliberately throwing suspicion on himself, in order to protect his ex?”

“No, I think it’s to protect Celeste. He might be afraid that Celeste killed Redding.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. From the expression on her face in that picture she certainly wasn’t posing for it reluctantly. And, I think the way she posed, with a chef’s apron barely covering her, and holding a pie—of all things—that she was mocking
me
.”

“Because you’re Daddy’s main squeeze?”

“I sure I’m his
only
squeeze,” I said.

“Don’t get prickly, Della. Since he’s been with you, he seems to have lost his playboy ways. The first time I met you, I saw something nice in his eyes I’d never seen before, so whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it best.”

At that moment, a man appeared at the entrance to the squad room and came toward us. He was alone.

I whispered, “That’s John O’Hara.” I felt my stomach muscles clench with apprehension.
Where’s Nicholas?

Olivia and I stood up to face John. She handed him her card. “I’m Olivia Wayne, representing Nicholas D’Martino. Where is my client?”

“How did you get here so fast?” John asked.

“On the wings of justice,” Olivia Wayne said.

John ignored that and focused on me. “Did you finish your statement?”

Olivia said, “Della’s my client, too. No statements until I’ve been allowed to confer with both of my clients.”

“Look, Ms. Wayne. I’m investigating a murder—”

“And I’m sure you’re doing it brilliantly,” she said. “Have you booked D’Martino?”

“Not yet. Depending on the case we put together, it’s possible he could soon be charged with murder, but right now he’s been brought in for questioning. Unless he starts cooperating, we’ll put him under arrest for obstruction of justice. At the moment he’s even refusing to confirm his name and tell us his address.”

“And you couldn’t beat it out of him? A great big, strong man like you?”

“Cut the crap! We don’t do that.” I saw the effort John was making to control his temper.

“Of course you don’t.” She softened her tone. “Look, Detective O’Hara, it’s late and I interrupted a very pleasant evening to come rushing down here. When I’ve had the opportunity to speak to my clients, I’m sure we can find a way to protect their rights and also be helpful to your investigation. So, let’s play nice, shall we? Let me talk to D’Martino alone first, and then we’ll have a conference. Deal?”

At ten minutes to midnight, the detective partners had reduced the pile of files they were going over by two-thirds, and the young man who had been typing at the computer had finished whatever he was doing and departed.

While I was alert for John and Olivia to come through the door, I’d read every one of the “Wanted” circulars tacked up on the big cork Announcements Board between the front windows, had gone through a two-page recruiting flyer, and was now trying to concentrate on a slickly printed brochure about joint community and police department activities and opportunities for volunteerism.