Stripped (21 page)

“Don’t take this shit lying down, Amanda,” Stride told her.

“I never have before.” Amanda wondered, though, how much more she could take. It didn’t matter how often she proved herself, they kept coming for her, trying to drive her away. She stared at the word again. Pervert. She could feel the hatred of whoever had written it. This wasn’t a mean joke, a taunt. It was primal and ugly.

“You okay?” Stride asked, watching her.

She shook her head. She wasn’t okay. “I could have caught the Green River Killer, and the headlines would have been about my cock. I mean, is it really such a big deal?”

Stride laughed.

Amanda realized what she’d said and laughed, too. Some of the tension drained out of her. “Okay, it is a big deal,” she said slyly. Then she added, “I know what people think. It just hurts to have it constantly thrown in your face.”

She spent another few seconds feeling sorry for herself. Stride waited, not pushing her, and she felt a surge of warmth for him. She remembered what Serena had told her—that Stride had swooped in out of nowhere and become a lifeline for her. Amanda felt a little like that herself—not in a romantic way, because she loved Bobby, and she knew Stride loved Serena, but it made her feel less alone on the force to have him there, as if she finally had an ally, a friend. That hadn’t happened, not since she was Jason. Her friends from back then had peeled away, one by one.

“Tell me something,” she said to Stride. “Why don’t you hate me, too?”

“Come on, Amanda. That question’s not worthy of you.”

“You’re right. It’s stupid. Someone else asked that, not me.”

Stride was all business again. “You said Tierney had a bodyguard, didn’t you? Where was he?”

“Who, the Samoan? I think he’s just rent-a-muscle. There was no one else in the house.”

“Shouldn’t there be a live-in staff at a palace like this?” Stride asked. “A butler, six maids, a few gardeners to water the rocks?”

“Not according to the neighbor who found the body. I talked to him. He says there’s day staff only. Apparently, Moose likes to walk around naked at night.”

“Thanks for putting that image in my mind,” Stride said.

“What I’m wondering is how the perp got in here. He sure as hell didn’t walk from the highway at night.”

“Is there a log of all the vehicles in and out?”

Amanda nodded. “I’ve got uniforms tracking down every car in the security log, starting with the cars that left after the time of the murder.”

“Did he leave the shell casing again?”

“Yes, a .357, just like with MJ. I’m betting if we can recover the bullet, we’ll get a ballistics match. Although I doubt we’ll even need it. He’s not trying to cover his tracks. I’m having them dust for prints to see if he left us another souvenir.”

“Three murders,” Stride said. “Four, if there’s a tie-in with Reno. He’s picking up the pace.”

Amanda saw headlights approaching down the lakeside avenue where Moose and a handful of other wealthy neighbors had their homes. As the vehicle passed under the first streetlight, she recognized the limo in which she had sat with Tierney Dargon. When Tierney was alive and young.

She pointed at the car. “Moose,” she said.

Stride could see where the comedian got his nickname. He was amazingly tall and seemed to be all legs, like a circus magician on stilts. He had a shaggy head of long hair, unnaturally black and thick for a man his age. It flopped across his face as he sat with his elbows propped on his knees and his long, spindly fingers cupping his face like tentacles. His tuxedo fit loosely. He had undone his bow tie, which lay like a squashed bat on his ruffled white shirt.

He was alone with Stride and Amanda in the rear of the limo. His feet almost touched the other cushions of the stretch.

“My beautiful girl,” he said. “I should have left her where she was: I’m a selfish bastard. I wanted someone to take care of me. To bury me. Now I have to bury her instead.”

He looked up at them, his dark eyes haunted. Stride noticed his trademark eyebrows, furry and wild, which he was able to curl and twitch at will. They were part of his act. He could make his eyebrows dance, and crowds died laughing. Stride had seen him in a stand-up routine on television almost twenty years ago. His humor was black and self-destructive, filled with jokes about drinking, divorce, and strokes, drawn from his own life. But his eyebrows lightened everything, as if they were twin dummies and Moose the ventriloquist. Tonight, though, they sat motionless above his eyes like sleeping dogs.

“Can you tell us where you were this evening, Mr. Dargon?” Stride asked. He was polite but firm.

Moose slowly focused. He seemed genuinely numb with grief, but Stride had been disappointed too many times by suffering spouses. Too often they turned out to be perpetrators, not victims—and Moose was a performer.

“I was entertaining at a fund-raiser,” he said, pointing to a reelection button for Governor Durand on his tuxedo lapel.

“Why didn’t Tierney go with you?”

One of Moose’s eyebrows sprang briefly to life. “I’m a beast when I have a show to do. I don’t talk to anyone before or after. Tierney would have had to sit by herself with a table full of gassy lawyers. Listen to them telling her about their latest Daubert motion while checking out her tits. She would have hated it.”

“Who else knew she was going to be home alone?” Stride asked, putting a faint emphasis on the word “else.”

“I can’t think of anyone,” Moose said. “Usually, Tierney goes out if I have a show. She’s young. But today she decided to stay home and watch some movies.”

“Did she tell anyone about her plans?”

“Just the security company. She called them around noon and said she wouldn’t need an escort tonight.”

Stride glanced at Amanda, who was already scribbling in her notebook. He asked Moose for details about the security company he used, which was called Premium Security. Stride remembered that Karyn Westermark used a bodyguard, too, when she was in Vegas, and he jotted down a reminder to find out whether she used the same firm.

Amanda leaned forward. “Mr. Dargon, did you know MJ Lane?”

Moose’s face was blank. “Walker’s son? The boy who was murdered last weekend? I knew the old man, back in the sixties, but not MJ. Why?”

“There’s no way to be delicate about this,” Amanda told him. “Tierney was having an affair with MJ.”

“Oh.” Moose rested his head back until he was staring at the ceiling of the limo. “Now I see. You think I’m a jealous cuckold. First I had her lover killed, and now my wife.”

“You have a reputation,” Stride said. “A temper.”

Moose looked down and gave them a sad smile. His eye-brows rippled. Stride noticed the man’s gray pallor, how the outline of his skull showed through the skin. He had seen the look before, when his wife Cindy was dying of cancer.

“Once upon a time? Sure. But we were all bad boys then. We drank, we partied, we got out of hand. We were colorful, and that’s how people liked us. I used to piss into the fountains at Caesars. I’d egg on pretty boys until they took a swing at me, and then I’d break their jaws. I’d dance on blackjack tables. That was part of the show. When I went too far, they’d throw me in a jail cell until I sobered up, and then I’d have bacon and eggs with the cops in the morning. I knew the first name of every cop in the city, and I went to most of the birthday parties for their kids.”

“So your mean streak was just an act?”

“I’m saying I was what everyone wanted me to be. Look, I could blow up with the best of them. I was a son of a bitch sometimes. But I’m eighty years old, Detective. I’m on my way out. I’m a squealing little pig with his nuts cut off. My devil days, when I had a temper and liked to use it, were a very long time ago. I didn’t marry Tierney for sex, and not even to have a pretty young thing on my arm. Believe it or not, we liked each other. We were friends. I encouraged her to see young men if she wanted to, because I knew she’d have to go back to that life after I was gone. I didn’t ask for details, so I had no idea she had a relationship with MJ or anyone else.”

Stride listened for a false note and didn’t hear one.

“Do you remember Helen Truax?” Stride continued. “Her stage name was Helena Troy.”

“Sure. She was a dancer at the Sheherezade.”

“How well did you know her?”

“Well enough to have a drink now and then,” Moose said, “but that was it. She was Leo Rucci’s gal, so I kept away from her, Where are you going with this?”

“Less than two weeks ago, Helen’s grandson was killed in a hit-and-run” Stride explained. “Then Walker Lane’s son. Now your wife. We think the same person was responsible for all three murders.”

Moose sat up. “You think this is all connected to the Sheherezade?”

“All three of you were mentioned in the article Rex Terrell did about the murder of Amira Luz. Did you talk to Terrell?”

Moose’s upper lip and eyebrows seemed to curl in disgust at the same time. “Me? Talk to a fucking worm like Rex Terrell? No way.”

“Rex says you, Helen, and others benefited from Amira’s death.”

“I won’t deny I wasn’t too sad to see the little bitch dead and gone,” Moose said. “She played me. Used me to get to Boni and then kicked me in the balls.”

“Helen says you told her Amira was the best lover you ever had,” Stride said.

“That was no secret. We were involved. That Spanish blood, it runs hot. But she was no better than a hooker, using me to make her way up the ladder.”

“Where were you the night Amira was killed?” Amanda asked.

Moose laughed. “Drunk. In jail. Like I said, that happened a lot in those days. As it turns out, it was fortunate that I had an alibi.”

“So you don’t know what happened that night?”

“Just the rumors,” Moose said.

“You mean Walker Lane?” Stride asked.

Moose nodded. “Everyone assumed he did it. That story about a stalker, that was pretty convenient. I figure they wanted a fall guy. Like I said, I’m glad I had an alibi, because I would have made a sweet target.”

“So you believe Walker did it, too.”

“It makes sense,” Moose said. “But it surprised me.”

“Why?”

“I never thought Walker would have the balls for it. He was soft. He liked to dance with the devil, but he was just an L.A. rich kid. Killing Amira, that took guts. I can’t believe he’s still alive after doing that.”

Stride and Amanda looked at each other. “What do you mean?” Stride asked.

“Most people didn’t know. I knew, because I knew Amira. She told me, just to rub my face in it. And Walker would have known. He
had
to have known. I know he loved her act, went to all her shows. But he would have gotten word from Leo Rucci that the high-roller amenities didn’t extend to Amira.”

Stride’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”

Moose’s eyebrows did a little dance, like caterpillars wriggling to the music of the Sugar Plum Fairy. “Amira Luz was the sole property of one man and one man only,” he said. “The man you didn’t mess with. Boni Fisso.”

Serena parked in her driveway at home. She didn’t get out of the car. She turned off her cell phone and sat silently in the darkness.

She remembered the first time it happened with Deidre, when she was eighteen. She was in the shower. Deidre knew that she went into little fugues sometimes under the water, letting it pour over her head as the memories came back, hoping it would somehow rise above her mouth and drown her. In Phoenix, she used to take showers after Blue Dog, her mother’s drug dealer, was finished with her. Brown water, lukewarm, then cold.

She wasn’t sure how long she had been standing there that first time. Frozen. Lost. She felt like a quadriplegic, aware of her surroundings but unable to move or react, helpless to stop what was happening to her. Forced to rewind her past and watch it occurring over and over. As if, in the two years since she had escaped from Phoenix, she had not escaped at all but been consumed by a single, silent scream.

Then she felt someone else crawl inside her cocoon. Without a sound, out of nowhere, Deidre was there with her. Behind her, in the shower, naked flesh against naked flesh. Deidre’s lips were by her ear, and she was cooing over and over, “It’s okay, baby.”. Deidre’s hands encircled her stomach and held her gently, nurtured her, saved her. Serena leaned back against her, and something seized inside. A cofferdam of fear and shame began to grow fissures and give way. Serena sobbed. Her whole body trembled, and she was indescribably cold, frigid to her soul, except for the warmth of Deidre behind her. The more the tears fell, the more Deidre held her and soothed her.

It’s okay, baby.

Serena turned around and buried her head in Deidre’s shoulder, and still Deidre held her, letting her cry herself out. She didn’t know how long they stood there, as she climbed out of her flooded cave and back into the light. The water of the shower was still on; it was cold, but they were warm. When Serena finally looked into Deidre’s eyes, she felt free. She stared with exhilaration into Deidre’s damp, beautiful face and felt love and gratitude overwhelming her, morphing into passion. Deidre began, and Serena didn’t stop her. She joined in. Their lips came together. Their slippery bodies seemed to merge. She felt Deidre relishing her touch, and the more Deidre responded, the more Serena strove to give her pleasure. Kissing her. Massaging the hollow of her back. Hearing her whispered pleas to go further. Sliding fingers inside her, everywhere, front and back, deep and probing. Wanting to climb inside her.

In her memory, they seemed to glide, dripping, from the shower to the bed, then to spend hours together as night fell outside, making love to each other over and over in the squeaking twin bed where Serena usually slept alone. When they had sated each other, they fell asleep, exhausted, entwined.

They spent six months as lovers. She knew that Deidre wanted it to stay that way. In the beginning, so did Serena. She was afraid of men and felt safe in Deidre’s arms. She had no mother, and Deidre played that role for her, too. That was enough for a while.