The Midnight Show Murders (2) (16 page)

Chapter
THIRTY-ONE

Brueghel’s pitch the night before, about the evidence losing its luster, had spooked me. Of late, the odds were at least two to one against an L.A. jury convicting a celebrity murderer suspect. If my sitting down with Roger could in some way help to balance those judicial scales, how could I refuse? And let’s face it, I was more than a little curious about what he could possibly have to say to me.

As soon as I’d sent Dani on her way, I called the detective and asked him to start the ball rolling. I explained that I’d be tied up after two p.m. that day but would be free the following morning.

Less than an hour later, while I was amusing myself watching Amelia St. Laurent lead a straw-thin, shaggy-bearded fiftysomething member of British rock royalty and his actress wife around the property, Brueghel called back. Could I make it to Men’s Central Jail on Bauchet Street in downtown L.A. in forty-five minutes?

“You tell me,” I said. “I’m out at Malibu.”

“Drive fast,” he said.

The MCJ, maintained by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, is said to be the world’s largest jail. For one or two very personal reasons, even the world’s smallest jail would be near the top of my avoid-at-all-cost list. So it was not with eager anticipation that I deposited the Lexus in a public lot on the corner of Vignes and Bauchet and walked toward the lobby of the twin towers.

Brueghel was waiting just past the door with a man whom he introduced as Malcolm Darrow. Though I had mused on the lawyer’s surname, I was not expecting him to look quite so similar to the legendary Clarence. He couldn’t have been more than forty, but the image he conveyed was of an older man. His three-piece suit, though no doubt expensive, might as well have been off-the-rack department-store material, the way it was wrapped around his ample frame. He wore a vest pocket chain, the likes of which I’d seen only in black-and-white movies, and a starched collar/narrow bow tie combo that went back even further in history.

His receding hair had strands of both white and black, and a hank of it flopped down on his very high forehead in a manner that resembled Clarence’s. And come to think of it, Oliver Hardy’s. His shiny pink face was strengthened by high cheekbones and a slightly jutting jaw. Thin brows, arched in arrow points, gave him an air of permanent awareness. His eyes were as pale blue as a frozen pond. And my guess, about as deceptively treacherous.

“A pleasure, Mr. Blessing,” he said, staring at me unblinkingly, as if I were a beetle on a pin. He shifted a battered cordovan leather briefcase from his right hand to his left so we could shake. “Good of you to come.”

That point was debatable.

“We’d better get to it,” I said. “I have to leave in about an hour.”

“Then I’ll be heading back to the office,” Brueghel said.

“You’re not joining us?” I asked.

The detective glanced briefly at Darrow. “Wouldn’t want to intrude,” he said. He nodded to us both and walked away.

The lawyer’s pale eyes followed him to and through the exit, then turned my way. “Shall we?” he said.

There were three chairs and a table in the meeting room, all industrial gray metal. The single door was metal, too, painted a pale green like the walls. An old-fashioned buzzer was attached to the door frame at chest level. Except for the door, the walls were solid and went straight to the white ceiling without benefit of decorative molding. There was no two-way mirror behind which bored cops might observe our conversation.

In this age of technological miracles, I suppose there may have been a hidden camera or microphone. But I couldn’t see any, and Darrow struck me as the sort of barrister who’d bring the house down if such a device were discovered.

He sat next to me, placed his briefcase on the floor between us, and frowned at the empty chair across the table.

“How far away is his cell?” I asked.

“Not that far. Roger is in a private custody unit, designed to keep high-profile prisoners away from the unnecessarily inhumane, toxic atmosphere of the general prison population.”

“That toxic stuff sounds like something your great-uncle Clarence might have said.”

He smiled. “He and I are related only by political and philosophic bent. I share his belief that people are not in prisons because they deserve to be. They, like the five thousand poor souls in this facility, are behind bars because of circumstances beyond their control. An accident of birth. A mental aberration.”

“Would Roger Charbonnet be an example of the latter?”

He gave me full benefit of those arched brows and icy blues. “Roger Charbonnet is an innocent man.”

“The police have turned up a lot of evidence to the contrary.”

“As the greater Darrow once noted, ‘The police are the real criminals.’ ”

So Brueghel had been right about a planted-evidence defense. Considering the amount of it, that was probably the only way for the lawyer to go. Still, even though the average citizen’s paranoid distrust of authority seemed to be on an alarming upswing, judging by the vitriol permeating the Internet, playing to that struck me as not only desperate but disruptive. I didn’t like it. And I wasn’t all that crazy about Malcolm Darrow.

I watched him tug a round gold watch from his vest pocket, glance at it, and tuck it back in place.

“I understand your being simpatico with Clarence Darrow,” I said to him. “But isn’t the suit, the vest, the pocket biscuit, and the hairstyle carrying that a little far?”

That earned me a shark’s grin. A lawyer’s grin. “When you appear on your cooking show, Mr. Blessing, or on the cover of your cookbooks, do you not wear a chef’s white jacket and toque?”

“Jacket, yes. Toque, never.”

“The jacket gives you the instant recognition of being a professional, an expert. You dress the part you play in life. In the dim, dark days when I was a very young lawyer competing against graduates from schools more prestigious than mine, I decided to take full advantage of my surname. Let them wear their Ivy League suits like a banner. I dressed the part of a Darrow. My suits and bow ties and pocket watch were and are instruments of what they now call ‘product branding.’ But I’m curious, Mr. Blessing, as to why you seem so averse to wearing a toque.”

There was no harm in telling him the truth, that I thought it made me look too much like the guy on the Cream of Wheat box. I was about to do so when the door opened and a guard entered with Roger Charbonnet.

The room was small, and the looming six-foot-three presence of Roger in a bright orange jumpsuit seemed to bring the walls and ceiling closer in. His brief jail time had changed him. Hands cuffed in metal, he had a wild and dangerous look about him, enhanced by a drastic case of bed head and eyes red-rimmed and frantic enough to belong on Dracula’s dog. His stubble had grown past the fashion-statement length.

And unlike my über-chef buddy Mario Batali, orange just wasn’t his color.

He glared at the guard, then at his lawyer, and finally at me. He nodded his head. “I knew you couldn’t stay away.”

The guard dragged the empty metal chair out from the table, scraping its legs against the floor tiles. He used a key to unlock Roger’s left wrist, then, when Roger sat and dutifully moved both arms behind the chair, ran the empty cuff and chain through the metal spindles and reattached it to his right wrist.

Satisfied that his charge was pretty well chair-bound, the guard stepped back.

Roger continued to stare at me, nodding. I wondered if I was being set up as a witness for an insanity plea.

Darrow thanked the guard in a manner that was also a dismissal.

The guard didn’t move.

“We can handle it from here,” Darrow said.

The guard raised an eyebrow, as if in disagreement. He and the lawyer had a brief, rather low-key, face-off, at the end of which he said, “I’ll be right outside. Hit the buzzer when you’re through.” He glanced at Roger. “Or if you need me.”

When the three of us were alone, Darrow asked Roger if he was being treated well.

Keeping his eyes on me, Roger replied, “I haven’t slept since I got in here.”

“I’ll get them to give you something to help with that,” the lawyer said.

“Blessing’s going to be all the help I need. Right, Blessing?”

I looked at Darrow.

He said to his client, “We’d better get down to business, Roger. Mr. Blessing only has a few minutes.”

“Right. Right, right,” Charbonnet said. “Busy man. Down to business.” He flared his nostrils and took on that bull-like presence he’d shown me at Stew’s. I supposed that Roger could stand with the chair and charge at me, for whatever that would get him. In any case, I slid my chair back a few inches and began to speculate on how fast the guard would respond to that buzzer.

“The bottom line, Blessing, is that I had nothing to do with that fucking bomb, and I don’t know how all that crap got on my property. I mean, obviously it was put there to frame me. The only person I can think of who hates me that much is that whacked cop. Not even you hate me that much.”

“I don’t hate you,” I said.

“Roger, perhaps we should—”

“I’m getting down to business, like you said. Okay?” He leaned forward as far as he could with his wrists secured behind him. When that proved too uncomfortable, he slumped back and said, “For the last twenty-four hours I’ve been thinking about this. And it doesn’t scan. There’s something I’m missing. Like I say, the cop hates me. But how the hell could he have collected all that stuff, the dynamite and whatever, and then put it in the shed so fast?”

Darrow leapt to his feet. “That’s enough,” he said firmly. “This is not a topic for discussion.”

Roger gave him a quizzical look. “Whose meeting is this?”

“Yours, but—”

“Mine. I know what I’m doing, Malcolm. Just chill.”

The lawyer sat down again, slowly.

“Let’s see now. Where was I? Brueghel getting the explosive stuff to plant. Let’s say he went out to buy it. A lot of people know him by sight. He’s supercop, for Christ’s sake, the detective who caught The Hairdresser. When that writer, whatever the fuck his name is, came out with his book, he and Brueghel were on TV every time I turned it on. If somebody sold him the dynamite, they’re gonna remember.”

“Roger, I have to insist—”

Charbonnet ignored him. “So assuming he was the one who planted the evidence, it seems to follow that he didn’t just go out and buy it the day before it turned up in my shed. You with me, Blessing? Brueghel had the bomb ingredients at hand. Which would also mean that he’s got to be the one who made the bomb and blew up the studio.”

Okay, so Roger was now officially running for mayor of Crazy Town.

“We should end this,” Darrow said. “Roger, you’re not yourself …”

“You don’t stop interrupting, Malcolm, I’m gonna get my good friend Elmer the guard to kick your uptight ass out of here,” Roger said. He hit me again with those bloodred eyes. “Well? What do you think? Did the asshole detective want to put me away so bad he tried killing you to do it?”

What did I think?

There seemed to be two possibilities. Roger had won the mayor’s race by a landslide. Or, as I suspected, he was faking it.

In either case, he’d made a serious mistake, as his lawyer had correctly realized. I’d be taking at least one useful bit of info away from the meeting. Even while feigning the loonies, Roger had admitted that the detective’s fame would have made it impossible for him to purchase the evidence to plant without being noticed.

“Well, Blessing, would he have hated me that much?” Roger stared at me expectantly.

“No,” I said. “I don’t believe Brueghel would try to blow me up just to have an excuse to put you in prison.”

He nodded again. “It’s a stretch, I admit,” he said. “But who else would want to frame me? This guy’s been on my ass for twenty-two years. Nothing proactive. Nothing to merit a harassment complaint. But he keeps popping up in my peripheral vision. Having lunch in one of my restaurants. Or parked down the street near my house. The movie ends and the lights go on, there he is sitting five or six rows away. I’m at my tailor’s, standing on the box, and I see him in the mirror, looking at swatches. That goes beyond dedication. That’s insanity. Or am I wrong?”

“It’s pretty weird,” I had to admit. “But not insane. And insanity is what it would take to commit a murder just so you could arrest a murderer.”

“So lemme get this straight,” Roger said. “Victor lies about my alibi, so I’m a murderer. Brueghel spends the last twenty-two years stalking me, but he’s sane. You’ve got a weird fucking logic working for you, Blessing.”

I looked at my watch. It was nearing one-thirty. Almost time for me to leave, thank God.

Darrow had been paying attention. “We’re running out of time, Roger. Could we move on from Detective Brueghel to the original point of the meeting? The one you and I discussed?”

Charbonnet glared at his attorney, then turned to me with a look that was almost plaintive. “What he’s talking about is … The only reason I’m being accused of killing a guy I never met is because a woman I loved got murdered twenty-three years ago. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Not really.”

“Okay. Let me put it this way. I didn’t kill Tiffany. And if I didn’t kill her, then I sure as hell didn’t set off any bomb to try and kill you.”

“Roger, I don’t understand what you want from me. I’m not going to be on your jury.”

He looked at Darrow.

“What Roger is having a hard time saying,” the attorney told me, “is that he needs your help.”

“My help with what?”

“Proving his innocence.”

I wondered again if there wasn’t a camera hidden somewhere in the room. That ubiquitous entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher had to be lurking somewhere nearby, ready to punk me.

“Why would I want to do that?” I asked Darrow.

Roger spoke before the lawyer had a chance. “Let me ask you something, Blessing. Man to man. Back in the day, what was your deal with Tiffany? Were you giving her a little poke every now and then?”

I stared at him, changing my opinion. Maybe he wasn’t faking craziness after all.