The Midnight Show Murders (2) (2 page)

Chapter
TWO

“Change seats with me, mate,” Des O’Day said to Fitz, who leapt to meet the request. Unfortunately, in his zeal, he’d neglected to unsnap his seat belt, and it nearly cut him in two.

“Uh, oh, Jaysus! Sorry, Des,” he said, freeing himself this time and hopping into the aisle.

“Save the low comedy for the show, boyo,” Des said as he eased past the bearded man and slid onto the vacated seat.

“Man’s as thick as two short planks,” he said, winking at me.

I said nothing, merely gave him a questioning look.

“Well, Billy, suppose you tell me what ball of shite’s awatin’ me in lotusland?”

“Could you be a little more specific?”

“What’s the city like? I know the jokes. It’s a great place to live if you’re an orange. In Malibu, you can lie on the sand and stare at the stars, or vice versa. I’ve heard ’em all. But what’s it really like?”

“Your guess would be better than mine,” I said. “I haven’t been out there in years.”

“Twixt you and me, mate,” he said, lowering his voice, “the longest I’ve spent in the so-called Angel City has been forty-eight hours, and most of that was in the airport.”

“But you’ve been there preparing for the show, right?”

“I’ve taken some quick runs in and out, mainly to meet with our fearless producer, Slaughter. And to check the progress on the theater conversion. It’s near the WBC lot in Hollywood. For the last thirty or forty years it was a playhouse where they put on live dramas. Last time I was there, some of that ‘Don’t throw away our history’ bullshite was goin’ on, but I hear that’s mellowed some.

“I didn’t see the point of gettin’ involved in any of that. So I’ve been puttin’ off the big move, and the publicity, till the last bloody minute.”

“Last, indeed,” I said. “You go on the air in nine days.”

“They don’t need me to cobble the feckin’ set,” he said angrily. “All I’m expected to do is move kit and caboodle to a strange and, from all reports, loony land; get me fixed up in a proper house; keep my pale Irish flesh from the incessant, cancerous sun; find a whole new stable o’ slappers; and, finally, hobble in front of a camera and try not to look like bloody Fecky the Ninth.”

Not having an Irish slang dictionary handy, I was pleased with myself for making sense of at least a third of everything Des said. “You’re a funny man,” I told him. “You’ll do fine.”

“Don’t go Father Feeney on me, Billy,” he said. “I haven’t got a baldy, and I know it. I tried like hell to convince Gretchen to do the show from New York. It’s my bad cess she didn’t see the logic of it. I mean, Christ, look at the crowd of shows out here every night. Leno, Kimmel, George Lopez. And the bloody Scot. And now feckin’ Conan’s back. All hustlin’ for A-list wankers an’ makin’ the same bloody jokes about smog, agents, and the stupid culchies.

“Meanwhile, Dave and Fallon, bein’ the only players in Big Town, can afford to do hardball comedy, pick ’n’ choose from the top-name caffers, and still get the ratin’s. I mean, what’s Gretchen thinkin’?”

At this point I should confess I had given up deciphering what Des was saying, and to a failure of character. I was romantically involved with Gretchen until she suffered a lapse in taste and dumped me. There’s more to that story, of course, and if Wally has his way, you may be reading about it someday or seeing it in some exaggerated context on a movie screen. For the now, I mention it only to explain why I was secretly amused at the thought of Gretchen reacting to the carping and complaints of a sometimes-incomprehensible brash comic she was about to transform from sitcom sidekick into brand-name headliner.

I could imagine her biting her tongue, secretly cursing Des. Possibly even cursing her father, Commander Di Voss, for deciding that the network (of which he was president and chairman of the board) needed a late-night talk-show presence. Was it wrong of me to take some delight in an ex-sweetie’s distress? An
unfaithful
ex-sweetie? I think not.

“The fact of it, Billy,” Des was saying, “I need the edginess of a real city, like New York or Dublin, to keep the noggin noodles crisp. I’m afraid of what the feckin’ sun and the smog does to your wit. Not to mention everything being all spread out like bloody cheese on a cracker. Hell, I don’t even know how to steer a car. I’m gonna have to depend on a bloody chauffeur. Or Fitz.”

“Life is tough in paradise,” I said.

“If it was like Vegas, maybe I could work around the sun and the rest of the shite. You know, just hang in the hotel, do your work, and order up the food, drink, and scrubbers. But Gretchen says I’ve got to use the feckin’ city in my stand-up. And to use it, you’ve gotta know it.”

“Then it’s a good thing I won’t have to use it,” I said.

“As much as you’ve bounced about, I can’t believe you never spent serious time in L.A.”

“Nothing worth mentioning,” I said.

“Then why am I wastin’ my scintillatin’ personality on you?” he asked, giving me a half smile to show he was only half kidding. He removed his glasses and tossed them on the empty seat next to his script. “Might as well go check the talent on the flight.”

I wasn’t unhappy to see him wandering off to treat the hostesses to his dubious charm. Aside from his being pretty much the antithesis of a good traveling companion, I really didn’t need anybody to quiz me about L.A.

I pressed the button that lowered my seat as far as it would go, leaned back, and closed my eyes. I was hoping for sleep. Instead, I was visited again by the memory of Tiffany’s murder, the events leading up to it and the aftermath.

Especially the aftermath.

Chapter
THREE

As I said, my short-lived Angeleno life began about twenty-three years ago, not long after I decided to exchange a somewhat dubious and unlawful youth for a future fueled by ambition and a strong sense of purpose. During a brief stretch in prison, I found my true calling in the kitchen. Once I’d served my time, a jobs program landed me an apprenticeship under chef Ambrose Provoste at La Provence in Detroit. I was one of three chosen to assist him in the kitchen of a restaurant soon to debut in the heart of Hollywood, owned and managed by an oily Frenchman named Victor Anisette.

Just weeks after its opening, Chez Anisette became the favorite watering hole of a cadre of celebrities who followed in the wake of one of its daily diners, a famous, fabulously overweight director whose reputation as a gourmet was almost as impressive as his work on film.

For nearly a year, it was a wonderful adventure. The stars, superstars, and their acolytes and fans kept the kitchen busy, and, thanks to Chef Ambrose’s kindness, I was transformed quickly from apprentice to line cook.

I lived at the beach in a ritzy condo on the Venice–Santa Monica border. It was owned by an actress friend who was in New York, appearing in one of the few nonmusical hits of that Broadway season. The deal was a good one—I paid her monthly mortgage fee, which was not excessive, and kept the fish in her aquarium as well fed as the customers at Chez Anisette. In return, along with a furnished suite that included access to a gym and swimming pool, I was also able to hop across the hot-sand beach and treat my body to a saltwater immersion while freezing my ass off in the always frigid Pacific Ocean.

It was, actually, paradise. But like any paradise, only temporary.

The working relationship between Ambrose and Victor Anisette had been edgy from the jump, a classic case of genuine genius versus the self-deluded variety. It eventually deteriorated past the point of no return.

“You know who William Goldman is, Billy?” Ambrose asked me one night at the bar at Kathy Gallagher’s, a restaurant on Third that we frequented because it stayed open several hours past Chez Anisette and its bartenders made excellent full-measure gin martinis.

“Goldman?” I said. “Sure. He writes novels and screenplays. Including
Butch Cassidy.
”

“There’s a story going around, maybe true, maybe apocryphal. A couple years ago, he wrote this script for a TV comedian who’s now a big movie star. There were disagreements, and both Goldman and the director quit. Just the other day, the comic tried to bring Goldman back on board. He was in the middle of enumerating the script changes he wanted when the writer stood up and headed for the door. The comic asked where he was going, and Goldman replied, ‘I’m too old and too rich to put up with this shit.’ ”

Ambrose took a sip of his icy martini, swallowed it slowly, and smiled. “Earlier tonight, I said those exact words to Victor.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked, though what I was really thinking was what was
I
going to do?

“I am rich, in a minor way,” he said. “And a dollar goes pretty far in Louisiana real estate. Especially around my hometown of Alexandria. I’ve been thinking about opening a restaurant in Alex. It’d be like following in my old mentor Chef Louis’s footsteps.”

Chef Louis was Louis Szathmary, a Hungarian refugee who, with his wife, began a tiny place on Chicago’s Near North Side called The Bakery that eventually expanded into one of the city’s most treasured restaurants.

“I’ll start out small,” Ambrose said, “maybe fifty chairs. Then, as business demands, expand.”

It struck the self-absorbed, cynical, youthful me as being something of a dream. I was familiar enough with the territory to know that unlike Chicago, Alexandria, Louisiana, was not a hotbed of gourmets. Nor was it a city where diners were open to new culinary experiences. Worse yet, it was clearly not a stepping-stone to bigger things for an ambitious young black chef, even if Ambrose was to make me an offer. Which didn’t seem to be in the cards.

“What about Tiff?” I asked, just making conversation. Tiffany Arden was a very pretty twenty-six-year-old failed-starlet-turned-Chez-Anisette-maître d’ess and bookkeeper. She’d moved in with the twice-divorced fifty-four-year-old Ambrose about three months before.

“She’ll come with me,” Ambrose said with certainty.

“You’ve talked it over?”

“Not in so many words. I really just made up my mind tonight,” he said. “But Tiff’s a trouper. They’ll love her in Alex.”

Actually, they never got the chance. Trouper Tiff wasn’t quite ready to give up the fast life in L.A. for a city where folks like to crack crawfish for entertainment. So Ambrose returned to his hometown single-o and brokenhearted. He started a small restaurant that he called Ambrosia and, last I heard, was a new grandfather happily retired from kitchen work and teaching a course in nutrition and food preparation at Louisiana State University at Alexandria.

As for Tiff, well, the way things turned out, her decision to stay was not a wise one.

Ambrose’s replacement in the kitchen of Chez Anisette, and, not surprisingly, in Tiffany Arden’s bed, was an admittedly talented, if arrogant and obnoxious, young chef named Roger Charbonnet. He was a massive six-foot-three, gym-toned, ill-tempered jerk who made Gordon Ramsay sound like a food whisperer. His yelling and screaming were so loud that Victor Anisette was forced to soundproof the kitchen.

Giving the devil his due, Roger helped me become a better chef. Mainly because he scared the hell out of me and I did not want to become one of his kitchen smash toys.

Things went smoothly and uneventfully for nearly five months. Then, one morning, the cleaning crew arrived at the restaurant to find the front door unlocked, the cash register open and empty, and Tiffany’s body in one of the garbage bins out back.

The crime scene technicians (perhaps they called them CSIs in those days, though I doubt it) decided that she’d been killed in the kitchen and dragged to the bin. “Death by blunt instrument” was the official pronouncement. The specific blunt instrument, discovered in another bin, was a meat tenderizer bearing Tiffany’s blood but nary a fingerprint. The time of death had been approximated as between one a.m. and five a.m. that morning.

I and the other members of the kitchen crew testified that we’d last seen the victim when we’d left the restaurant at a little after eleven the night before. She and Victor had been toting up the lunch and dinner numbers, while Roger sat at a nearby table, scribbling his critique of our kitchen performances.

The detectives assigned to the murder were on Roger like white on rice. He’d not only worked and played with the victim, he’d shouted and screamed at her, and she at him. And their frequent outbursts of mutual animosity had been observed by many. Roger had had the opportunity to murder Tiffany, the proximity, and the motive. A prosecution trifecta, if you will.

But just as the case against Roger seemed a sure thing, it ran out of the money when Victor Anisette stepped up to provide him with an airtight alibi. According to the restaurateur, after we’d left that night, Roger and Tiffany had had another of their rows, this one, like the others, involving the chef’s roving eye. And other body parts.

When Tiffany furiously declared that their romance was kaput, Victor and a morose Roger had departed together, leaving her to close up the shop. The two men had traveled by separate cars to Victor’s home in Brentwood, where they drank and discussed the vagaries of women until the early morning, when Roger passed out on the sofa and Victor went to bed.

That had been at approximately six a.m. Victor was certain of the time, because he had set his alarm for ten a.m. When the device did its job and he awoke, Roger was still asleep on the sofa.

Victor assured the investigators that Roger had remained in his presence during the crucial hours. Yes, both he and Roger had relieved themselves from time to time, but not for periods longer than a few minutes. It was at least a twenty-five-minute drive from Victor’s home to the restaurant, even without traffic.

Faced with the restaurant owner’s statement, the detectives were back at square one. They put us all through the wringer again. They even checked Ambrose Provoste’s whereabouts and that of Tiffany’s other significants, going back to her college years. But they were unable to build even a circumstantial case. And eventually they were shifted to warmer investigations.

Life went on. Except for Tiffany’s. We of the kitchen ensemble settled back into our pre-murder routines, and a new one that Victor established to chase away our postmortem blues. Chez Anisette was dark on Mondays, so, at the close of the kitchen on Sunday nights, he broke out the booze and hosted a little end-of-the-week celebration for the staff.

It was near the close of one of those Sunday-night soirees that I found myself last to leave, observing Victor drain the dregs of a bottle of absinthe that he’d smuggled into the country after one of his infrequent Paris visits. I’ve never been fond of the flavor of anise, so I’d sipped my cloudy cocktail and was reasonably sober. Victor, for reasons unknown, had tossed his down like Coca-Cola and had all but succumbed to the so-called
la fée verte
, the Green Faerie.

After much boozy palaver about this and that, just as I was racking my brain for an excuse to get out of there, Victor shifted the subject to the feeling of loyalty he had for his Chez Anisette “family.”

Falsely interpreting my lack of response as disbelief, he pounded the table, causing the cloudy liquid in my glass to hop. He did care about us, he shouted. Then he added, and I still remember his exact words, “If I hadn’t cared, why would I have lied to save Roger’s ass?”

Even if I’d been swigging the absinthe, that would have sobered me. “Roger wasn’t with you the night Tiffany died?” I asked.

“What?” He stared at me, glassy-eyed. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“You said you lied to save Roger’s ass.”

“I said nothing of the sort. You’re drunk. We’re both drunk.” He stood up, weaving. “Bar’s closed. Go home, Billy. Sleep it off.”

I went home. But I didn’t sleep it off.

He’d said it. And I’d heard him.

After my real father’s death, I’d spent some of my teenage years traveling across the country with my foster father, Paul Lamont, a surprisingly moral con man, but a con man nonetheless. Because of that and my incarceration, I was not exactly a stickler for law and order. But Paul had died at the hands of a villain who’d escaped legal punishment. And my feelings about murderers roaming free were still strong and raw.

The next morning, I contacted the homicide detectives who’d been assigned the Tiffany Arden investigation, an easygoing, old-line cop named J. G. Penny who was only months from retirement, and his much less tolerant partner, Pete Brueghel, a wiry, intense hero of the Vietnam War who’d told me more than once that he believed police work wasn’t merely a job but a calling.

Victor told them I’d been drunk and must have misunderstood or perhaps even imagined he’d said any such thing. He held to his statement that he’d been with Roger at the time of the murder.

Penny had accepted that, but Brueghel, who was definitely not a member of Roger’s fan club, bullied his partner into reopening their investigation. What followed was a series of rigorous interviews that, in Victor’s words “formed a pattern of harassment that interfered with the operation of my restaurant and bothered my Brentwood neighbors to distraction, forcing me to secure the services of a very expensive law firm.” He told me that at work shortly after hearing from his expensive firm that the detectives had found no substantive proof that Victor had lied and therefore were closing that part of their investigation.

With the burden of suspicion lifted, Victor felt he was able to kick me to the curb, which he did with a smile. The fact that he hadn’t fired me sooner was, to my mind, another indication of his guilt.

Though there are thousands of restaurants in the greater Los Angeles area, the list of notable eateries was not long. And Victor Anisette had been quick to put their owners on notice about my “lack of skill and disruptive kitchen presence.”

Still, naïvely optimistic, I persisted. Several weeks and upward of thirty turndowns later, I departed a classic Old Hollywood establishment on the Strip to find Roger Charbonnet leaning against the front of my car.

He straightened and, nearly seething with fury, told me that he’d been in love with Tiffany Arden, that he had not killed her, and that he was not going to allow me to continue telling people that he did.

I replied that I hadn’t told anyone he’d killed Tiffany, merely that Victor had lied about his alibi, which I knew to be the case. I added that I didn’t need him to “allow” me to do anything.

Roger drew back his jacket, exposing a gun tucked behind his belt. He raised his right hand and hesitated, as if counting to ten before doing something he might regret. He blinked and lowered his hand. He shrugged the jacket back in place, covering the weapon. “I’ll
allow
you a week to leave this city. After that, if I see you, I’ll kill you.”

I watched him cross Sunset and get into his new, shiny black Corvette. I got into my twelve-year-old formerly owned Mercedes sedan, which I still hadn’t quite paid for, and considered my options. What good were a lovely townhouse, the Pacific at your door, great West Coast seafood, fresh vegetables and fruit, and beautiful women if you were dead broke? Or worse, just plain dead?

I went to the townhouse and phoned Ambrose. Through his auspices, I left four days later for a job in the kitchen of the Quarterdeck Club in Aspen.

Now, twenty-two years later, I was returning to the city where the murder of Tiffany Arden was still unsolved and Roger Charbonnet had become something of a food icon, the very visible partner of a reclusive Victor Anisette in several of the better restaurants.

I’d have to settle for other places to eat. Nothing spoils a dinner on the town more than wondering if there might be arsenic on the arugula.