The Midnight Show Murders (2) (24 page)

“It scared the crap out of him,” I said. “So much so, he immediately moved out of the villa.”

He smiled. “So the little rat chased the big rat away.”

“He was scared of you, Stew. According to his friend, Fitzpatrick, on our first night out here, when I passed along your party invitation, it sent him into a dark mood that ended with him getting drunk and nearly killing someone.”

“Sounds like the kind of guy who made a lot of enemies,” he said. “Maybe it wasn’t Trey took him out. I’d be surprised if your cop friends didn’t wind up with a list of suspects long as your arm.”

“My cop friends.”

“The two detectives who were prowling the beach with you. What brought ’em out here, anyway?”

He popped the remains of his cupcake into his mouth.

“I asked them to come. Last night—”

I was interrupted by door chimes.

“Hold that thought,” Stew said, and hopped from the chair. He was halfway to the front door by the time I stood.

I’d barely made it around the couch when he said, “Don’t run off, Billy. I want you to meet an old friend.”

A tall man with gray hair was standing in the open doorway. He was wearing odd octagon-shaped sunglasses. I’d seen them and him at the theater the day before the explosion. I was pretty sure that if he took the glasses off, there’d be a milky film over at least one of his eyes.

“Meet Doc Blaney. He’s the troubleshooter you went to in the old days when the job was too shady for Pellicano to handle.” Anthony Pellicano, the so-called “private eye to the stars,” had recently been convicted on charges of wiretapping and racketeering, among others.

“Then it’ll be four of us for lunch at Beau Rivage?” I asked.

Stew smiled. “Trey should be arriving shortly,” he said. “Fact is, we’d been plannin’ to just rustle somethin’ up here.”

“And Dani?”

“She’s in Coral Gables. I got her a script-girl job on a TV pilot.”

“So it was all a lie?”

“I’d prefer to call it acting.”

“What’s goin’ on, Stew?” Pellicano’s moral inferior asked.

“Billy brought the cops out here today,” Stew said with a hint of regret.

Blaney removed a gun from beneath his rumpled jacket. “Told you we shoulda just wasted him last night. Dumping two is as easy as dumping one.”

“Billy’s a friend. I was hoping he was so drunk that … Hell, in the light of day I can see it was a dumb idea.”

“Like I told you before, simple is better. You can fuck yourself up trying to be too clever.”

“That’s one of the problems with spending a lifetime pretending,” Stew said. “The movies I make, the plans always work out in the end.”

“This sure isn’t any movie,” Blaney said.

“No. But it will work out. Only not so nice for you, Billy.”

I guessed they were not planning for me to be around to see this flick released on Blu-ray or DVD.

Chapter
FORTY-FIVE

Trey arrived within the hour. By then, Blaney had cuffed my right wrist to the leg of a table in the kitchen. Stew had slapped together a pile of sandwiches for us. Roast beef, honey-cured ham and Swiss cheese, and for Trey, who was one of those meatless half-vegans, a tuna melt on rye.

They had theirs with soft drinks. I ate mine, single-handed, with a wheat beer while they discussed my fate.

The early part of their conversation concerned my “cop friends.”

“What’d you tell ’em about last night?” Blaney asked.

“That I saw Gibby Lewis being murdered.”

“Shit,” Trey said. “I told you this would happen, Stew.”

“It’s just a hiccup,” Stew said. “On Monday, when both Lewis and Billy are no-shows, things will get a little frantic at the network. Eventually, the police will be notified. The lead detective—what’s his name? The one who caught The Hairdresser?”

“Brueghel,” Blaney said.

“Right. He’ll zoom here and find that Billy moved out the night before. That’s why we’ve got to keep him alive. So that the security guard can see him drive away with all his crap in the car.

“Brueghel will still dig around out here like a hound hunting truffles, but there are thirty-seven homes in the Sands, not including the villa. I’ll take those odds.”

“He won’t have to dig too deep to make the connection between you and Des O’Day,” I said.

“Let him. I got an alibi for that night, podnah.” He smiled. “I was with my good friend Doc.”

Blaney smiled, too.

“But Blaney did kill Des,” I said.

“That’s the beauty part, Billy,” Stew said. “By him being my alibi, I automatically become his. We both slide.”

“Why’d Gibby have to die?” I asked.

“Tell him, Doc,” Stew said. “That one’s on you.”

“I, ah … It’s my eye thing,” Blaney said. “I spent a lot of time in the sun, growing up. It kinda fucked up my eyes. It’s why I wear these glasses during the day. But after dark, I can’t see worth shit with ’em. That night in the theater, just as I’m getting ready to operate the fucking overcomplicated trigger device, I look up to see the schmuck staring straight at me. I tell him some bullshit that I’m a photographer and it’s a camera I’m carrying, and between that and the fact I’m hidden by this black outfit head to toe, I figured all was copacetic.

“But last night, almost midnight, I’m relaxing in my hot tub with a friend and the phone rings. My office number. It’s the schmuck. He says he recognized me by my eyes.

“A few years back, I did some work for a friend of his, a cheeseball comic named Philly Slide who needed somebody to throw a scare into this bimbo who was squeezing him. Lewis tells me Slide confided all this to him just after I put the fear in the broad so bad she went running back to Bumfuck, Kansas, or wherever she was from. At the time, Slide also mentioned my … eye ailment which is how Lewis made the connection.

“So he’s blabbing to me about all this, and I’m thinking about how I’m gonna have to kill him when here comes the fucking unbelievable part. He offers me a hundred grand to appear on his show in disguise and tell the world who hired me to off O’Day. That’s more than Stew paid me to do the job.

“Lewis swears he’ll never give me up afterward, even if they throw him in the slams. It’ll only add to his fame. He’ll write a book about it. He’s got it all figured.

“It’s too loony to be a setup. I mean, the schmuck is a witness to murder. He goes to the cops, they’re not gonna play games like this. They’re gonna drag my ass in and then do their best to make me give up names.”

He turned to Stew. “Not that I ever would. Anyway, I can’t see a downside in meeting the schmuck. If the cops are behind it, I’m nailed anyway. If he’s for real with his offer, I can get all or part of the hundred grand and … kill him. It’s a win-win.

“At my suggestion, we meet in the parking lot at Du-par’s in the Valley. I get him into my car. Check for a wire, though I know fucking well there will not be one. Then bounce his head off the dash and stick him in the trunk.”

“And you bring him out here,” Stew said, obviously miffed.

“Like I told you, where else? My ‘friend’ is at my crib. I don’t know where Trey coops. I got to find out if the schmuck’s told anybody about me, and I figure this place is nice and secluded.”

“With the party of the year going on,” Stew said.

“How the fuck was I to know that?”

“There are a million places where you wouldn’t run the risk of the guy breaking away and running for it. The place where you disposed of the body, for one.”

“Stew, ease off, huh?” Trey whined. The peacemaker. “We’re all in this together.”

“Yeah, Stew. Don’t forget, if we hadn’t listened to you, right now we’d be looking forward to a nice, enjoyable Saturday night. Instead, we’ll be heading back to the fucking dump.”

“You’ll be heading back,” Stew said. “Like last night.”

“It’s a different situation from last night, Stew,” Doc said. “I drove in with Gibby in my trunk, and I drove out the same way. No prob. But this guy is gonna have to be seen driving his car out. So it’s a three-car, three-person job, like Fitzpatrick was.”

Poor Fitz
, I thought.
Didn’t make it to his safe haven
.

“Okay,” Stew said reluctantly. “But I’m not going to be the guard dog again. You can hold the gun on Billy, Doc. I’ll drive your car out.”

“That won’t work. You don’t look nothing like me.”

“I’ll wear your glasses.”

“I don’t wear ’em at night. And I don’t like other people wearing ’em. It’s called conjunctivitis. Look it up.”

“This is fucked,” Stew said. “All I wanted to do was blow that homicidal mick to hell. That was a just act. That was setting the record straight. This other stuff, it’s murder, boys. And it doesn’t seem to end.”

“This is definitely the end,” Trey said.

“You said that about the musician.”

“We had to do that, once we realized he knew about you and Des. But you can’t call this murder. It’s more like … I don’t know, collateral damage.”

Stew glared at him, eyes blazing. “That’s what they called Connie’s death.”

Trey lowered his head and seemed to melt into his chair.

They were quite a trio. Larry, Moe, and Curly given a David Mamet update. But they’d killed three people, and, unless I was very, very lucky, I’d be number four.

Chapter
FORTY-SIX

It was near midnight when we got rolling.

They spent the time arguing, eating, watching one of Stew’s movies on a big screen in his den.
High Timber
was the title, in case you were wondering. Not the film ripped from the Westlake novel. All agreed it was one hell of a flick. I thought it may have been just a tiny bit too heavy on exposition. Kind of like what I had just endured.

At ten the four of us slunk along the sand under the cloak of darkness to the guesthouse, where they put on latex gloves and paper booties, provided by Blaney, before entering. They cuffed me to the bed’s headboard, without much conversation, then removed all my stuff from the closet and drawers. They carefully folded my clothes and placed them and my other possessions into my bags.

I asked why they were being so neat, and Blaney explained, “If the cops ever do find your body and the luggage, it’ll slow ’em down a little if they think you did your own packing.”

Ah, that’s where they slipped up. Little did they know, I’m a lousy packer. I had them right where I wanted them.

“Look around,” Blaney said. “Make sure we got everything.”

“What about his computer?” Trey asked. “Shouldn’t we make sure he didn’t put anything on it that could cause trouble?”

“Good call,” Blaney said. He pulled the laptop from a bag and took it into the bathroom, where he began banging it against the tub.

When he tired of that, he returned with the poor thing’s case dented and cracked. He dropped it onto the bag.

“That looks dumb,” Trey said.

“His car is going to take a real long fall,” Blaney said. “Things break.”

“You oughta distress the bag, too, or it won’t look right. And the computer could still work.”

“Fuck it,” Blaney said, and slammed the bag shut.

Eventually, they were going to kill one another. But probably not soon enough to do me any good.

They spent the final hour sullenly eating and drinking the remains of my larder, allowing me a final hunk of Jarlsberg Swiss and a cluster of red grapes. They cleaned everything and, like the good departing guest they assumed I was, left the house keys in their box on a table near the door.

At the Lexus, Blaney popped the trunk and they laid in the luggage. Then Trey departed.

Blaney watched Stew remove the handgun from his belt and get into the Lexus behind the front seats. There was not a lot of room. Whoever designed the floor space had not had the body of a big, raw-boned man in mind.

Stew grunted, twisted, tried to find a position at least partially comfortable, and failed. “Trey had better stop for the switch as soon as we make the turn,” he told Blaney. “Otherwise, I may shoot myself.”

He did something that I assumed was releasing the safety and pointed the weapon at me as I got in behind the wheel.

“Trey should be in his car by now,” Blaney said to me. “A Prius. He’ll make his exit. Give him a minute, then you leave. I’ll be following.”

I watched him open the metal door and depart into the night. The door swung shut behind him with a clang.

“Get going, Billy. And don’t do anything stupid,” Stew said, his voice sounding as if the seat were talking to me.

“Or what? You’ll shoot me?”

“You and the security guards.”

“What’s a few more murders, right?” I said.

That shut him up.

I started the car. Through the bars of the gate, I saw a silver Prius ambling past soundlessly, headed for the security kiosk.

I backed until I hit the beam that slid the gate open, then continued backing into the lane. I put it in drive and crept forward until I could see the taillights of the Prius. When they disappeared I counted to fifty, then got moving.

The youthful Rambo was on duty with a guard only a few years older, probably the one MIA the previous night. He was the personification of the surfer dude, tanned, lanky, and slightly spacey. Unlike Rambo, he was hatless, the better to show off his long, curly blond locks. He gave me a funky salute and almost crooned, “Have yourself a merry evening, sir.”

“Thank you,” I said. Then, following the script, I added, “As Rambo can tell you, my name’s Blessing.” Hearing his name, Rambo joined us, waving. “I’m moving out of the Villa Delfina tonight. Please make a note on your log that I left the keys in the guesthouse for the realtor.”

“Sure thing,” the blond said.

“Pleasure meeting you, Mr. Blessing,” Rambo added.

And thus ended my Malibu stay.

“That was nice,” the car seat said.

Round the bend, the silver Prius was parked by the side of the road. I pulled up behind it.

“Oh, man. I hope that means I can get out of this vise,” Stew said.

I did not reply. I just remained behind the wheel as I was told.

Before too long, Blaney’s Mercedes parked behind me, and he got out.

He’d taken off his glasses.

He walked to the other side of the Lexus and opened the passenger door, and I got a good look at those cloudy eyes. Pretty damned unnerving.

“You can come out now, Stew,” he said. “Unless you like it back there.”

“Take this fucking gun,” Stew said, holding the weapon up. When Blaney complied, the actor extricated himself from the well, accompanied by a series of moans, grunts, and curses.

“Now what?” he asked.

“You sit right down on the passenger seat and keep Blessing obedient while he drives.”

“I’m not doing that again. While I was shepherding the musician, I kept thinking:
What do I do if he runs a red light or signals a cop in some other way? Do I shoot him? And then what? Shoot the cop?
Forget it.”

“What do you suggest?”

“You take the passenger seat, and I’ll drive your car.”

“Nobody but me drives my car,” Blaney said.

“Why don’t we just call this whole thing a mistake?” I said. “I’ll go find a hotel.”

“Let Billy drive the Prius,” Stew said. “Trey can carry the pistol.”

“Forget Trey,” Blaney said. “I don’t think he’s ever held a gun in his life. Here’s the deal. Trey leaves the Prius where it is. We’ll drop him off here after we’re done. He drives the Lexus, and I drive my car with you and Blessing in back.”

Carpooling can be murder.