The Midnight Show Murders (2) (27 page)

He led us toward an open archway. Victor yelled something to his nurse, who responded by wheeling him in our direction.

“Hus hanana?” he cried out to Roger.

“He wants to know what’s happening,” the nurse said.

“He should join us,” I said. “He was part of it, too.”

We paraded past the customer restrooms, the service restroom, an unmarked door, an entrance to the restaurant’s kitchen, and finally into the business office, where a bespectacled woman in her thirties sat at a desk, doing something with a computer. She was wearing a man’s sport shirt at least two sizes too big for her, denim trousers, and gym shoes. She had a round, unlined, cosmetic-free face that seemed much too sensible and down-to-earth to be working for Roger.

Her name was Gina, I discovered, when Roger asked her to give us a few minutes alone. As soon as she left, closing the door behind her, he leaned against the other desk in the room—his, no doubt—and said, “Okay, Billy, say what you’ve got to say.”

“I assume you all know I spent most of yesterday and last night in the company of three men who conspired to kill Des O’Day,” I told them. “At the time, it was more than a little unpleasant. But in retrospect, it was pretty educational. Mainly, it taught me that living with a murder on your conscience tends to take some of the joy out of life.

“These guys were not happy campers. All three of them were at one another like rabid dogs.”

“This is all fascinating, Blessing,” Roger said testily. “What’s it got to do with me?”

“Well, last night, I asked Stew Gentry what he’d do when Detective Brueghel here found out about his daughter and made the connection between him and Des. He had a very interesting answer. He said he’d tell the detective he had an alibi for the night of Des’s murder.”

I seemed to have captured their interest.

“Since it was Doc Blaney who did the actual crime, Stew could have gone any number of places to provide himself with a real alibi. But he was going to tell Brueghel that he’d spent the evening with Blaney. The ‘beauty part,’ as he put it, was that this would not only remove
him
from the suspect list, it would do the same for the guy who really committed the crime. It kinda struck me as sounding familiar.”

Roger glared at me with that angry bull frown. “You’re implying that twenty-three years ago, Victor and I colluded in a plot to kill Tiffany?”

“I am not implying that,” I said. “How do I put this? For the collusion plan to work, neither Stew nor Blaney could have a real alibi. If Stew, for example, had decided to spend the night at a bar or in a poker game—”

“I get it,” Roger interrupted me. “Anybody seeing him in the bar could have busted the fake alibi. And Blaney would have been left swinging in the wind.”

“What the hell are we talking about?” Brueghel asked.

“Essentially, that Victor killed Tiffany Arden.”

The old man still had a mean stink eye. He made some guttural sound that caused the nurse to shrug.

“That’s ridiculous,” Roger said. “Why would he …?”

“Well, let’s see. You and Tiffany had a fight that night. Maybe Victor thought he could take advantage of the situation. She rejected him. He goes a little wacko, things get out of hand, and he hits her with the tenderizer. Drags her out to the alley, tosses her into the bin. He cleans out the cash register and goes home, hoping everything will work out.

“Think of his relief when you call, panicked, in desperate need of an alibi. ‘Of course,’ I can hear him saying, ‘anything for a pal.’ ”

“Hul hint!”

“He said ‘Bullshit!’ ”

Roger stared at the old man, curious now but still not a believer.

“Did you know that back then, he forced … another girlfriend of yours to sleep with him by threatening to expose your affair to her husband?”

“Ayyyye!” Victor yelled.

“ ‘Lies.’ ”

“Your call, Roger. Do you believe him or her?”

“Jesus, Victor,” Roger said. “You did that, didn’t you? You son of a bitch.”

Brueghel moved closer, ready to try and stop Roger from snapping the old man in two. But Roger wasn’t showing anger. He looked beaten and betrayed, which was more disturbing, somehow.

“Whenever I showed any interest in a woman, Billy, he always took a shot at her. I used to think it was funny. And pathetic. But this … Why the hell didn’t she come to me?”

My guess was Gloria didn’t know how much he cared about her. Maybe
he
hadn’t realized it before. “You should ask her,” I said.

“Who’re we talking about?” Brueghel asked.

Roger looked at him. “I think Victor did kill Tiffany, detective. It coulda been like Billy said, him losing it after she rejected him. But there’s something else.”

Victor let out another of his indecipherable screams and began writhing on his chair. The nurse made no effort to assist him.

“Tiff welcomed diners to Chez Anisette. But she also kept the books. After her death, Victor told me there’d been a discrepancy of nearly one hundred and fifty grand that she’d stolen.

“I was such a dunce. Like if Tiff had been sitting on top of all that cash I wouldn’t have known it. But this man was like my dad. And he was such a swell guy, he even brought in an ‘accounting specialist’ to disguise the discrepancy. Leave Tiff’s name unsullied.

“I’m dealing with the handiwork of some ‘specialist’ now. Gina’s been going through our accounts, covering just the past ten years, and there’s over two million dollars unaccounted for.

“So I’m thinking now that Tiff didn’t take that hundred and fifty grand, but she might have discovered it was missing that night.”

“Christ,” Brueghel said. “We never even considered the bookkeeper angle.”

Both men converged on Victor. He twisted his lips into what may have been a sneer and said, “Yll nehe conhi a crihi.”

“He says you’ll never convict a cripple.” The nurse’s pretty face hardened, and she added, “But if it’ll help, I know where he keeps all of his records, business and personal.”

Victor’s claw shot up and clutched her wrist.

She pulled back his index finger until it popped. He released her, screaming in pain.

“I like this lady,” Brueghel said.

So I guess I had become
his
wingman.

Chapter
FORTY-NINE

My flight to JFK was delayed forty minutes for some reason. Drunken copilot. Monster on the wing. It didn’t matter, really.

I had forty minutes to kill. I could watch CNN, have a cocktail, buy a souvenir cap with a palm tree on it, but even if I hid out in the Million Milers Club, there’d be somebody wanting to know all about the Des O’Day murder.

I have discovered that the only place in an airport where you won’t be bothered, outside of a bathroom stall, is when you’re talking on a public phone. You can lean in, embracing the phone, turning your back on the rest of the world, and it would take a kamikaze celebrity stalker, operating on their own or under the aegis of
TMZ
, to invade your space.

There were only two problems with that plan.

It’s not that easy to find a public phone anymore. I uncovered one hiding behind a Burger King. Then I had to think of someone to call. Which is why I wound up returning Harry Paynter’s message from the day before.

“Yo, Billy, what’s the hap?”

“You tell me. I’m returning your call.”

“Oh. Yeah. Well. I was just checkin’ in.”

“You getting anywhere on the book?”

Silence on the other end.

“Harry?”

“Yea’, bro. You, ah, talk to Wally the Winger lately?”

“Not today. Should I?”

“Big changes, bro. Sandy’s refocused.”

“What’s that mean?”

“New project on the front burner.”

“What about mine?”

“You better talk to Wally. He and Sandy worked something out. I think you got points in the new project.”

“What is it?”

“The hottest property in town. Get this title:
Blowout: The Stew Gentry Story
. It’s got it all: sex, showbiz, violence, heart, and lots of CGI potential, including, wait for it, 3-D.”

“Stew’s cooperating?”

“Hell, yeah, he’s cooperating. Wouldn’t you for two million bucks? You can buy a lot of defense with that.”

“I thought there was a law against profiting from a criminal act.”

“Listen to yourself,” Harry said. “This is L.A., Jack. Five minutes after that rule went into effect, any contract lawyer worth his Century City address had come up with a half-dozen loopholes.”

“Well, they just called my flight,” I lied. “I’ve got to run.”

“And I better get back to the old word maker. Man, it’s great working on a project I believe in. What do you think sounds better,
Blowout
or
Blowup
?”

“How about
Blow Me,
” I said, and replaced the phone.

The plane was actually an hour and twenty minutes late. I never learned why. Stardust in the fuel tank, maybe. Lotus leaves on the runway.

My seat in first class was beside an eighteen-year-old girl with Day-Glo yellow hair and a ring in her left nostril who’d just won a fourteen-million-dollar California lottery and was hooking up with her Internet boyfriend in New York for a monthlong trip to, as she put it, “Paris and other countries.” She had a box of tiny rubber bands that were supposed to be for her braces, but every so often she’d shoot one at me and pretend it was a mistake.

A filter problem necessitated a shutdown of the AC, and things got a bit hot and clammy in the cabin. An attendant spilled half a Coke down my pants leg and into my shoe. And the movie turned out to be
Ghost Rider Two
with Nicolas Cage.

But I didn’t care. I was alive. I had my health. And every hot and sweaty, Coke-drenched, Cage-mumbling, rubber band–dodging minute I spent was taking me closer and closer to the one and only Capital of the World.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

AL ROKER is known to more than thirty million viewers each week for his work on NBC’s
Today
show, a role that has earned him ten Emmy awards. He also has his own show on The Weather Channel,
Wake Up With Al
. He is a blockbuster
New York Times
bestselling author for his book
Don’t Make Me Stop This Car!: Adventures in Fatherhood
. An accomplished cook, Roker also has two cookbooks to his credit, including the bestselling
Al Roker’s Big Bad Book of Barbecue. The Morning Show Murders
marks his first foray into fiction. Bantam Dell will publish the third Billy Blessing mystery in 2011. Roker resides in Manhattan with his wife, ABC News and
20/20
correspondent Deborah Roberts, and has two daughters and a son.

DICK LOCHTE is the author of a list of popular crime novels, including the award-winning
Sleeping Dog
, named one of the “100 favorite mysteries of the century” by the Independent Booksellers Association. His crime fiction column that ran for nearly a decade in the
Los Angeles Times
earned him the 2003 Ellen Nehr Award for Excellence in Mystery Reviewing. He lives in Southern California with his wife and son.