The Proof is in the Pudding (32 page)

“No. It was blunt force trauma. She smashed him in the head with a bronze bust of Julius Caesar. It was almost an Olympic feat, because Yvette was a foot shorter than the late Mr. Talib, and almost a hundred pounds lighter.”

“Are you saying that she might have had help?”

“According to her, she acted alone, claiming she hit him out of fear for her life. She called the police herself. Without delay, according to the medical examiner in London. Her fingerprints were the only ones on the bust. Still, my friend said it was as though a cat had killed a Rottweiler.”

“ ‘And though she be but little, she is fierce,’ ” I quoted, almost to myself. But John heard me.

“
Richard the Third
,” he said.

“So you managed to stay awake the night we all went to see it.”

“Yeah. I was mentally counting up the charges I would have lodged against Richard.”

“John, I’m outside the Santa Monica Library. I’ve got something to look up before it closes at four today.”

“Is this for your show, or about the case?”

“The case. It’s some research I want to do. I may not find out anything useful, but it’s worth a try.”

“If I can’t keep you out of this, at least I’m glad you’ll be safe in the library,” he said.

“What are you going to do?”

“Go home. I’m taking Shan and Eileen to an early movie and then out to dinner. But if you need me, during the movie I’ll have my phone on vibrate.”

When the call was over, I sat in my Jeep for a few more moments and tried to sort out the new pieces of the puzzle I’d acquired. All of them focused on Yvette Dupree.

Alan Berger told me that Yvette had cooked a special dinner for a little party to celebrate Roland Gray’s book sales. That was evidence of a connection between Yvette and Gray.

Weaver told me that at different times both Tina Long and Yvette Dupree had been filmed in Keith Ingram’s bed. Earlier, Eileen had told me that Ingram despised Yvette, and yet at some point I knew that he’d had sex with her.

Yvette’s protective behavior toward Tina Long the night of Ingram’s murder, and Yvette’s own words to me yesterday, indicated that she was a mother figure to motherless Tina. I wondered if the young girl knew that both she and Yvette had been to bed with the same man, and what, if anything, that shocker might have had to do with Ingram’s killing.

Last, according to John’s friend at Interpol, ten years ago, when Yvette Dupree was known at Fabienne Talib, she killed her husband. Her claim of self-defense was believed and she was acquitted of the crime. Not long after that she must have changed her name and became the Global Gourmet.

These were certainly colorful parts of the puzzle, but there were still too many pieces missing for me to be able to see the picture they formed.

The most glaring of those missing pieces was the question of who shot into the window of Caffeine an’ Stuff. Hatch was acting as though he had his man. If he believed that, then it meant he could concentrate on proving John killed Ingram.

I hoped that Hatch was wrong about the shooter—but hoping was not good enough with John’s life on the line.

Opening my cell phone again, I dialed 411 and asked for the number for Olivia Wayne, attorney at law.

The operator’s mechanical voice found the listing and offered to connect me to it. I pressed the button that meant “yes” and heard ringing on the other end of the line. Another mechanical voice answered with the name of the firm. Among the offers it made was the option to hear the list of attorneys and their extension numbers. Another press of the appropriate button. The firm’s lawyers were listed in alphabetical order, so it took a while to get to W. When I heard Olivia Wayne’s extension number I punched it in.

I’d expected to leave a message on her voice mail, but to my surprise Nicholas’s favorite criminal lawyer answered in person.

“Hi, Olivia, this is Della Carmichael, your one-dollar client.”

All business, she asked, “Have you been arrested?”

“No. I’m calling to buy an hour or two of your time.”

“What’s the problem?”

“A friend on the LAPD told me that a man named Victor Raynoso was arrested for shooting at cars on the freeway, but that Detective Manny Hatch also believes that he was the sniper who fired into the front window of Caffeine an’ Stuff in Santa Monica in the early hours of Friday morning.”

“I hope you’re not asking me to represent him.”

“No. All I’d like you to do—what I want to hire you to do—is to talk to him in jail and see if you can find out whether or not he was the one who shot into the café. He claims he didn’t do that.”

“Nick told me you and the writer, Roland Gray, were sitting in the café’s window and that Gray was wounded. Is that why you’re interested?”

“Partly.” I told her that I believed the shooting at the café was connected to the murder of Keith Ingram at the celebrity cook-off Wednesday night, but that if Raynoso was the shooter then they had to be separate acts.

“Why do you want the two events to be connected?”

“Because if the wounding of Gray was just a coincidence, then the detective in charge of the Ingram murder—Manfred Hatch, of West Bureau—will keep trying to prove that John O’Hara killed Ingram. John was my late husband’s partner in the LAPD. I know that John didn’t commit murder as surely as I know I’m sitting here talking to you.”

“So you want me to talk to this Victor Raynoso. What do you expect that to accomplish? You think he’ll have a TV moment and suddenly confess all his sins because I’ve cornered him with just the right question?”

Her sarcasm was irritating, but I wanted her to do this for me, so I ignored it and applied a speck of butter.

“You’re a skilled attorney, Olivia. What I want is your professional opinion, after you’ve talked to Raynoso, as to whether or not he was the Caffeine an’ Stuff sniper.”

“I’ve crossed swords with Manny Hatch—he’s an ambitious SOB. And stubborn,” she said. “I don’t think he’d deliberately frame anyone for murder, but I wouldn’t put it past him to try to sweep aside something that doesn’t fit his theory of a case.”

“Will you go see Raynoso and let me know what you think?”

“All right. I’ll polish up my crystal ball to take with me.”

“Thank you, Olivia.”

“It’s not a favor. I’m going to bill you—and it’ll include this phone call and my travel time.” She hung up.

It was getting late; the library would close in just a little more than half an hour, but that should give me the time I needed.

Before I got out of the Jeep, I took a cautious glance around. All I saw was the usual cast of characters that strolled along Montana Avenue in good weather: young couples holding hands, older people by themselves or in small groups, dog walkers, window-shoppers studying displays in Santa Monica’s tempting boutiques. There was no one who seemed to be taking an interest in me, or even looking in my direction.

I stepped down to the pavement, locked the Jeep, and went into the library.

Because I used my card regularly at the Santa Monica Library, I didn’t need to ask the librarian where the fiction section was. I just gave her a friendly wave, headed toward my destination, and went directly to the G shelf. Eight of Roland Gray’s nine spy novels were there; the only one not present—probably checked out—was his current best seller,
The Terror Master
. I didn’t need that one because at home I had the copy Roland gave me.

I carried the stack of eight novels to the nearest reading table and started my research. By referring to the copyright dates, I was able to lay them out in their order of publication. Beginning with the first of Secret Agent Roger Wilde’s adventures, I opened the book to the Acknowledgments page.

Roland Gray had created MI 9, a fictional department of the British Security Service from which Roger Wilde took his assignments, but it appeared that he had done research, because he thanked “the real-life agents in MI 5 and MI 6, who understandably wish to remain anonymous, for their generosity in sharing their expertise and guidance through the dark and dangerous world of security and espionage.”

Because I was a fan of this kind of thriller, I knew that MI 5 stood for Military Intelligence, Section 5, and is the United Kingdom’s counterintelligence and security agency. The Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS—also known as MI 6—was the country’s external intelligence agency. Roland’s fictional MI 9 went back and forth across those lines.

It was in the first book’s final authorial “thank you” that I found a name I recognized. The acknowledgement read: “I am grateful to British commando Willis H. Parker for helping me extract Roger Wilde from an impossible situation.”

According to the copyright date, that meant Gray and Parker had known each other for at least nine years.

No familiar names, not even Parker’s, were in Gray’s expressions of gratitude in the second book, but there was an intriguing reference to “the lovely lady who inspired the character of ‘French Toast.’ ”

I remembered that character in the book. “French Toast” was the playful nickname Roger Wilde gave to a woman who was in love with Wilde, but who went to bed with a vicious arms dealer in order to discover information that saved Wilde’s life. She paid for that act with her own life.

Thinking back over the novels in the series, all of which I’d read up until his most recent one, Secret Agent Roger Wilde had proved to be very bad luck for women. Every time he fell in love, the object of his affections died some kind of violent death near the end of the book, just when it seemed as though Wilde would be able to retire from fighting international master criminals and settle down in his beautiful seaside cottage on the Costa del Sol in Malaga, Spain.

Books three and four yielded no familiar names, but in Wilde’s fifth adventure I found this acknowledgement: “My heartfelt appreciation to Eugene Long for his kind hospitality to Roger Wilde and company.”

Flipping again to the copyright date, I saw that book number five had been published four years ago, which indicated that Roland Gray and Eugene Long had known each other for at least that amount of time.

But neither of them had given any indication of it the night of the gala. Are—or
were
—they friends?

They both knew Yvette Dupree—and quite well, judging from what I’d learned so far. She had cooked for Roland and was an affectionate mother figure to Long’s daughter, Tina.

Thinking about Long and Tina, I remembered something that Phil Logan had told me the afternoon he announced that I was going to be a cook-off judge. While he was warning me that Eileen was going to be hurt by Keith Ingram because Ingram intended to marry superrich Tina Long, he gave me an example of what a doting father she had. Phil said that when Tina was struggling to graduate from a private high school, Long actually bought the school. Then Long had hired “a novelist” to write Tina’s co-valedictorian speech, but that the novelist hadn’t told Tina how to pronounce some of the words. The result was public embarrassment for Tina. I shuddered in sympathy, imagining how painful that must have been for the young girl.

And then I imagined how furious Long must have been at that novelist.

Was the novelist Roland Gray? If so, what had happened between that time and what must have been the previous year, when Gray thanked Long for his hospitality? Did Yvette have something to do with it?

Looking into people’s private lives made me feel uncomfortably like one of those sleuths who uncovered stories for the tabloids, but at least I wasn’t going to make anything I found out public—unless it had to do with Keith Ingram’s murder. I made a note to call Phil Logan as soon as I left the library. If anyone could find out the name of the novelist who had humiliated Tina Long, it was Phil.

There were no other familiar names in the Acknowledgments of books six, seven, and eight. So my next act was to see to whom Gray had dedicated these eight books. The first was to his mother, and the second “to the memory of my beloved mother.”

The next four books were dedicated to his agent, Alan Berger.

Book number seven broke Berger’s streak of dedications, although the agent was thanked warmly on the Acknowledgments page.

The dedication in the seventh Roger Wilde novel was: “To Frank R. Stockton, who understood both Ladies and Tigers.”

That one was easy to decode; it was a reference to the classic short story, written by Frank Stockton, called “The Lady, or the Tiger?” It was one of the most chilling tales I’d ever read. I taught it every year in my old high school English classes because the ending always provoked lively debate among the students. Their answers to my questions “What would you do if you were the hero?” and “What would you do if you were the princess?” revealed important clues about their personalities. From time to time what I learned from that exercise enabled me to motivate them to think about their own futures, and inspire them to get the most they could from their years in school. Sometimes; unfortunately, not often enough.