The Trials of Nikki Hill (20 page)

“I, uh, got plans for later,” Dimitra said. “You kids go along now and have fun. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t.”

As they worked their way through the crowd, Virgil said, “It’s amazing how much you women look alike. Almost could be sisters.”

“Almost, but not quite,” Nikki said.

T
HIRTY-FOUR

I
ain’t big for overtime,” Morales complained, wandering impatiently around the crime lab. Goodman was seated on a chair, trying to ignore his partner’s complaints while relaxing his whole body, the way his doctor had instructed. “Tonight I’ll wind up eatin’ dinner at ten, eleven o’clock,” Morales continued, “an’ the food is jus’ gonna sit on my stomach in bed.”

Goodman was getting pretty good at perfecting his total relaxation technique.

“Can you give that a rest, amigo. You freakin’ me out. All that groanin’.”

Reluctantly, Goodman opened his eyes. “It’s humming, not groaning,” he explained for the tenth or twelfth time. “It clears the head and makes meditation easier.”

“Yeah, well, save it for your apartment, huh? What the fuck’s keepin’ these guys?”

As if in reply, a lab technician entered the waiting area. He was a pale young man with a crew cut and a cheeriness that Goodman found a little grating. He ushered them into a workroom with white Formica counters on which rested an assortment of odd-looking machinery. Early in his career, Goodman had made the mistake of inquiring about a gadget for measuring the whorls in fingerprints only to emerge hours later on the cusp of an anxiety attack but no wiser in the ways of forensic testing. Since then he’d been happy to simply take the words of experts. No detailed explanations necessary, thank you.

The young tech gestured to a counter where two plaster casts rested side by side. “The one on the left is a moulage made from a tire track in front of the Laurel Canyon home,” he said. “The radial has plenty of tread. It left a neato impression on that gravel drive. Naturally, we’ve got photos of the whole drive. I could lay ’em out and show you the exact path the tire took, from the point where it left the road to turn in to the house.”

“This’ll be fine,” Goodman said. “The other cast comes from a tire on Willins’s car?”

“Yep. A perfect match.”

“No chance we could be talking a different car here?” Morales asked. “Say another Jag XKE with the same brand of radials?”

“No, no, no,” the tech replied. “The beauty part is right here.” He pointed to a raised spot along the mold. “That’s a little chunk that got taken out of the rear right tire of the Jaguar that was brought in. The car hopped a curb, hit a pothole, something. It’s unmistakably the tire that made these tracks. Neato, huh?”

“Definitely neato,” Goodman said.

As he and Morales walked out of the lab, he said, “Maybe we ought to check with Serology.” Samples of something that may have been blood had been taken from the Jaguar’s steering wheel and leather armrest.

“They said they wouldn’t have nothing till Monday morning. Let’s give it a rest, huh?”

“Yeah,” Goodman said. “We can all use a rest.”

On the twenty-minute drive to his apartment, Goodman heard two repeats of a news item coming from an unnamed source at the LAPD: one of the city’s most respected businessmen would be arrested shortly in connection with the Madeleine Gray murder.

He was still ruminating on the identity of “the unnamed source at the LAPD” while fiddling with the key in his apartment lock. Before he could get the door open his neighbor from across the hall, Dennis Margolis, called out to him. He stood in his doorway in faded pajamas and ratty robe, a lonely, balding man with a perpetually worried face that suggested the rigors of everyday life were a bit more than he could cope with.

“Hi, Dennis,” he said. “What’s up?”

“I just told them the truth, Ed,” he said.

“Told who, Dennis?”

“They came to my door. I think they talked to the whole building. I’m sorry to hear you’re in some kind of scrape.”

“Whoa, partner. Let’s take this one step at a time. Who came to your door?”

“Two men.”

Goodman frowned. “Description?”

“Ordinary. Guys in suits. Maybe a little rough looking. But I guess if you’re in law enforcement, it’s a good thing if you look a little rough.”

“These guys were in law enforcement?”

Dennis hesitated. “They showed me badges.”

Goodman knew that on a scale of easy accessibility, badges ranked somewhere between handguns and toilet paper. “What did they want, these lawmen?” he asked.

“They said you were in deep shit and I would be in deep shit, too, if I held back anything I knew about you.”

“So they asked you questions?”

Dennis nodded. “I’m not a terribly good liar,” he said apologetically.

“What was there to lie about?”

“Your gun going off that time. At that party.”

Goodman had thrown a party to celebrate his last wife’s remarriage. That must’ve been five or six years back. He’d invited most of the tenants and several cops and some women friends. The booze had flowed and everybody had gone a little goofy. One of the tenants had found his gun in a closet and tried a little target practice in the bedroom, blasting out a section of wall.

“They knew about the gun?” Goodman asked incredulously.

“I think that Yokum guy in 4D told them about it. All I said was that it happened. They also asked me about some woman named Jastrup I’d never heard of.” Seven years before, the Jastrup sisters had moved into the building. They were beautiful, young, and fun. And they were call girls. When their madam was arrested, as madams inevitably are, even in Los Angeles, they’d come to Goodman for help.

By calling in a favor or two he’d kept them clear of the roundup of the madam’s other employees. Instead of a simple note of thanks, Edie Jastrup offered him a gift he’d been unable to refuse—a fun-filled weekend as her guest at the Four Seasons Hotel in Palm Springs. Cupid amuses himself in perverse ways: at the end of the no-strings-attached holiday, Goodman asked her to leave the life and move in with him. She did.

They were together for the better part of a year, when, for some reason he never understood, she let her sister talk her into a fall from grace. Their idyll came to an abrupt close on a typically bright and sunny morning when she returned from an all-nighter with a Hollywood bad boy, still jazzed from champagne and crank.

Edie Jastrup. So long ago and with him still. As were they all.

“Hope I didn’t make any trouble for you, Ed?” his neighbor asked.

A gun going off at a party. Edie. A long time back. “Nothing for either of us to worry about, Dennis. Thanks for letting me know what’s going on.”

He entered his apartment, conscious of Dennis standing there, looking after him.

Damn it, life was getting complicated.

In the living room, the blinking red indicator on his answering machine was like a beacon in the darkness. He flopped onto the couch and leaned toward the machine to press the playback button.

The voice was one he didn’t recognize. Male. Hoarse. Threatening. “We got your number, asshole. Drunk. Crooked cop. Pimp. You’re done.”

He wasn’t bothered by what the caller had said. It was bullshit, more or less. What bothered him was that the guy had his unlisted number.

Grumbling, he went to his kitchenette and poured a shot of tequila. He tossed it back and returned to the phone. He punched the star-six-nine combination and discovered the anonymous call had been placed from a Hollywood pay phone. Then he dialed a new set of numbers. After five rings Gwen Harriman’s recorded voice informed him she was not there, but would return his call as soon as possible if he left his name and number.

He didn’t.

T
HIRTY-FIVE

N
ikki was surprised to discover that Virgil lived in Hollywood, on one of those tree-lined streets south of Sunset devoted to upscale apartment buildings and condos. He occupied the upper half of a duplex, one of four similar buildings surrounding a lovingly landscaped brick patio. Standing at the top of the stone stairwell leading to his apartment, waiting for him to unlock the door, she looked down at the pond in the center of the softly lit patio and asked, “Koi, too?”

“Pretty damn elegant, ain’t it?” he said, holding the door for her to enter.

“My thought exactly,” she said.

The building, she figured, was about forty or fifty years old. His furnishings were very contemporary—dark leather and light-colored wood, a thick, pale carpet on the floor. One wall was given over to books and electronic gear. African artifacts—sculptures, snake carvings, textiles— were scattered about.

Among the wall masks was a strange heart-shaped face with narrow slit eyes and stylized, jagged hair that reminded Nikki of Bart Simpson’s. “That’s a Fang mask,” he said from the kitchenette. “In Gabon, it’s used in a ritual where men are initiated into the ngil society. The ngils are the Fang cops.”

He returned with a snifter of brandy. “Excuse me a minute,” he said, handing her the snifter, “while I drop this coat and tie. Look around. Make yourself comfortable.”

She studied the masks a few seconds longer, then moved on to browse through his books. African and American history. Biographies. True crime. No fiction. His music tastes were less restricted. Hip-hop. Pop. Jazz. Some classical. She turned on his CD player and the voice of Luther Vandross came from speakers cunningly hidden around the room.

Damn but the man keeps it clean and neat in here!
she thought as she sat on the sofa. She hoped he wasn’t a compulsive neatness freak. She kicked off her shoes and tucked her legs under her, sipping the smoky-warm brandy.

“I imagine you’re wondering how I can afford to live here?” he asked, reentering the room, his shirtsleeves rolled and collar open.

“The question crossed my mind.”

He explained, pouring himself a snifter, that soon after he’d made detective, he’d been assigned to a murder in the complex. “Somebody had carved up this Limey screenwriter like a Christmas turkey. The other residents were shakin’ in their Guccis. So, when yours truly put the arm on the twisted little knife artist, the landlord thought it might be a good idea to have a cop on the premises.”

“And he just happened to have a vacancy,” she said.

He grinned, taking a seat beside her on the sofa. “Yep, this is where the murder took place. In that bedroom.”

“Romantic,” she said.

“I wouldn’t have mentioned it to a civilian.”

“Was Dimitra impressed?”

“Dimitra? What made you think Dimitra’s been here?”

“Maybe because when I got to the bar tonight, she had her knee in your crotch.”

“Is that what that was? Her knee?” His smile was so damned charming it undermined her jealous pose.

The smile left his face as he looked at her, and the intensity of his inspection began to excite her. He must have sensed it because he took the snifter from her hand and placed it and his own on the coffee table. Then he pulled her to him, held her tight, pressed his lips against hers. The feeling of letting go was incredible.

Somewhere nearby, Luther Vandross was singing about not wanting to be a fool for love. Then she and Virgil were in the dimly lit bedroom and Luther’s blues were no longer a part of her mural. Nor was Dimitra Shaw. Nor Madeleine Gray. Nor even the poor screenwriter who’d bled to death in that very place, probably a victim of love’s folly. All of that was for some other time.

She was in the now of it.

She stood before him, looking into his eyes as his fingers slowly worked on the buttons of her blouse. The garment seemed to float from her body.

He found the zipper on her skirt easily and it too made its way to the carpet.

“Damn it, Red, you’re fine,” he said.

His hand went to his shirt, but she stopped it. “My turn,” she said.

She unbuttoned the shirt. As he shrugged it from his shoulders, she reached out and ran her hand over his bare chest, smiling at the smooth, hard wonder of his body. Smiling more as his breathing grew heavier.

Her hand was at his belt, freeing its clasp. He stayed still as she undid the top button of his pants. At an almost sadistic pace, she slowly pulled down the zipper, lightly brushing him with her knuckles.

Then she took his right hand and placed it at the tab at the front of her black bra. It parted and his hand moved of its own volition, circling her right breast slowly and lightly with his fingers, narrowing the circle to the tip of her erect nipple.

She closed her eyes and felt his breath on her left breast, then the touch of his lips there. Her knees felt weak, but he was ready for that. He was ready for everything.

One of his arms found the bend in her legs; the other circled her back. He lifted her tenderly and carried her the few feet to his bed. He placed her at its center, atop a soft down duvet.

He lay beside her, kissing her forehead, her eyelids, her nose, her lips. Her mouth eagerly accepted his tongue, toyed with it, caressed it with her own. His hands moved over her body, lovingly studying its contours. Wherever he touched, her skin tingled.

His tongue withdrew and tasted the corners of her mouth. Then he slid down the bed, lips pressed against her stomach, tongue busy. She closed her eyes as she felt her silk panties being drawn down her legs.

Oh, please,
she thought.
Let this be the start and not the end.
Then the ecstasy was so intense it didn’t matter much what it was, beginning, end, or anything in between.

She did not have to tell him when she wanted him to enter her.

He paused to find a condom in a bedside table drawer. She waited for him to break the seal, then said, “Let me.”

He moaned as she unrolled the condom over his erection.

He started to lean forward, but she pressed her hands on his chest. “Let me,” she said again, and when he answered, “Yes,” she straddled him, placing him inside her.

She began rocking, slowly at first. Then her movement became feverish, demanding.

Like a dancer adjusting his style to his new partner’s, Virgil’s body matched hers in intensity, meeting her thrusts with perfectly timed thrusts of his own.