The Trials of Nikki Hill (45 page)

“That’s enough to put them all away for quite a while,” she said.

“Right. But at the time Rupert wasn’t thinking about that.”

“Rupert?” She seemed startled by the name.

“You know him?”

She told them about a confrontation with the clean-cut gangsta at the home of her former friend Victoria Allard. “He had a copy of Dyana Cooper’s file.”

“He must’ve got it from Arthur Lydon before he...Did he have a long leather case with him when he fronted you?” She nodded. “Inside was the machete he used on Lydon.”

Nikki shivered, then said, “Tell me you didn’t use force or interfere with his rights in getting his confession.”

Morales made a noise that might have been a sneeze or a belch. Goodman said, “I think the weapon will speak for itself.”

“How did you obtain it?” she asked flatly, as if she no longer had confidence in their methods.

“We were on our way to talk with James Doyle,” Goodman said, “when we observed Rupert and several other members of the gang parking near Doyle’s temporary residence. We watched the gangstas enter the building—”

“They break in?” she asked hopefully.

“Not exactly,” he replied. “They rang the bell. A friend of Doyle’s opened up. They hit him and entered.”

“You saw them hit the guy and that’s when you went in?”

“Uh huh,” Morales said.

“We found the punks in Doyle’s bedroom,” Goodman said. “Rupert had the machete at Doyle’s throat. But Carlos read the kid pretty well and took a chance that he wouldn’t actually cut Doyle.”

Goodman wasn’t happy with the spare-me-the-horseshit look she was giving him. “Are the other gangstas in custody, too?” she asked.

“No,” Morales replied. “They beat it and we didn’t feel right about shooting them in the back.”

“Why stop at that?” she asked sarcastically.

“Too much paperwork,” Morales said.

“So Rupert told you Willins got them to clean up his murder and dump the body?”

“He used Willins’s gang ID,” Goodman said. “Lee-O.”

“Lee-O? I know that name.” The connection she made obviously annoyed her, and she took it out on them. “Let’s see if I got this straight. This punk-ass Rupert, who makes up lies faster than most people breathe, told you Lee-O killed Maddie at the Sanctum. We all know John Willins whooped it up with her at that spa. Therefore Lee-O equals Willins.”

“That more or less covers it,” Goodman said.

“For the sake of argument, let me remind you that the miserable manager of the place said Maddie was a customer there, too. Suppose she took a liking to some dude she met and brought
him
to the spa for fun and games. And the games got rough. And he was just Lee-O, the old gangsta, and not John Willins at all.”

“The spa manager would know the truth,” Goodman said, growing sorrier and sorrier that he’d asked her along.

“The spa manager is a slimy weasel who is not about to cooperate in any way. We can’t count on anything he has to say.”

Goodman took the copy of Sandoval’s decrypted notes from his pocket. “This is information that Doyle’s private peeper was gathering.”

She glanced at the page. “These initials are...oh, I see. ‘J.D.’ is Jamal Deschamps. ‘E.G.,’ ‘N.H.,’ ‘C.M.’ And ‘D.S.’ ” She frowned at the page. Goodman assumed she was reading about “D. S.”pulling the plug on her aunt and using the inheritance to attend law school.

“The John Willins material is down near the end,” Goodman said.

He watched her eyes go down to the bottom of the sheet and absorb the information. “Hmmm. These are just Sandoval’s speculations,” she said. “Maybe Willins’s parents did die by accident.”

“That’s what we’re going to Carver to find out,” Goodman said.

“What’s this ‘Emory at Eternal Light’ and the phone number?”

“I don’t know exactly. A funeral home? I’ve called the number a bunch of times. Nobody answers.”

Nikki dialed the number on her cellular. Again, no one answered.

“Can I hang on to this sheet?” she asked.

He nodded.

“This trip better be fruitful, detectives,” she said. “Because if all we have to go on is what you just told me, we’ll be damn lucky to get a conviction on Rupert. Willins? He’ll be as free as O. J. Simpson.” She smiled. “The part about Lee-O being in charge of the Crazy Eights confirms something an old... associate told me. It also explains the bracelet with the lion charm. Lee-O the lion. Which suggests Maddie knew his past.

“Except,” Nikki went on, “if Maddie was murdered at the Sanctum, why was the bracelet found at her home?”

“It was in the room where she’d had the scuffle with Dyana Cooper,” Goodman said. “Knowing what we do about Maddie, it’s possible she might have been amused to flaunt a bracelet Willins had given her right under his wife’s nose.”

Morales interrupted the discussion. “We’re here,” he said.

E
IGHTY-FOUR

N
ikki looked out of the car window to discover that the Barstow Freeway had been replaced by a dark narrow road between fenced-in fields that went on as far the eye could see in the moonlight. No town was in sight.

“This is Carver?” she asked.

“Naw. This is
cacahuates,
” Morales said. “Peanuts.”

“Carver’s the only town in California where it gets hot enough to grow peanuts,” Goodman said. “Almost as many harvested as down in Georgia on Jimmy Carter’s farm.”

“Tha’s why they call the place Carver,” Morales said. “After one of your people. George Washington Carver. The peanut guy.”

Nikki wasn’t sure how she felt about Carver being referred to as “the peanut guy,” but she was amused by the detectives’ knowledge of the territory. “You aren’t putting me on?”

“Absolutely not,” Goodman insisted.

“You did some research?”

“A friend of ours had a book.”

“George Washington Carver, huh?” Nikki said. “Not too many towns named after black men.”

The road continued for several miles without a break in the peanut fields. They reached the end of the fenced-in acreage, rolled past a farmhouse or two, and crossed railroad tracks. A sign by the side of the road informed them that they were entering “Carver, California. Population: 14,325 and growing fast as peanuts.”

Downtown Carver, such as it was, was just around a bend in the road. It consisted of the local version of a 7-Eleven, called simply QuickBuy, with a pale light glowing over the front door and an eerie neon sign illumintating the interior; a gas station closed for the night; a former movie house, named—What else? the Carver Theatre—that had been converted to a ninety-nine-cent-or-less store. Finally, there was the probable reason for the conversion of the theater, a video rental shop with a hand-printed sign tacked to a slot that said “Return Videos Here.”

No people were visible anywhere.

Morales drove along at a clip, looking for some sign of life. Ten or fifteen minutes later they found it. Headlights, moving their way from a road to their right. Morales parked the sedan across the road, blocking the truck’s egress.

“Not the friendliest of gestures,” Nikki said.

“It’s doin’ the job,” Morales said as the truck ground to halt.

The black man who swung out of its cab was well over six feet, heavily muscled, and, judging by his expression, not predisposed to liking strangers.

Goodman opened his door to meet the man.

“We need a little hel—”

“Mind getting out of my way?” the driver of the truck growled.

Nikki edged over to the window and said, “We just need some help.”

The trucker eyed her suspiciously or appraisingly, she couldn’t tell. “Where can we find your police chief?” she asked.

“What’s wrong?”

“These two men are policemen from Los Angeles. I’m—”

“I know you, don’t I?”

“I don’t think we’ve met. Can you direct us to your lawman?”

He continued to gawk at her. “That’d be Parnell. Southwest edge of town, near the railroad station. He’s gonna love gettin’ waked up.”

Chuckling, the man returned to his truck.

Goodman got back into the sedan. Morales made a U-turn, kicked up some dust, and went back the way they’d come.

It didn’t take them long to find the small brick building with the sign out front that read “Jail and Police Station.” A light glowed over the door. Parked in front was a five-year-old, brown and white Ford Taurus with a gold star on the door and the words “Carver Police Dept.” hand-lettered in the center of the star.

Parnell Jefferson was a small, wiry black man with a mustache who apparently slept in his uniform shirt and trousers when he was on duty. He opened the door of the jail and police station in his sock feet, yawning. He seemed unimpressed by the two detectives, but when he saw Nikki, he tried unsuccessfully to tuck his shirt into his trousers.

“What can I do for you folks?” he asked.

Goodman showed him his badge and said, “We’re looking for information about some people who used to live in Carver. The Willins family?”

Chief Jefferson shrugged. “Name’s kinda familiar. But I don’t recall—”

“Burned in a fire, twenty years ago?”

Jefferson smiled. “Twenty years ago,” he said, “I was fourteen and living very happy with my mama and daddy on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois.”

“Anybody been around long enough to have known the Willinses?” Nikki asked.

“Reverend Wilmot’s been here a while. Roosevelt Styles, who owns the peanut plant. I suppose somebody’ll remember the name. Old Emory Moten, of course. The oldest citizen in these parts. He surely knows everybody who’s dead.”

“Why’s that, chief?” Nikki asked, recalling Emory’s name from Sandoval’s notes.

“He’s the caretaker at Eternal Light. Cranky old man, except when he’s drunk, which is most of the time. Then he’s just stiff.”

“Eternal Light would be... ?”

“Carver’s only cemetery,” the chief said. “Of course, we’ve got a boot hill for people can’t afford Eternal Light. If these folks are worth your coming all the way here from L.A., they probably wouldn’t be buried in Boot Hill, now would they?”

E
IGHTY-FIVE

E
ternal Light Cemetery, at the southern tip of Carver, just a few miles from the start of the Mojave Desert, covered the equivalent of several city blocks, enclosed by a high whitewashed wall that had been structurally altered by earthquakes in the area.

Possibly because of the sudden drop in temperature in the desert, a fog was settling in. Seeing its wisps float in front of the sedan’s headlights, Nikki said, “That’s an over-the-top touch, isn’t it? Graveyard’s not going to be spooky enough, we’ve got to have fog, too?”

Morales parked the sedan near a wrought-iron gate.

In just the short drive from the police station, the air had turned cold. Nikki was freezing in her cocktail dress. To her surprise, Morales put his coat around her.

Goodman tried the gate and it creaked open.

Inside the wall, the area was nearly pitch black. The absence of moon or stars and the presence of fog made it almost impossible to see anything clearly past a foot away. They much in the fog. At least they provided enough illumination to keep them from stepping into an open grave.

It was no place to be wearing high heels, Nikki decided as she stumbled beside Morales, sharing the light from his flash. Goodman wandered off to their right in search of the caretaker. It wasn’t long before he called them to join him.

Emory Moten’s cottage was a rustic affair with a smooth stucco base and what appeared to be a Spanish tile roof. A faint light shone behind a circular window built into the front door.

Goodman knocked a few times. When that didn’t work, Morales took his turn pounding on the wood.

No response from inside the cottage.

“What now?” Nikki asked.

Morales tried the doorknob. Locked. “Old dude’s sleeping it off inside, probably.”

“Try again,” Goodman said.

Morales banged even louder, yelling, “Hey, open up in there!”

Nothing.

“I sure didn’t drive all this way to spend the night in a motel,” Goodman said. He handed his flashlight to his partner and slipped a small leather case from his pocket. He unzipped it and removed two thin metal picks. “Shine some light over here,” he said to Morales.

Nikki turned away as Goodman worked the picks into Emory Moten’s lock. She could barely make out the shape of tombstones in the fog. She shivered inside Morales’s coat.

The sound of the door creaking open drew her attention back to the detectives as they entered the cottage. “Yo, Mr. Moten,” Goodman called. “Anybody here?”

No reply.

She walked to the door and looked in on a cluttered, rough-hewn room dimly lit by a brass lamp on a desk against the wall. Everything was old and worn—the heavy desk, the wooden chair with its tattered cushion, a faded and stained maroon couch. There was a filing cabinet with rust poking through its dark green paint, an ancient floor-model TV with an antenna enhanced by a ball of tinfoil stuck on one rabbit ear, and a deep blue plastic container near the door almost filled with empty beer and whiskey bottles and tin cans.

“Guy really knows how to live,” Nikki said.

“I’ll see if he’s in the back,” Morales said.

Goodman strolled to a grimy framed map that decorated the wall above the desk. “This looks like the ticket,” he said.

As Nikki moved closer she could see that it was a schematic drawing of the cemetery, broken down into rows of lots numbered consecutively from 1 to 2050. The lots were of different sizes, which meant there was no consistency in the number per row. “According to Sandoval’s notes, we want 1232,” she said.

The detective ran a finger along the map, from the spot marked “Office” to Lot 1232. It was in roughly the center of the graveyard. “Twenty-two rows up,” he said. “Even knowing that, it could be a bear finding it in the fog.”

“Nobody home but us chickens,” Morales announced, joining them.

“Where would he go?” Nikki asked.

“Hangin’ with relatives, prob’ly,” Morales said, looking at the map. “Can’t blame him. This place is a rat’s nest. Bedroom smelled like bad cabbage.”

“Let’s get our business done,” Goodman suggested.