The Trials of Nikki Hill (46 page)

As they walked out into the cold, foggy night, Nikki said, “The visiting gangsta should be included on the headstone. What was Lee-O’s real name?”

“Leonardo Broches,” Goodman said.

“If it’s there, it’ll definitely tie Willins to the Crazy Eights and to Maddie Gray’s murder.”

Nikki’s heels kept sinking into the ground as they made their way through the fog, counting rows. At the twenty-second, they began concentrating on the tombstones. They moved slowly and carefully but they didn’t find the final resting place of the Willins family.

“What now?” Morales asked.

“It was an old map,” Goodman said. “Maybe they’ve added rows. Or maybe Sandoval got it wrong.”

“As long as we’re here, let’s check a few rows up and back,” Nikki said.

They split up, Goodman taking the lower rows, Nikki and Morales the ones above.

“Fog’s getting thicker,” Morales grumbled, as his partner disappeared from sight.

Colder, too, Nikki thought. She hoped Morales wasn’t freezing in just his shirt. “Let’s get this over with,” she said.

They began checking the names on the tombstones. They were almost at the end of the row when they heard the shot.

Morales clicked off the flash. Nikki was almost overwhelmed by the fog and the darkness. “You okay?” he whispered. She could barely make out his white shirt.

“Uh huh,” she said. “It’s Willins, isn’t it?”

“That’d be my guess,” he said. “I doan think he was shooting at us.”

She didn’t either. The noise had come from the other side of the cemetery.

“Stay here,” Morales said. “I gotta go check on Eddie.”

The vague image of his white shirt disappeared in the fog.

She hunkered beside a headstone, staring off into the dark cemetery and straining to see something that would offer a clue as to what was going on.

Another two shots, in quick succession.

Who was shooting and who was being shot at, she couldn’t tell.

She saw a flash of light. Then another. Then, nothing but darkness.

She thought she heard a footstep.

The detectives should be calling out to her any second. Telling her not to worry, everything was all right.

All was silent, the fog masking even the ordinary sounds of night.

She began edging back, keeping the headstones between her and the pathway. Her high heel sunk deep into a mound of loose dirt. Before the implication of that could make its way to her brain, she took another step backward. Into emptiness.

She tried to shift her weight, but she was too far gone. She fell awkwardly into a deep gravesite, smashing her head against a wall of packed earth. Her foot was twisted beneath her.

She lay on her back, dazed, staring up at the sky filtered by fog. Pain shot up her leg from her ankle. She rolled onto her side so that she could straighten the leg. The pain coming from her ankle was excruciating. It was broken. She’d just have to endure it. She forced herself not to cry or moan as she sat up, though the raw pain radiated along her leg like a fireball coursing under her skin.

Maybe Willins hadn’t seen her fall. Maybe he’d pass her by. Then she could somehow climb out of the grave. Those hours spent struggling up the sand dune should count for something. Maybe she could make it to the car and the gun and cellular phone in her purse.

That pleasant scenario was abruptly canceled by the sensation of something slimy crawling on her hand. She shook it away.
Worms. Oh, God.

A beam of light swept the top of the grave.

It was bright enough to give her a sense of the deep hole she was in. It also showed her a weapon. A pickax rested within reach. She blessed the careless gravedigger. Of course, because of her ankle and her position, it seemed impossible for her to take advantage of her discovery.

The light shined directly down into the grave. Into her eyes.

Practically blinded, she could make out very little of the features of the man standing above her at the edge of the grave. She was able to tell that he was big and, judging by his pant legs and shoes, still in his tux. Hadn’t taken the time to change, of course. Too anxious to find out what they were up to in Carver.

“So there you are,” he said. “I was worried over nothing. You don’t have a gun, do you?”

He chuckled.

“The headstone you were looking for is right over there,” he told her. “Auntie and uncle and my dear little cousin, crispy critters all. Just a few plots over. Of course the family name on the stone isn’t the one you were expecting.”

She knew that now, just as surely as she knew that the man standing beside the grave was her boss, District Attorney Joseph Walden.

E
IGHTY-SIX

I
’d rather not shoot you just yet,” he said, sitting on a high mound of dirt beside the open grave. He clicked off the flash and assumed a ghostly image in the fog. “It’ll be a while before the gang arrives to do the cleanup. I don’t like spending time alone. I’ve always been a people person.”

He was squatting up there, sounding so smug and satisfied with himself. He’d assumed she’d given up. He always had underestimated her.

“Are the detectives dead?” she asked, her left hand feeling for the handle of the pickax. She didn’t think she could even lift the thing, much less swing it in an upward arc faster than he could aim and pull a trigger. But she wasn’t about to just lie there and let the bastard kill her at his leisure.

“Dead or dying,” he said.

“My God, Joe, how many people have you killed?”

“Quite a few. My aunt and uncle and cousin. Maddie, of course. We could count Dimitra. I didn’t actually do that one myself, but I ordered it done.”

“Why? I thought you and she—”

“Oh, she was a great piece of ass, just too curious for her own good. Anyway, back to the list. The old caretaker here—”

“He’s dead?”

“Certainly. I’d just choked the life out of him when you people started knocking on his door. I didn’t think that you, an officer of the court, would let them break in like that. I barely had time to drag the old buzzard’s body into a closet before Morales came snooping into the bedroom.”

“Sorry we inconvenienced you.”

“No problem. I just roll with the punches. I’ve always had a knack for murder. Especially close work. My marksmanship is only so-so; though, as tonight proves, it gets the job done. I imagine I’d have made a damn good hired assassin, if Tom Gleason hadn’t shown me my true calling.”

The tips of her fingers touched the ax handle. “What’s Gleason got to do with it?”

“Tom was a genius. He created the Crazy Eights, you know? We were just a bunch of punks. Eight of us. Petty thieves, barely in our teens. Tom was head deputy D.A. under Pendleton. He knew our juvie records and he handpicked us. Brought us to his place in Pasadena, fed us steak and ale, told us his plan for our future. We were to become the new gang in town. Gang? Two of us couldn’t stay in a room together for more than ten minutes without fighting. Tom was patient. He spent a year shaping us up, making sure we stayed out of jail.”

“What was his point?” She grasped the ax handle.

“His point? His point was he needed distributors for his product.”

“Drugs?”

“He’d cut a deal with a local bigwig whose son had been arrested for running a penny-ante import operation. Tom told me it was one of the old California families, going back several generations, but he never uttered the name in my presence. It’d been a snap for him to find enough mistakes the cops had made to dirty the evidence and let the kid roam. The boy was sent to a school in Switzerland as punishment for his crime. Tom and the boy’s father took over the operation and expanded it.

“Tom had vision. He saw a vast market that their white-bread pushers weren’t able to penetrate. The gangs in the hood were nickel-and-diming, but there was no organized distribution. That’s where we came in. Eight tough kids who knew the territory and who were a little smarter than the other gangstas. Plus we had a head deputy D.A. on our side.”

“Tom Gleason,” Nikki said, “the black man’s friend.”

“He was. His dedication to inner-city youths is one of the main things that helped him get elected over that jive-ass racist Pendleton.”

Nikki tried to lift the ax. It was too heavy. She dragged it closer to her body. Maybe with both hands...

“Tom was sincere about helping black kids.”

“Sure,” Nikki said, “he helped ’em by turning ’em into crackheads.”

“You don’t understand. Some kids are born to self-destruct. If it’s not drugs, it’s booze or guns. They’re weak and worthless and they give up. What’s wrong with using these losers to allow ambitious young people to do something with their lives?”

“In other words, what’s wrong with a couple hundred kids, including babies not even born, dying of crack and smack so you can get your law degree? Right?”

“Of course,” he said without irony. “The things I’m capable of achieving are worth the lives of a hundred drug burnouts. Tom saw that. He handpicked me. He saw your potential, too.”

“Mine?”

“Sure. He thought you had the stuff to be a great prosecutor.”

“He told you that?”

“He told me everything. I was his protégé. Dick Grayson to his Bruce Wayne. He was grooming me to be him. He thought you were bright and ambitious and tough. You let him down with Mason Durant.”

Of course Walden knew about Durant. How foolish she’d been to think Virgil might have betrayed her confidence. How sad she might never see him again to make it up to him. She had both hands on the ax handle now. She’d have to stand to reach Walden with the weapon. She wasn’t sure she could move.

While he droned on, recalling time spent in the company of the great Tom Gleason, she tried sliding her body up the wall of packed earth. Each little movement sent a searing bolt of pain from her damaged ankle. She positioned the top of the ax blade against the grave floor and used the upright handle as a cane.

“. . . when you sent me your letter asking to be reinstated, I suddenly realized, of course, I had to have you back downtown. I needed prosecutors I could control. I was sleeping with Dimitra. And thanks to the Mason Durant screwup, I had something to hang over both your head and Ray’s.”

She was several inches off the ground now. The wall of earth was pitted with rocks and she was glad poor Carlos Morales’s coat was blunting some of their sharper edges. She halted her progress because he’d stopped talking. “So how did a smart guy like you do something so stupid,” she asked, “killing a high-profile celebrity?”

“It’s my one failing. My bloody temper. I’d handled it pretty well for more than twenty years, but that night Mad-die was an unholy bitch. She was drunk when I got to her place. Drunk and insulting. I’d brought her a present that she threw back in my face.”

“The charm bracelet,” Nikki said.

“It was ...a sentimental gift. She was wearing an expensive ring I assumed had been given her by some bastard she was fucking. She hadn’t thrown that back in anybody’s face. We shouted a bit. I may have slapped her a couple of times. Then, she went through one of her mood swings and began to act like a loving woman should. She told me she’d arranged for us to go out. This was surprising. Until then, she’d insisted our romance be kept a secret.”

“She didn’t want her fans to know she was seeing a black man?” Nikki asked.

“Nothing like that. Whatever else she was, Maddie was certainly not a racist. She’d sewn some wild oats in the past and almost lost her show because of it, so she was determined to keep her private life private. And I think secrecy turned her on. Anyway, what she’d planned that night wasn’t any public declaration of our relationship. She’d booked an overnight at one of the Sanctum’s more secluded cabanas. She even made me hide in the bathroom when they delivered our dinner, the dinner that we never go to eat.”

“What happened?”

“She was a very nasty drunk. I’m afraid I was moved to beat the hell out of her. She retaliated by informing me that she’d discovered a notebook in my coat pocket one night. She’d thought it was my little black book and copied several pages while I was sleeping. It didn’t take her long to realize the numbers were for beepers. In even less time she’d discovered whose beepers they were.”

“If you wanted to keep your connection to the Crazy Eights a secret, why did you tease her with the lion charm?” Nikki asked.

“The charm?”

“A lion. Lee-O.”

“That never occurred to me,” he said. “No. The lion was a reference to a sex show we caught in Paris—lion and trainer.”

“She was the one you told me about during my interview lunch,” Nikki said. “The one you met on your vacation.”

“Precisely. From the first moment I saw her, I was blinded by love. But when she was screeching at me, threatening to expose my gang connection unless I gave her one hundred thousand dollars, the scales fell from my eyes. I understood I had to kill her. I couldn’t have picked a better place to do it. I used a bust of Julius Caesar. Nothing at all like the metal sculpture everyone was so satisfied with.”

“Why’d you take the rug from her house?” Nikki asked.

“In the course of our earlier altercation, I dropped my glass and it shattered. Pieces of it caught in the rug. I didn’t want to risk leaving any prints or saliva for the lab to play with. So when I returned to get the file she’d been keeping on me, I cleaned up the broken glass from the floor and took it and the rug when I left.

“Not that it was easy to make my getaway. In the midst of my cleanup, the door buzzer sounded. I moved quietly to a window and saw a man and a woman—John Willins and his wife, though I didn’t know it at the time, it was too dark. When no one answered, they went back to their damned Jaguar and just sat there for nearly an hour. I waited with them, eager to be on my way down the road to where I’d parked my car.”

“They probably were there to pay blackmail,” Nikki said.

“Maybe they were there to kill Maddie and I saved them the trouble.”

“You planted the rug fibers in Dyana Cooper’s car?”

“No,” he said. “That was a pleasant surprise. I imagine when she had her fight with Maddie, she must have picked up the fibers on her clothes and carried them back to her car.”