This is some knocked-out tootsie!” Pete Capra whispered in Maxi’s ear as he took a seat next to her in the conference room at Channel Six News. The woman seated opposite them was digging in her purse. Taryn Zimmerman had called Maxi at the office, saying she had important information concerning the Jack Nathanson murder case. It was late afternoon on Friday, two days after the funeral. Maxi had asked her to come in, and when she sauntered provocatively across the bustling newsroom ten minutes ago, work stopped, and every male eye in the place locked on to her lank, luscious frame.
Six feet tall in heels, with loads of curly, fiery red hair, she was sheathed in a scarlet miniskirt, with a matching shirt tied under her astonishing breasts, exposing about a foot and a half of well-toned, well-tanned midriff.
Before they’d had a chance to get started, Pete Capra had popped his head inside the door. “I’d like to sit in on this, if it’s about the Nathanson case,” Pete had announced in his most officious boss tone. Why am I not surprised? Maxi thought.
“It was because of the fire hydrant,” Taryn Zimmerman was saying now, as she applied crimson gloss to her pouty lips with what happened to be a fire-engine-red–tipped index finger, “and it was after that whole thing went down that I started sleeping with Jack. I mean, that wasn’t because of the hydrant, but—”
“Wait, wait, wait, wait,” Capra said, stopping her. “Slow down, and start from the beginning.”
She pushed her chair back from the table and crossed her unbelievably long, golden legs in a gesture of impatience—she wasn’t used to being slowed down.
“My husband, Irving Zimmerman, uh, my ex-husband Irving Zimmerman, well, he was my husband at the time—”
“Yuh, got that,” Capra prompted, trying not to look at her legs, or her anything, trying to look her straight in the mauve-tinted glasses.
“Irving… we… needed a fire hydrant. We’d just bought the Benedict Canyon house, the big one, but it wasn’t big enough for Irving, so he wanted to add on. When he applied for the permits they told him he had to put in a fire hydrant, because of a new city ordinance that covered hillside building. Or, since the property next door already had a fire hydrant, if we could get an easement from the owners, whom we hadn’t met yet, an easement to use their fire hydrant if there was a fire, then we wouldn’t have to put one in.”
“Uh-huh,” Maxi deadpanned. Ordinarily, either she or Capra would make the teller cut to the chase, but eyeing her boss’s rapt expression, she guessed that this particular teller could take all afternoon and it’d be fine with Pete.
“Well, the fire hydrant turned out to be a whole lot more than just a fire hydrant, because they said we’d have to widen the driveway so a fire truck could get up it and another fire truck could come down at the same time, and that meant we’d have to tear out the walls, and a bunch of trees, and all the lights, and resurface the driveway, and put in a wider electric gate—anyhow, the whole thing was going to cost about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
Capra whistled. A quarter-million bucks for a fire hydrant! That was twice what his house was worth. Pete Capra was still concentrating on not looking at this woman below the neck.
“Now, it’s not as if Irving couldn’t afford his own fire hydrant,” she was saying, “but he saw no reason to pay for one if he could get one for free. That makes sense, right?”
That made sense to Capra.
“So,” Taryn Zimmerman went on, “Irving invited our new neighbors, Jack Nathanson and Janet Orson, to come over for a barbecue, and Irving put some steaks on the grill, and popped some champagne, and we ate, and we drank, and we talked about Jack’s movies and the shopping centers Irving built, and we got a little drunk and we were having a great time, and Irving put his arm around Jack and told him we needed an easement to hook onto his fire hydrant.”
“And then what?” asked Capra, who was trying to stay focused on the narrative.
“And Jack said sure, just get a letter over to his business manager, and he gave Irving Mr. Bloom’s number, and he said Sam would take care of it.”
“But he didn’t?” Maxi was trying to move this along.
“Well, what really happened, I mean much later, when, like I said, I was sleeping with Jack, and that’s a whole other story, though it does have a lot to do with—”
Does this totally red woman know that she’s talking about my ex-husband? Maxi wondered. She thought about getting up and leaving Capra alone with her; she had things to do.
“Anyway,” Taryn Zimmerman was saying, “what Jack told me much later, like in bed, was that the next morning he called Sam Bloom and told him some asshole next door wanted something to do with a fire hydrant, so write him a letter and say that you’ve reviewed the situation and you’re sorry but you have to turn him down.”
“And your husband knew that?” Capra asked.
“Well, no, but when he got that letter from Sam Bloom, he couldn’t believe it. He ran over to Jack’s house waving the letter and saying he didn’t get it, it was no skin off Jack’s ass if someone signed on to his damn fire hydrant, it wouldn’t cost him anything—Irving couldn’t believe that his new best friend next door was not falling all over himself to do him this favor, like people usually did. Jack just laughed at him, which really pissed Irving off! Jack said, ‘Sorry, buddy, I gotta do what my business manager tells me; that’s what I pay him for,’ and Irving knew that was a crock of shit.”
Irving Zimmerman was a name well known in the high-end commercial construction business, and also in police business. Years back, Maxi had investigated a tip from a source in the Department of Building and Safety, of all unlikely places, that a certain building inspector, who had turned up missing and was never found, was planted upright in the southwest abutment of the shopping center at Westwood and Pico that was built by Zimmerman Construction, a building inspector who had held up the project and pissed Zimmerman off. Irving Zimmerman had a reputation as a man you didn’t want to piss off.
“So you think your ex-husband killed Jack Nathanson because he wouldn’t give him an easement to his fire hydrant,” Capra said, acting as though he thought this was totally plausible.
“No, no, it goes on….” That’s what Maxi was afraid of.
“Irving shelled out the money, had the engineering done, and put in the hydrant, built our new wing, two bedrooms with baths, an office and a gym, and he was mad as hell the whole time, and he never talked to Jack Nathanson again—”
“But obviously you did,” Capra observed with a smile.
“Like I said, that’s a whole other story, but I’m getting to that….” Maxi wasn’t interested in a story about yet another woman her ex-husband had slept with; Capra was rubbing his hands together—he couldn’t wait to hear this woman tell it.
“Well, it just sort of happened,” she said. “You know how those things happen….”
“Yeah,” Capra encouraged her. Maxi was ashamed for both of them.
“Anyway, long story short, one day Irving was at work, and I’m out by the pool getting some sun with no top on—I do that so there’s no tan line—” Capra ran a finger under his collar.
“And I hear a noise, and I look up, and there’s Jack Nathanson standing there, and I ask him how did you get in here, and he grinned like he does, uh, did, and said the gardener must have left the gate in the chain-link open, and I was so surprised to see him I forgot to cover up my tits, and, well, it was kinda too late by then anyway, and he said hey, you and 1 shouldn’t be enemies, and he told me Janet was at work, and you know, we talked, and he said he knew a director who had a little part for someone exactly like me in his next picture, was I interested, and one thing led to another.…”
“So what happened?” asked Capra.
“Well, we had a thing going, usually in the afternoons. Janet was always working. He said he didn’t have sex much with her anyway—”
Yup, that sounded like something Jack would tell a woman, Maxi thought.
“So how long did this go on with you and Nathanson?” Capra asked.
“Until he died,” she said. “Well, till the week before he died, actually. Anyway, the point I’m getting at—”
Oh good, the point, thought Maxi.
“Irving came home early one afternoon. I mean, he never came home early. He was always late, if anything. But one day, he just walks into the guest room; that’s where we used to do it. We couldn’t do it at Jack’s house because Carlotta, his housekeeper, was always there, and sometimes Gia and Ginny. Ginny was Gia’s nanny at Jack’s house—are you following this? So anyway, Irving comes home early and asks Mrs. Hicks where I am, and the bitch tells him I’m in the guest room, so he walks in, and there we are….”
“And?” Capra prompted. Maxi noticed beads of perspiration on his forehead.
“And he doesn’t say word one to Jack, who gets up and puts on his clothes and leaves. He says to me, ‘Get dressed and pack a suitcase.’ I say, ‘Why, where are we going?’ And he says, ‘We are going to a hotel, and I am gonna drop you off, and I’ll send the rest of your stuff wherever, and my lawyer will be in touch with you.’
“And he practically drags me into our bedroom, and he says, ‘Get dressed,’ and he threw a bunch of my things in a suitcase, all the wrong clothes of course, nothing went with anything, and he shoved me and the bag in the Range Rover, and I said, ‘Aren’t we gonna talk about this?’ Like didn’t it ever occur to him that he was forty years older than me and the three-minute sex didn’t exactly get it done for me?”
“So now you’re divorced,” Maxi put in, “and you two are not friends.” It was nearly four, and Maxi had to prepare for the six o’clock broadcast.
“Friends!” She spat it out. “Oh, I’m so sure! He made me sign a prenuptial agreement. It said if the marriage broke up before five years I’d get a hundred grand as a rehabilitative settlement, plus everything I had when we got married, and I had a green 1982 Toyota Corolla when we got married, so he had his people go out and buy me a frigging green ’82 Corolla! It’s parked right out there in your lot, that prick.”
“So you think he killed Jack Nathanson,” Maxi interrupted, wearying of this. She closed her notebook and stood, indicating an end to the meeting, at least for her.
“No, I don’t think he killed Jack. He wouldn’t actually kill a guy. But he sure as hell could have it done, and he was majorlypissed at Jack Nathanson, and if I understand my ex at all, it would take a lot less than—”
“So you and Nathanson had a thing going,” Capra cut in. “You must miss him, huh?”
“Sure, I miss him,” the ex-Mrs. Zimmerman said. “He was gonna get me in the movies.”