Chapter 11

POLICE CARS HAD closed off the street at Damon’s corner, and a combination of yellow tape and uniformed officers blocked access to the building. A small crowd of “civilians” had gathered, whispering to each other. Considerate—trying not to wake the dead. The first person I recognized was Matt Phoenix. As I came closer, I saw he was talking to Joe Niles and taking notes.

Matt looked up and saw me.

“What are you doing here?” His tone was professional.

“I telephoned her,” Joe said.

“Why?” It sounded like an accusation. Where was the gentle voice that told me I had pretty hair?

Joe’s feet were surrounded by half-smoked cigarette butts. “Why did I call Morgan? I—I just . . . just thought  . . . she should know . . .” he stammered. It sounded lame, even to me.

“Who did you call first, Mr. Niles—the police or Mrs. Tyler?”

That was an accusation. Detective Phoenix, who wasn’t “Matt” to me now, was brow-beating Joe. In spite of my distaste for our director, I thought Phoenix was treating him badly, without a good reason.

“I called nine-one-one. Then I called Morgan.”

“Who else did you call?”

Joe hesitated, taking time to wipe the perspiration from his forehead and neck, although it was a chilly night.

“Who else did you call? We can find out from your phone records.”

“Bloody hell, I am not stalling,” Joe protested. “I just saw a friend of mine smashed to pieces on the bricks. That has left me more than a bit shaken.” He took a breath. “I also informed the network people I thought should know. Rick Spencer and Nathan Hughes.”

“Rick works with Damon,” I said. “Nathan’s head of public relations. You met them both at the hospital the other night.”

“I remember.”

“Rick said he was going to call Mr. Yarborough,” Joe said. Then he added, “Winston Yarborough, the chairman of the network.”

“Just the next of kin, huh.”

Detective Phoenix is a sarcastic bastard, I thought, then realized, “Ohmigod—Jeremy.” I looked at Joe. “Has anyone told Damon’s son? Or Jeremy’s mother? They shouldn’t find out on the news.”

Joe shook his head. “Not I.”

Phoenix aimed a professional frown at me. “Who did you tell?”

“No one—I didn’t know what happened, so I came right over.” Now my explanation sounded lame. Why did I rush to Damon’s? Did I want to make sure he was truly dead? “What did happen?”

Before he could reply, the medical examiner’s van arrived.

“Stick around,” Phoenix told us. “I have some more questions.” He strode off to meet the medical examiner. Detective Flynn emerged from the side of the building and joined him at the van. Then Phoenix and Flynn led the medical examiner toward the patio, which was enclosed by a thick wall of foliage and out of sight from the street.

“What happened, Joe? Quick, before he comes back and arrests us.”

“That’s not funny.”

“Lots of things aren’t funny,” I said. “Can you tell me what happened?”

“It was damned awful, Morgan. I found his body.”

I have seen a dead human being, and I know the experience has a profound impact. If someone else had been in this situation, I would have tried to comfort that person, but I couldn’t bring myself to comfort a pig like Joe Niles. He was on his own.

“He was lying in the middle of the brick patio below the balconies. You can’t see it from the street—”

“I know. Why did you go around to the patio? Actually, why did you come to Damon’s this time of night?”

“He called me earlier, while I was having dinner. Said he had something important to discuss, and I was to be here at 1 A.M. I was early, so I decided to go around to the patio to have a smoke. He doesn’t allow smoking in his apartment.”

One A.M. was a strange time for Damon to schedule a meeting. He was well known for getting up at six o’clock every morning so he could telephone Los Angeles, where it was three o’clock. He liked to fling questions at his underlings when they were asleep, when they were most likely to make mistakes in their answers. I had never heard of his scheduling a meeting for later than the dinner hour. Damon liked to be finished with his business day by ten o’clock at night so that he could enjoy his personal life. But maybe that vile personal life was the reason he had wanted Joe to come over.

“Did you see him fall?” I asked.

“The detective just asked me that when you got here. No, thank God. He was already lying there . . . so much blood . . . and his face, it was all mashed . . .” He shuddered at the memory. “I walked onto the patio, struck a match to light my cigarette—God, I almost tripped over him.”

“When you called, you said someone pushed him over the balcony. How do you know that’s what happened?”

“Well, how else could it? You’ve been up to his apartment. The railing’s more than waist high. He couldn’t have climbed over with casts on his arm and leg. So I just assumed . . .” His voice trailed off.

“Did you tell that to Detective Phoenix?”

“Yes.” He saw me frown. “Christ, he’ll suspect me, won’t he? If it happened the way I thought it did. He could think I knew because I killed him.”

“Joe, I can’t believe anybody would think that, just because you made a good guess—if you did. We don’t know that. We really don’t know anything at all.”

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Detectives Phoenix and Flynn came back into view, followed by the medical examiner. They were accompanied by two men carrying a body bag on a stretcher. The detectives went over to the building’s entrance to question the doorman, but I couldn’t take my eyes off that stretcher as the medical examiner supervised its loading into the back of his official van. Damon Radford, heir apparent to the kingdom of the Global Broadcasting Network, was now only a lifeless object. When I turned away, I noticed Joe was staring at the covered body, too. There was a look very much like relief on his face. As I watched him watching Damon’s remains disappear into the medical examiner’s van, I remembered something Joe told Phoenix earlier that had struck me as odd. What he said was “I just saw a friend of mine smashed to pieces on the bricks.”

Joe Niles referring to Damon as a “friend” was typical. Behind Damon’s back, Joe had expressed his absolute dislike of our boss. Maybe I was being too literal; in the entertainment business people frequently use the word “friend” to describe any relationship from the barest acquaintance to implacable hatred. The two words that are most abused in this profession are “friend” and “love.” Still, I could not help wondering if Joe was lying to Phoenix to make it appear that he had no reason to kill Damon?

If, indeed, Damon actually had been murdered.

Or did Joe and Damon have a personal relationship unknown to the rest of us worker bees involved in putting Love of My Life on the air?

If Damon had been murdered, I wasn’t particularly hoping for the killer’s apprehension. It was likely that whoever had been up in the penthouse with Damon last had a very good reason to want him dead. Still, as someone who creates plots for a living, including murder mysteries, I was curious to find out the who, and the why.

THE DETECTIVES FINISHED questioning the doorman and returned to where Joe and I were standing. I had a question for them.

“Who’s upstairs in Damon’s apartment?”

“Forensics—the crime scene team.”

“Nobody else?”

“No. Should there be?”

“Damon hired male nurses to be with him on eight-hour shifts. Where is the one who should be on duty now?”

“The doorman said he left with Radford’s doctor, about nine-thirty. He said Radford didn’t have any other visitors tonight.”

“He wouldn’t necessarily know. He couldn’t have seen anyone who went up or came down by way of the service elevator.”

“Service elevator?”

“Each wing has a service elevator that stops at the kitchen door of each apartment. It’s for deliveries, but if you’re in a hurry, it’s quicker than going down the front way.”

Three men were looking at me, but not the way a woman likes to be looked at.

“Good lord, Morgan,” Joe Niles said, “how many times have you been to Damon’s?”

“My best friend, Nancy Cummings, lives in this building. Ten E. I stayed with her for several months, when I first came back from Africa.”

We heard the roar of a motor and the screeching of brakes as the first TV news truck arrived. A camera-ready news reporter hopped out, followed by her live-on-the-scene broadcast crew.

I aimed a defiant look at Detectives Phoenix and Flynn. “I’m going to tell Jeremy about his father,” I said. “He loved Damon. It’s going to be terrible for him, but maybe a little easier if he hears it from somebody who’s not a stranger.”

Flynn nodded to Phoenix. “I hate the notifying-the-next-of-kin part of the job. You go with her, Matt.”

“Where does the boy live?” Phoenix asked me.

“On East Seventy-Seventh Street.”

“I’ll drive you,” he said.