It wasn’t until I’d started on my way up Calvin Coolidge Drive that I noticed the car, and only then because ignoring it was impossible. It was the only other vehicle on the winding drive, and its headlights flashed in my rearview mirror at every twist and turn.
Even then I didn’t suspect it was following me.
Brueghel’s house was near the top of the drive. A work in progress. Just half of the front of the small cottage had been recently painted. The gate was new, but the wood was bare and, even in a city with minimal rainfall, cried out for some kind of stain or varnish.
As I entered through the gate, the BMW drove past, traveling neither fast nor slow. Nice car, I thought. But I never quite understood why people liked those dark tinted windows.
I turned and followed a short brick walkway to the front door of the house, passing a paint can that rested on a patch of scrub grass that constituted the front lawn. The lid of the can was missing, and the paint had solidified around a brush that Brueghel or somebody had left in it. I wondered how long ago he’d been called away from working on the house and how long it would take him to get back to it.
In response to the buzzer, a light went on over the front door and, after a second or two—the time it would take to press an eye to a peephole—the detective was framed in the doorway, wearing a blue warm-up outfit. He gave the surroundings a quick scan, then invited me into a tiny entrance area that smelled of turpentine, though I saw no evidence of it.
There were baseball caps, a hat, and several jackets, of cloth and leather, hanging from pegs on a wooden block bolted to the wall next to a closet door. A handsome bleached-pine floor seemed to run throughout the house.
“Have any trouble finding the place?” he asked, leading me down a short hall to a living room that a neatness freak would call messy but that struck me as comfortable.
“Nope. My rental’s GPS led me right here.”
“Good. How about a beer after that drive?”
“Sure,” I said, wondering, not for the first time, what I was doing there.
He disappeared for about as long as it took me to move a stack of paperback mysteries from a chair and sit down. He returned with a frosty bottle of Cerveza Pacifico in each hand.
“Maybe you’d prefer a glass?”
I told him I didn’t, and accepted the offered bottle. He clinked his against mine, and we both drank. The icy beer was just a few degrees shy of a brain freeze and had a nice sharp edge.
“I’m out of limes,” he said.
“You drag me all the way up here and you don’t even have limes?” I said.
It took him a second or two to realize I was kidding.
“What can I say, Blessing? I’m not used to playing host.”
“I’m surprised you suggested we meet here at your house,” I said. “Don’t you guys usually draw the line between your work and your home?”
“Ordinarily I’d have suggested a bar,” he said. “But knowing how you hoard information, I don’t see you blabbing my address to just anybody on the street. And the fact of the matter is it was too late for me to get a sitter for the kid.”
Only then did I notice the little transformer toy resting on the floor near the dark TV set. “A boy?” I asked.
He nodded. “Just turned four. A real handful. In his bed, hopefully asleep.”
“I didn’t take you for a married man,” I said.
“I’m not. Little Pete’s mother and I never … well, she’s out of the picture now.”
He raised the beer bottle to his lips. I waited for him to either explain why she was out of the picture or to move on to another topic. When he remained silent, staring at the floor, I, used to filling in awkward silences while on camera, said, “A homicide detective raising a young boy. Can’t be easy.”
“No. I wouldn’t call it easy. But it has its moments.” He smiled. “And Pete’s making a better man of me. At least this guy who’s a pretty good observer of human nature thinks so.”
“A fellow detective?”
“No. He writes books. Ever heard of a crime novel called The Manicurist?”
“Of course,” I said. It had been a bestseller. The story of a tough L.A. homicide detective on the trail of a serial killer who murdered hookers and then painted their fingernails pale green. “Wait a minute. Don’t tell me …?”
His grin turned sheepish. “Yeah. He kinda based his fictional story on my investigation and capture of a whackjob the media named The Hairdresser. I don’t know if there was much about that case on the East Coast, but out here it was a big deal. Anyway, he’s writing a sequel. And since I’ve got Pete now, in the new book his detective is becoming a single father, too. He says it’ll make the character more unique and more human.”
“So your son living here is a recent development?”
“A few months,” he said. “But I didn’t ask you up here to talk about me.”
He took a slow sip of beer.
“If it’s about the whirring sound I heard before the explosion,” I said, “I don’t know what else I can tell you.”
“That was helpful info, and I’ll pass it along to the techs who are trying to identify the device and its triggering mechanism. But that’s not why I asked you here, either. Something’s come up I didn’t want to get into on the phone.”
“Yeah?”
He stared at me for a beat, as if he were contemplating several approaches to the something that had come up. He settled on: “Charbonnet wants a sit-down with you.”
I think I showed great restraint by not doing a classic spit take. Instead, I asked, “Why?”
“His attorney, Malcolm Darrow, who’s pretty damn sharp, by the way, said he didn’t know why. He was just passing along his client’s request.”
I placed the beer bottle on the floor and stood up. “Tell Mr. Darrow I’m sorry, but I’ve had more than enough meetings with his client.”
“Sit down, Blessing. Finish your beer and hear me out. Please.”
Reluctantly, I sat down. I said, “It’s not hard to figure out why you’d want me to meet with Roger. You’re hoping he’ll blow up and do something stupid, like cave in my head with a chair.”
“Maybe not that, exactly,” he said. “There’s no chance of him harming you. In fact, I can’t see a downside to your meeting with him. But it could result in him spilling something that will help our case.”
“Don’t you have enough evidence now to put him away?” I asked.
“You never have enough,” he said. “The ghost of the O.J. trial will be haunting us for a long time.”
“This won’t be anything like the O.J. trial,” I said.
“Oh, really? Let me bring you up-to-date. The lovely Miss Zeena Zataran has now definitely remembered, without a doubt, that she’d made a date with Charbonnet that night for eight o’clock and failed to notify him about her conflicting vodka party commitment. So he’ll say he was expecting her. Ergo, the ‘I was at home’ alibi is looking better.
“And she’s positive he called her from his home at nine-thirty. She even recalls a chime going off from the clock in his living room.”
“What about all the junk you recovered from his place?”
“That’s the O.J. touch,” Brueghel said. “There’s a rumor going around that one of the investigating offers may have had a hidden agenda that drove him to plant that ‘evidence.’ ”
I leaned back in the chair. “The officer being you,” I said. “And the hidden agenda being your previous failure to nail Roger with the death of Tiffany Arden.”
“You got it. Before little Pete became a part of my life, this kind of crap would have driven me nuts. Now I just look for other ways of getting the job done. Will you talk to him, Blessing?”
“Let me sleep on it,” I said.
If the BMW followed me out to Malibu, I didn’t notice it.