There were two of them. They came from inside the house.
Then came silence.
I stopped swimming. Lulu stopped barking. Over on the patio, Elliot froze, tongs in hand, and stared up at the house.
The silence was broken by the hollering of the paparazzi crowded outside of the gate, their voices amped by a whole new level of hysteria. Quickly, I got out of the pool and grabbed a towel.
That’s when I heard the second set of shots. Two more.
I dashed toward the house with the towel around my neck and Lulu trailing right behind me.
Elliot’s eyes were wide with fright. “What the hell was that noise?”
“Gunfire. What do you think?”
“Should we call someone?”
“No need. The cops on the gate heard it. They’ll phone it in.”
“They won’t come check it out for themselves?”
“Can’t. They’ve got a tabloid mob out there to contain. They’ll call for help. We’ve got a few minutes before they get up here. We’d better see what happened.”
I headed into the kitchen. Elliot followed me. On the stove a cast-iron skillet of onions and peppers was cooking on a low flame. A flour tortilla was warming in a second skillet on another burner. There was a package of tortillas and a stack of white kitchen cloths on the counter next to the stove. What there wasn’t was any sign of Maritza.
“She asked me to keep an eye on the steaks while she finished up in here,” Elliot said to me. “I wonder where she went.”
I turned off the flames under the pans and hurried toward the grand front rooms, hearing voices upstairs. Lulu dashed her way up the curving stairway. I followed her.
Reggie and Danielle were standing together in the upstairs hall, both wearing terrified expressions on their faces as they stared down the hall at the big double doors to the master suite, which were closed. Lulu headed straight for the double doors and sat, staring at them.
“Where’s Monette?” I asked them as Elliot came waddling up behind me, still clutching the grill tongs. “What’s happened?”
“We d-don’t know.” Reggie’s voice was quaking with fear. She’d changed from her wet bikini into an old Grateful Dead T-shirt and shorts. I put my arm around her. She nestled against me, trembling.
Lulu continued to sit and stare at the doors to the master suite.
“Did you knock?”
Reggie shook her head.
“Monette . . . ?” Elliot called out. “Everything okay, hon?”
There was no response.
Danielle hadn’t said a word. Just stood there in wide-eyed fear.
“Did you hear anything?” I asked her.
She blinked at me. “Like what?”
“An argument, raised voices?”
She shook her head. “I was in my shower rinsing off the chlorine from the pool.” She wore a pair of blue jeans now with her untucked lavender boyfriend shirt. Her hair was wet. “I was drying off when I heard the shots.”
“And what about Joey? Where’s he?”
“In his room, I guess. That’s where he always is.”
I heard rapid footsteps on the stairs. It was Maritza, who was puffing a bit and looking more than a bit shaken.
“Where have you been?” I asked her.
“In the kitchen, Senor Hoagy,” she replied, her brown eyes avoiding mine. “The peppers and onions. I was stirring them.”
She hadn’t been in the kitchen stirring the peppers and onions. I’d just come from the kitchen. But I didn’t dispute her outright lie. Nor did I say anything about the fact that thirty minutes ago Maritza had been wearing a pale pink dental hygienist’s outfit and now wore a powder blue one. What I did say was, “If you were in the kitchen why didn’t you use the service stairs?”
“I tried, but the door to the senora’s suite is locked,” she explained, snatching the grill tongs from Elliot. “You told me you would keep turning the steaks. They are burned now. No good to eat.”
“I don’t think anyone will be eating lunch,” I said to her.
Now I heard more footsteps on the stairs. They belonged to Lou, Kyle and Joey’s seventeenth-birthday present, Trish.
“I heard shots,” Lou growled. “What’s going on?”
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out. Where have you been?”
“Hanging out in the room with the pool table in it.”
“That would be the billiard room. You were shooting pool?”
“Why is that any of your business?” Kyle demanded. “And where’s Kat?”
“No idea,” I said, noticing how flushed and sweaty all three of them were. They all gave off the same musky animal smell, too. They’d been having themselves a three-way, which is to say that Trish had been doing both men at once, and the doing hadn’t been gentle. She had blotchy red finger marks around her throat, fresh abrasions on her knees and her white bikini was on a bit crooked. I wondered if they’d been making use of the Eartha Kitt sofa. The romantic in me wanted to think they had.
“What’s Pats up to?” asked Lou, who—just this once—wasn’t clutching his blue nylon zipper bag full of drugs. Must have stashed it somewhere in that room with the pool table in it. “Where is he?”
I could hear the LAPD sirens way off in the distance now. The first responders were on their way. Lulu was still parked in front of those double doors to the master suite, staring right at them.
“Stay here,” I said to the others, starting down the hallway toward the suite. I knocked.
“Who is it?” Monette responded in a calm, clear voice.
“It’s Hoagy, Monette. Are you all right?”
“Perfectly fine, thank you.”
“May I come in?”
“Are you alone?”
“Lulu’s with me. No one else.”
“You and Lulu may come in.”
I opened the door and in we went. It smelled faintly of gunpowder in there. The windows were wide open, a breeze billowing the white lace curtains.
“Please close the door,” Monette said to me.
I closed it, my eyes flicking around as I took in the scene before me. Monette was standing, gun in hand, over the cooling sack of dead meat that until very recently had been one of network television’s biggest stars, not to mention her husband. Patrick lay on his back on the floor next to the bed in his Hawaiian shirt and shorts, bleeding out onto the stylishly worn Persian rug underneath him. He had two bullet holes in his chest, one in his right shoulder and one in his left side. His eyes were wide open. Surprised. He looked very surprised.
The master suite, which had been primped and fluffed enough for a magazine shoot the last time I’d seen it, was a total mess. There were desk and dressing table drawers flung open, items of clothing and jewelry tossed about. And then there was the blood spatter that was all over the ruffled white canopy bed, white linen bedspread and plump white pillows, not to mention the wall behind the bed.
There was also blood all over Monette. Her nose was bleeding profusely into her chambray shirt, which she’d stripped off and held to her nose like a wadded towel. The blood had dripped down her chin onto her tank top and white linen pants. She had long, bloody gouges on her bare forearms—fingernail gouges by the look of them—and red finger marks around her upper arms.
The gun she was holding was a stainless-steel Beretta 9mm with a black textured grip.
“Would you please put that gun down, Monette?”
“Yes, of course,” she responded calmly. Eerily so. Possibly she was in shock. “Shall I hand it to you?”
“Just put it down on the floor.”
She set it down on the rug next to her feet while Lulu nosed around in search of the four shell casings on the floor. She found them with no difficulty.
“Would you like to tell me what happened?”
“Patrick attacked me like a crazy man,” she answered in that same calm voice. “He grabbed me, punched me. He was completely deranged. So I took my Beretta from my nightstand and shot him. I had to. He was going to kill me.”
“How did you two end up alone in here together?”
“I came up here to powder my nose and when—”
“Is that your way of saying use the bathroom?”
“It is. And when I walked in I found him ransacking those drawers like a lunatic. He insisted he was looking for a valuable Rolex Submariner that he’d misplaced. I said, ‘Do you mean like the one you gave to Hector?’ He became outraged and said, ‘Are you telling me that he stole my Rolex?’ I said, ‘No, I’m telling you that you gave it to him. He’s very proud of it.’ Patrick said, ‘He’s lying. I never gave him that watch.’ And I said, ‘Patrick, you don’t remember half the things you do anymore. You’re bombed every waking moment. How dare you show up drunk for your son’s birthday party? How dare you bring your little tramp of a girlfriend? How dare you?’ That’s when he lost it and punched me in the nose really hard. I’ve never been hit in the nose before. It hurts like hell.”
“Yes, it does. Bleeds a lot, too. Here, let me . . .”
She lowered the wadded, bloody shirt from her nose. It was oozing blood from both nostrils and was starting to swell up.
“We’ll get some ice on that soon. But for now . . .” I took the bloody shirt into the bathroom and set it in one of the sinks, glancing at it for a moment and not liking what I was seeing. I brought Monette a towel. “Here, press this against it,” I said before I took a quick look around the suite. Monette’s immense walk-in closet was orderly and neat. Patrick hadn’t gone in there, apparently. The door that led to the service stairs was closed. Maritza had told me it was locked. I checked it and discovered it was unlocked—which might or might not mean something. I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything yet. “How many times did you shoot him?” I asked her as I heard the police sirens growing nearer.
“Twice,” she answered, holding the towel to her nose. “The first time, that is. I hit him in his shoulder and side, I believe. He fell back against the bed and slumped slowly to the floor. ‘You shot me, Queenie,’ he said, staring at me in utter disbelief. I said, ‘You’re damned right I did, you horrible bastard. Do you have any idea what kind of hell you’ve put me through? Do you even care?’ His response was to laugh at me. I thought he might apologize. Say something decent and human. Instead, he laughed and told me what a rotten bed partner I was. Went so far as to inform me that he’d had better sex with total strangers in the parking lot of Jerry’s. He wanted me to shoot him, I swear. So I did. Twice more, right in the chest. And I’m not the least bit sorry.”
“I’d advise you not to say anything more until Elliot can hire you an attorney. Just keep quiet when the police get here.”
“But I have nothing to hide.”
“Nonetheless, you’ll be better off if you keep quiet.”
She tilted her head at me curiously. “Why am I getting the impression that you’ve been through this sort of thing before?”
“Because I have. Take a seat in one of those armchairs by the fireplace. Keep holding that towel to your nose, okay?” I went back out into the corridor with Lulu, closing the door behind me.
Everyone was waiting out there expectantly. Everyone except for Kat and Boyd, who still hadn’t turned up. And Joey, whose bedroom door remained closed.
“What’s happened?” Danielle demanded tearfully, clutching Reggie’s hand tightly in her own.
“I’m sorry to say your father is dead. Your mother shot him.”
Maritza let out a gasp. Danielle and Reggie exchanged a look of utter horror.
“Is . . . Monette okay?” Reggie asked me, her voice faltering.
“She got beat up but she’s okay.”
“I don’t fucking believe this!” roared Lou, who picked up a glass vase filled with roses from a hall table and hurled it against the wall, sending shards of broken glass flying everywhere. “I’ll kill that bitch!”
“You’re not killing anyone,” I said to him. “Get a hold of yourself.”
“I want to see Mom,” Danielle said.
“I know you do, but that’s a crime scene in there. The police will want everyone to stay out.” I heard the LAPD sirens drawing nearer on Sunset. They’d just about reached the foot of Rockingham by the sound of them. “Elliot, she’s going to need a good criminal defense attorney.”
He nodded his frizzy head. “I’ll get her the best.”
Lulu was busy sniffing her way from the master suite directly to Joey’s closed door, the one that had the hand-lettered stay the fuck out sign taped to it. When she arrived there she sat, looking at me.
“Does Joey have any idea what’s happened?” I asked Danielle.
She let out a sob. “He always yells and screams at me if I bother him.”
I knocked on Joey’s door. When he didn’t answer I opened it and went in, Lulu darting in ahead of me as I shut it behind us. It was dark in there aside from his small desk lamp and the light coming from the screen of his Macintosh, where Joey was seated tapping away at the keyboard. He had his headphones on.
I thumped him on the shoulder.
He jumped, startled. “What do you want?” he demanded, removing his headphones.
I opened the wooden shutters over his windows, sending sunlight streaming into the darkened room. Joey blinked at me like the cave dweller he was. Or make that the cave dweller he wanted me to think he was. Because there was definitely something not right about Joey. He was wearing different clothes than he’d been wearing a half-hour ago out on the patio. Different flannel shirt, different T-shirt, newer, darker blue jeans. The cuffs of his flannel shirt looked damp. So did its collar and his long, stringy hair that tumbled over it.
Lulu went under the desk and sniffed at Joey’s beat-up black-and-white Chuck Taylor All Stars, snuffling and snorting.
“Your father’s dead, Joey. I’m sorry. Your mother shot him.”
“What are you talking about?” he cried out. “When?”
“Just now, in their bedroom. You didn’t hear the shots?”
He shook his head. “My headphones block out everything. That’s kind of the whole point.”
“Don’t you want to know if your mother’s okay?”
“I’m assuming she is or you would have said otherwise.”
“Fair point. Come with me, Joey. Your sister needs you.”
He gulped. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Be her big brother. Comfort her.”
“Okay. I can do that, I guess.”
Everyone was still standing out in the hallway. Except for Lou, who’d vanished. And Boyd and Kat, who still hadn’t appeared.
Danielle rushed to Joey and flung herself at him, sobbing. “Daddy’s dead, Joey! What are we going to do?”
The kid wasn’t exactly what I’d call a boa constrictor in the hugs department. He stood there stiffly, patting her gingerly on the back. They were quite a study in contrast. She was so golden, athletic and beautiful. He was so pale, pimply and gawky. It was hard to believe that they’d been produced by the same two humans.
“It’ll be okay . . . ,” he said as the police sirens pulled up outside the gate on Rockingham. Two cars, it sounded like. “Should we . . . go talk to Mom?”
“Hoagy said not to yet.”
“And God knows the Hoagster’s always right,” Boyd joked as he and Kat came up the stairs at long last. Boyd wore a cheerful grin on his face. Kat wore no expression at all on hers. Bored. She looked bored. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you folks. Why are you all up here? And what’s with the sirens?”
A buzzer went off in the kitchen. The police at the gate wanted in. Maritza went downstairs to buzz them in.
“Where have the two of you been?” I asked Boyd.
“Why, what’s going on?”
“Monette just shot and killed Patrick. Didn’t you hear the shots?”
“We thought they came from up in the hills. Somebody trying to take out a coyote or—or . . .” Boyd looked at me in disbelief. “Monette killed him? For real?”
“Doesn’t get more real,” I said as big Lou came charging back up the stairs. I didn’t bother to ask him where he’d been. I had a pretty good idea where.
“I have to phone Mr. Harmon Wright right away.” Boyd’s voice was heavy with dread. “He hates finding out this kind of news from CNN.”
I could hear the police cars pull up in the pea gravel turnaround outside. Car doors opened and closed. Footsteps approached the house. The doorbell rang. Maritza went to let them in.
Kat started toward the door of the master suite.
“You’d better stay out of there,” Elliot cautioned her.
She ignored him. She was Kat Zachry. Nobody told Kat Zachry what to do. She opened the door, took two steps inside and stopped, staring at the body of her lover dead on the floor.
I pulled her out of there, shutting the door. “You don’t want Danielle and Joey to see their father in that condition, do you?”
“I’ve never seen a dead person before,” she said to me, stunned.
“Did you care about him at all?” I asked her, hearing the husky voices of the cops downstairs. “Or was it strictly a career move?”
She gazed up at me with those big, brown bedroom eyes of hers and said, “Fuck off.”
Then she found Kyle and stood there with him, glaring at me. He put an arm around her protectively. Trish stood next to them in her bikini with her red, splotchy neck and red scraped knees, possibly wondering why she hadn’t chosen to spend the afternoon scrubbing the stubborn mold from the grout between her bathroom tiles. It would have been a major improvement over this.
Two burly young cops in uniform came barging up the stairs and, from that moment on, the official process unfolded in its own painstaking, step-by-step way. One of them herded us downstairs and took down our basic identification and contact information while the other called in Patrick’s death and Monette’s injuries. The pair of cops who’d arrived in the second car remained outside in the driveway to make sure that none of the paparazzi jumped the wall and tried to get in the house. An EMT crew arrived soon to attend to Monette’s bloodied nose and arms. A pair of homicide detectives showed up soon after that. Then came two vans full of crime scene personnel—the technicians who would, just for starters, take a million and one Polaroid photos of Patrick’s body, Monette’s wounds, the murder weapon, the shell casings on the floor and the blood that was spattered everywhere. And then came the county medical examiner’s man to examine Patrick’s body and move it so that more Polaroids could be taken of the blood-soaked rug underneath him.
While all of this went on upstairs in the master suite, we waited downstairs to be questioned by the homicide detectives.
Danielle and Joey sat huddled close together in the conservatory with Reggie, who spoke to her grief-stricken niece and nephew in a soft, soothing voice. Maritza sat near them with her hands folded in her lap and a frightened look on her face as she watched the authorities clomp up and down the stairs.
Kat, Kyle and Trish sat together on one of the chintz sofas in the living room in impatient silence. Trish now wore her cropped sweatshirt over her bikini. Lou sat in an armchair by the fireplace sucking on a grape Tootsie Pop and perspiring like crazy. He was barely keeping it together. His breathing was rapid and shallow, and his massive hands were gripping the arms of the chair so tightly that I half-expected him to rip them from the body of the chair, let loose with a roar and go crashing out the nearest window.
Boyd and Elliot paced. The living room. The hallway. The dining room. Back to the living room. They’d made the calls they needed to make. Now all that was left was to ponder the dollars and cents ramifications of what had just happened. And pace.
Me, I grabbed Boyd by the back of his polo shirt and yanked him into the billiard room. “Where were you and Kat?” I asked him in a low, quiet voice. “And please don’t tell me you two were getting it on.”
“No way,” he protested. “She’s got a kid inside of her. What kind of a sleazy perv do you think I . . . ? Never mind, don’t answer that. We were out back behind the pool house, okay?”
“Doing what?”
“Climbing in through the window. Well, I was climbing in. Kat couldn’t risk it herself, being pregnant and all.”
“Why on earth were you climbing in my window?”
“She wanted to borrow your leather motorcycle jacket and—”
“Flight jacket.”
“And she told me you’d said it would be okay, but that you must have forgotten—because when we tried your door it was locked.”
“Did you honestly believe that bullshit story?”
Boyd’s eyes widened. “She was trying to steal it?”
“No, she’s not that dumb. She convinced you to do it.”
“Well, I didn’t. Couldn’t find the damned thing.”
“Of course you couldn’t. I hid it.” Tucked it safely away in one of the Roadmaster’s saddlebags. “What I can’t believe is she talked you into breaking and entering.”
“It was strictly business,” he said defensively. “She said if I helped her she’d let me represent her book.”
“Book? What book?”
“What difference does it make? We’ll cook something up. Kat’s money. And her upside is huge, or at least it was until an hour ago. Help me out here, amigo. You’re the one who knows everything there is to know about showbiz murders. Will this be good for her career or bad?”
At our feet Lulu let out a low growl.
“Why is she doing that?” he asked me.
“Because she knows that if you don’t get away from me right now I’m going to slug you.”
“All I meant was—”
“Far away.”
“Okay, okay . . .” He went back out into the hall and resumed his pacing.
I didn’t feel like talking to anyone else so I stayed in the billiard room and shot some pool. Lulu was planning to curl up on the Eartha Kitt sofa until she sniffed at it with a basset hound’s version of puritanical disdain and opted for a leather armchair instead. It wasn’t bad there in the clubby silence of the billiard room. The antique table was a beauty. The cue stick that I’d chosen from the rack on the wall was balanced just right. The balls went exactly where I wanted them to go. I found it comforting to listen to the timeless clink of ball against ball as the crime scene professionals tromped their way up and down the curving stairway, speaking in loud voices.
I didn’t hear the last of them arrive. Didn’t even know he was there until I saw him standing in the doorway of the billiard room watching me shoot pool with a boyish grin on his face. I knew him from the last time I’d been in town. Different star. Different murder.
Lieutenant Emil Lamp was the department’s go-to celebrity homicide ace. And as unlikely-looking an ace as I’d ever come across. He was a fresh-scrubbed, bright-eyed, eager little guy with neat blond hair, alert blue eyes and wholesome apple cheeks. He bore an eerie resemblance to Howdy Doody, to be perfectly honest. He wore a tan suit made out of something no-iron, a yellow button-down shirt, a striped tie and a pair of nubucks with red rubber soles. Lamp specialized in high-profile showbiz killings because he and his nubucks happened to be uncommonly good at not stepping on famous, sensitive toes. He was polite, tactful and way, way sharp.
“Cheese and crackers, Hoagy!” he exclaimed. “What in the holy heck are you doing here?”
“I was just asking myself that very same question, Lieutenant.”
He considered this for a moment before he said, “Shall we make it Chuy’s?”
“Chuy’s, by all means.”