Trey arrived within the hour. By then, Blaney had cuffed my right wrist to the leg of a table in the kitchen. Stew had slapped together a pile of sandwiches for us. Roast beef, honey-cured ham and Swiss cheese, and for Trey, who was one of those meatless half-vegans, a tuna melt on rye.
They had theirs with soft drinks. I ate mine, single-handed, with a wheat beer while they discussed my fate.
The early part of their conversation concerned my “cop friends.”
“What’d you tell ’em about last night?” Blaney asked.
“That I saw Gibby Lewis being murdered.”
“Shit,” Trey said. “I told you this would happen, Stew.”
“It’s just a hiccup,” Stew said. “On Monday, when both Lewis and Billy are no-shows, things will get a little frantic at the network. Eventually, the police will be notified. The lead detective—what’s his name? The one who caught The Hairdresser?”
“Brueghel,” Blaney said.
“Right. He’ll zoom here and find that Billy moved out the night before. That’s why we’ve got to keep him alive. So that the security guard can see him drive away with all his crap in the car.
“Brueghel will still dig around out here like a hound hunting truffles, but there are thirty-seven homes in the Sands, not including the villa. I’ll take those odds.”
“He won’t have to dig too deep to make the connection between you and Des O’Day,” I said.
“Let him. I got an alibi for that night, podnah.” He smiled. “I was with my good friend Doc.”
Blaney smiled, too.
“But Blaney did kill Des,” I said.
“That’s the beauty part, Billy,” Stew said. “By him being my alibi, I automatically become his. We both slide.”
“Why’d Gibby have to die?” I asked.
“Tell him, Doc,” Stew said. “That one’s on you.”
“I, ah … It’s my eye thing,” Blaney said. “I spent a lot of time in the sun, growing up. It kinda fucked up my eyes. It’s why I wear these glasses during the day. But after dark, I can’t see worth shit with ’em. That night in the theater, just as I’m getting ready to operate the fucking overcomplicated trigger device, I look up to see the schmuck staring straight at me. I tell him some bullshit that I’m a photographer and it’s a camera I’m carrying, and between that and the fact I’m hidden by this black outfit head to toe, I figured all was copacetic.
“But last night, almost midnight, I’m relaxing in my hot tub with a friend and the phone rings. My office number. It’s the schmuck. He says he recognized me by my eyes.
“A few years back, I did some work for a friend of his, a cheeseball comic named Philly Slide who needed somebody to throw a scare into this bimbo who was squeezing him. Lewis tells me Slide confided all this to him just after I put the fear in the broad so bad she went running back to Bumfuck, Kansas, or wherever she was from. At the time, Slide also mentioned my … eye ailment which is how Lewis made the connection.
“So he’s blabbing to me about all this, and I’m thinking about how I’m gonna have to kill him when here comes the fucking unbelievable part. He offers me a hundred grand to appear on his show in disguise and tell the world who hired me to off O’Day. That’s more than Stew paid me to do the job.
“Lewis swears he’ll never give me up afterward, even if they throw him in the slams. It’ll only add to his fame. He’ll write a book about it. He’s got it all figured.
“It’s too loony to be a setup. I mean, the schmuck is a witness to murder. He goes to the cops, they’re not gonna play games like this. They’re gonna drag my ass in and then do their best to make me give up names.”
He turned to Stew. “Not that I ever would. Anyway, I can’t see a downside in meeting the schmuck. If the cops are behind it, I’m nailed anyway. If he’s for real with his offer, I can get all or part of the hundred grand and … kill him. It’s a win-win.
“At my suggestion, we meet in the parking lot at Du-par’s in the Valley. I get him into my car. Check for a wire, though I know fucking well there will not be one. Then bounce his head off the dash and stick him in the trunk.”
“And you bring him out here,” Stew said, obviously miffed.
“Like I told you, where else? My ‘friend’ is at my crib. I don’t know where Trey coops. I got to find out if the schmuck’s told anybody about me, and I figure this place is nice and secluded.”
“With the party of the year going on,” Stew said.
“How the fuck was I to know that?”
“There are a million places where you wouldn’t run the risk of the guy breaking away and running for it. The place where you disposed of the body, for one.”
“Stew, ease off, huh?” Trey whined. The peacemaker. “We’re all in this together.”
“Yeah, Stew. Don’t forget, if we hadn’t listened to you, right now we’d be looking forward to a nice, enjoyable Saturday night. Instead, we’ll be heading back to the fucking dump.”
“You’ll be heading back,” Stew said. “Like last night.”
“It’s a different situation from last night, Stew,” Doc said. “I drove in with Gibby in my trunk, and I drove out the same way. No prob. But this guy is gonna have to be seen driving his car out. So it’s a three-car, three-person job, like Fitzpatrick was.”
Poor Fitz, I thought. Didn’t make it to his safe haven.
“Okay,” Stew said reluctantly. “But I’m not going to be the guard dog again. You can hold the gun on Billy, Doc. I’ll drive your car out.”
“That won’t work. You don’t look nothing like me.”
“I’ll wear your glasses.”
“I don’t wear ’em at night. And I don’t like other people wearing ’em. It’s called conjunctivitis. Look it up.”
“This is fucked,” Stew said. “All I wanted to do was blow that homicidal mick to hell. That was a just act. That was setting the record straight. This other stuff, it’s murder, boys. And it doesn’t seem to end.”
“This is definitely the end,” Trey said.
“You said that about the musician.”
“We had to do that, once we realized he knew about you and Des. But you can’t call this murder. It’s more like … I don’t know, collateral damage.”
Stew glared at him, eyes blazing. “That’s what they called Connie’s death.”
Trey lowered his head and seemed to melt into his chair.
They were quite a trio. Larry, Moe, and Curly given a David Mamet update. But they’d killed three people, and, unless I was very, very lucky, I’d be number four.