City of Mirrors (11 page)

I
was back on Stone Canyon Road again. The gates to Bella Casa were opened and the street was filled with black-and-whites, fire trucks, and ambulances. The men and women who manned the emergency vehicles were preparing to leave.

Beth stopped the car near the curb. “My God, what's going on?”

“They found a body.”

She stared at me. “What's it have to do with you?” she asked.

“Nothing. I'm here to help a friend.”

She peered at the ivy-covered wall and the two entrance gates now with yellow crime-scene tape draped across them as if it were familiar to her.

“Do you know this place?”

“No. Who's your friend?”

“Celia Dario. The house is empty and for sale. She has the listing.”

“Zaitlin's mistress?”

“Small world, isn't?”

“No. Just a cruel one.”

“Thanks, Beth.” I got out of her car.

She waved, threw the Porsche into drive, made a U-turn, and sped off.

I strode officiously up to the patrolman who guarded one of the gates. “I'm Diana Poole, I'm here to see Celia Dario.” Then taking a big chance, hoping she was on this case, I added, “Detective Spangler knows me.”

He mumbled something into a walkie-talkie, then said, “You can go in.”

He released the yellow tape as if he were an usher letting me into the reserved section at a screening. I started up the drive. Patrol officers leaned against their cruisers. The ME vans waited with their back doors hanging open. No one bothered me.

There was too much activity by the front door so I veered off onto a brick path that led behind the house. Heading to the indoor swimming pool, I stopped dead. A few feet away a uniformed officer stood with his back to me, legs apart, staring out at the dusky unruly garden. It took a few moments for me to realize he was taking a piss on a Bird of Paradise plant. Taking advantage of his reverie, I dashed to the swimming pool door and went inside.

I hurried around the pool. Opening the louvered doors, I stepped into the gallery and followed it into the dining room. In the middle of the room was an antique crystal chandelier that had once hung over a long table where I used to eat alone. I ducked under it and paused, listening to voices coming from the kitchen.

“You looking for another dead body?”

I whirled around. “Hello, Detective.”

Detective Dusty Spangler sat on a folding chair next to a built-in marble-top buffet. Wearing her gray slacks, navy blue jacket, and a pink button-down shirt, she didn't bother to look up from the forms she was filling out. “Homicide always comes down to more paperwork.” Scribbling her name at the end of the page with a flourish, she got to her feet, put the forms on the buffet, then reached into her jacket pocket and took out a Snickers bar. “Want one?”

“No, thanks.”

“You look like you could use something to eat. But then everybody looks that way to me.” She patted her belly. “Take it. I have another.”

I unwrapped the Snickers while she found the other one in her jacket pocket and did the same. We stood eating the candy, assessing each other. She was right, I did need it.

Finally I asked, “Why do you make me feel guilty?”

She popped the last bite into her mouth. Still chewing, she answered, “Maybe because you used my name to sneak into a murder scene.”

“I came to see my friend Celia.”

“She's in the living room.”

“Thanks.” I started to go there.

“One sec.”

Reluctantly, I turned around.

“I saw you on TV this morning, leaving your house. You were getting into a big Mercedes-Benz limo.” She raised her blond, defiantly un-plucked eyebrows. “
Parson's
big Mercedes-Benz limo.”

“He wanted to know about his daughter's death.”

“Where was he? On his yacht? My partner and I just got back from visiting him at his house in Montecito.”

I nodded.

“Come with me,” Spangler said in her flat Kansas voice.

She walked me through the familiar kitchen. The place I would sneak down to in the middle of the night with one of my mother's sleeping pills, which I had stolen from her, growing sticky in my hand. I'd make hot chocolate laced with Irish whiskey, then down the pill with the delicious drink. I couldn't sleep then either. Now uniformed officers, beefy arms folded across their chests, leaned against the tile counters, talking shop while appraising me.

Spangler opened the back door and we were in the side yard. Lights had been set up to fight the growing darkness. A cold California dampness was settling in.

“Excuse us here.” She guided me around the forensic technicians in their protective clothing. “Step where I step,” she ordered.

We stopped near a collapsed outdoor umbrella leaning against a stucco wall overgrown with ivy. Slumped against the same wall was a man's body, his long legs extended in front of him on the grass. He was clad in black jeans and a navy blue T-shirt. The hood of his gray-sweat zip-up covered most of his sandy-colored hair. “You know him?”

The candy bar welled up into my throat. I swallowed it back down. “No, I don't.”

He was young with the kind of good looks a kid could rely on to just get by. But now his skin was as gray as his hoodie, a dark stain spread across his chest, and his amber eyes stared blankly down his splayed legs to his boots.

“He's Zackary Logan. Dead about three hours. Shot in the chest. Name ring a bell?”

“I said I didn't know him.”

“I'm asking if you've heard of his name.” She moved closer, her belly pushed at me, forcing me to take a step back. “Maybe you even mentioned the name to Parson?”

“No and no.” But I thought of the kid in Jenny's garage caught on the security camera with his hood pulled down over his face. “You think Parson had something to do with this? But he's in Santa Barbara. When did he have the time?”

“He only needs to make a phone call.” She took a brown leather notepad from her jacket pocket. It had the same embossed insignia on the cover as the one Heath had read his notes from on the yacht. She noticed me staring at it.

“A gift.”

“What's the CIU stand for?” I asked, even though I already knew.

“Criminal Investigation Unit for the Army. Couldn't wait to get out of it. The rank and file hate you. Feel you're spying on them. But when I got home, the experience put me on the fast track to become a detective.”

“Were you in Iraq?”

“Afghanistan.”

“Then you must know Leo Heath.”

She actually blushed, and it made her look ten years younger. “Runs a security firm. Good guy. He gave me this.”

So she was his source, I thought, as she looked over her notes.

“You know a P. J. Binder?” she asked.

“No.”

“Pool man. He discovered the body. He says he knew your mother.”

“A lot of people think they knew her.”

“He cleaned the pool when the two of you lived here. He remembers her.”

“I was fifteen, sixteen then. Are you saying he still cleans the pool at this house?”

“For about forty years. Celia Stone says the current owners rely on him, as did the past ones, and many of the neighbors in the area. Highly recommended.”

“The ‘mislaid man,'” I said, remembering.

“What?”

“That's what my mother called him. He's a Vietnam vet.”

“Trust him?”

“I never met him. He'd come around four in the morning to clean the pool. She'd go talk with him. That's all I really know.”

“Four in the morning. That's early.”

“I guess he couldn't sleep.”

“Why did she call him the mislaid man?”

“I never asked her. I wasn't that interested in what she did back then. May I see Celia now?”

She appraised me as if I were an exotic bird. “Novices usually can't handle viewing dead bodies. You did very well. In fact, you even kept your Snickers down.”

“Did you give me the candy bar as some kind of test?”

“No. You looked hurt and hungry. You can go see your friend now. Wait a minute.” She turned to a female cop. “Take her to the living room. She can see Celia Dario.” She smiled at me. “Don't want you wandering off contaminating any evidence.”

 

The policewoman returned me to the dining room and watched as I opened the double doors onto the living room. Her profile to me, Celia sat on an old purple velvet sofa that ran parallel to the empty fireplace. There was no other furniture. A five-tiered, wrought-iron chandelier hung from the dark wood-beamed ceiling, shedding a patch of dim filigreed light over the sitting area and leaving the rest of the vast room in shadows. I closed the doors behind me.

“Celia.” My voice echoed off the thick white stucco walls. My heels tapped on the walnut wood planks.

“Oh, Diana you came.” She rose, extending her arms toward me. We hugged, then sat down on the sofa, each at one end. An awkward coolness settled between us. Wearing jeans and a sweater, she looked shaken. Her bruise had lightened, yellowing her cheek.

“I'm outta the movie,” I finally said.

“What? Oh, God, I'm sorry. Robert wanted to keep you.”

“I know he did. Where'd this couch come from? Looks like early-brothel.”

“It was the only piece of furniture the owners left. I guess they thought it warmed the room.”

We smiled, but it was obligatory.

“The police showed me the body,” she continued. “Why would they think I'd know who he is … was?”

“It's what they do. How did he get in?”

“I don't know. Why would he be killed here?” She clasped her hands tightly.

Not having any answers, I pulled my gray leather jacket more closely around me and stared into the soot-blackened fireplace. Acanthuses were carved in relief on the limestone surrounding. My mother and I and the man who I had given myself to by the pool had once roasted marshmallows in it. Mother was desperate to create the fantasy of a holiday family. A Norman Rockwell sleaze-bag was a stand-in for my father. A man we had both screwed. “Look!” she had exclaimed. She held her firm white marshmallow, speared on a long-handled fork, over the flames, watching it shrivel and sag. “It's like seeing a beautiful face age in seconds.” She watched the sleaze-bag pop his gooey blob into his mouth and added darkly, “And then they eat you up.” And I knew she'd been talking about herself.

Celia reached over and took my hand. “I'm sorry I got so angry at you.”

“You need to tell me why,” I said.

The double doors opened and Spangler strode in.

“Later,” Celia whispered.

“I'm pooped. Do you mind if I sit?” Spangler gestured to the small space on the cushions between Celia and me, and squeezed her wide rear end into it. Now all three of us sat jammed thigh-to-thigh and shoulder-to-shoulder.

Grinning, I said to her, “You're very theatrical in your own way.”

“Am I?” She was pleased. “Maybe it's because I work the West L.A. Division. It kinda rubs off.” She glanced sideways at Celia. “I just have a few more questions. You said the house has been empty for almost two years. Why is that?”

“The market. Houses like this that need work are not big sellers right now. And the owners won't come down in price.”

“Does anybody ever use the house?”

“As I said, the owners live in Italy. Genoa.”

“That's where the salami comes from. Do they have a son?”

“They have no children. They're an elderly couple.”

“You never saw signs that the house might have been used for parties? Kids find a way of getting in and using empty homes for all kinds of things.”

“There's a gardener, a pool man, and a cleaning crew that comes in when we need them. They've never said anything. I've told all this to your partner.”

“The kid has keys on him but none of them fit any of the doors to this place. So somebody had to let him in.”

“Or the person who killed him could've taken the key,” I said.

“That was next on my list. Now why would the murderer do that?”

“I don't know but the kid, the body, looked more like a man to me,” I said.

“You're right, Zackary Logan was twenty-eight according to his driver's license.” She swiveled her head back to Celia. “How'd you get the bruise?”

Celia touched her cheek. “It has nothing to do with …”

“Then you won't mind telling me.”

“I fell. I was a little tipsy. I was wearing very high heels.”

“I tried a pair of those on, and I couldn't even stand up in them let alone fall down. Where did you take your tumble?”

“At home. I hit the edge of the coffee table.”

“Had to hurt.” She extricated herself from between us and stood, pulling her blazer down and adjusting her thick blond stub of a ponytail.

“It happened two days ago,” I said, hoping to make it clear to Spangler that Celia's bruises had nothing to do with the dead man in the side yard.

Glancing up at the chandelier, she said, “I can tell even in this light that they're not fresh.” She thought for a moment. “Jenny Parson was murdered two days ago. Thank you, ladies, you can go now.”

I
t was dark when Celia drove me down Sunset Boulevard to the ocean. Her hands moved nervously on the steering wheel. “Why did Spangler make that comment about my bruises and when Jenny Parson died? She's an idiot. And what's with the Country Bumpkin in Hollywood routine?”

“I think she knows exactly what she's doing,” I said.

“Do you remember when we were sixteen and driving down Sunset in your mother's Mercedes convertible, music blaring, sun in our hair, picking out mansions that each of us would live in when we were successful, madly in love, and married?”

“Gwyn was with us then.”

“Sitting in the back seat.”

I thought of Gwyn's chameleon-like eyes appraising me in the rearview mirror. It was the same jealous expression she'd had when her son, Ben, had kissed me at his birthday party.

“You chose a tiny clapboard house with a brick walk lined with pansies. Gwyn and I thought you were nuts.”

“I chose it because a movie star would never live there.”

“I picked that big Spanish house with the rolling lawn because it was grand and had great curb appeal. Everyone could see it from Sunset.”

“Gwyn picked the old gracious white house with the conservatory.”

“The one that the son of a wealthy Arab bought and put up naked statues all around the property which pissed off the Beverly Hills elite!”

We laughed, a weak imitation of the gusto we'd had back then.

Before I married Colin I had searched for that little clapboard house but it was long gone; an ersatz mansion stood in its place. Celia's beautiful sprawling 1920s Spanish house was still there with its rolling lawn and the same palm trees dipping toward the red tile roof. Gwyn's old gracious white house with the conservatory had burned down. The son of the wealthy Arab had fled the country.

“Heath said he didn't hit you.” I stared straight ahead.

“We had such hope back then, driving down Sunset, didn't we, Diana?” she asked plaintively as if I hadn't said a word.

“We had youth.”

“I had hope.” An oncoming car spread a bleaching light across her bruised face.

“Did you hear me, Celia? Leo Heath says he didn't hit you. Is he lying?” I persisted.

A sob escaped her lips. She swerved off onto a side street and stopped, tires bumping into the curb. Her head drooped forward against the steering wheel and she wept.

I waited, looking out the window at a dark residential street dotted with the yellow glow of porch lights.

“Ben,” Celia finally gasped. “It was Ben Zaitlin.”

I closed my eyes, wanting everything to stop.

“That's why I couldn't tell you,” she said.

I opened my eyes.

Celia had straightened up and was wiping her face with her sweater sleeve. “I'm so tired of crying.”

“So am I.”

She shook her long dark hair and breathed deeply. “I was afraid if I didn't give you a name, you'd call 911 or the police or make me go to the emergency room. I know you, Diana, you don't stop.” She gripped the wheel so tightly that her knuckles looked as if they would pop through the taut skin of her hands. “I knew Heath, or whoever he said he was, wasn't interested in buying the house. I thought you and I would never see him again. And you have to admit he looked like the kind of guy that might batter a woman. I needed you to believe me. I was desperate.” She turned toward me, her face twisted with grief and damage. “I'm sorry I lied to you, but … I couldn't tell you. I was afraid Robert would find out. And God knows what Gwyn would do. And you're probably not going to believe me, but I wanted to protect Ben, too.”

Again I remembered Ben telling me that he had discovered his father had a mistress; and asking me if I had gone to bed with his father and then his defiant kiss. I'd never once considered the anger that drove him to ask that question or to kiss me.

“It's all changed,” she continued. “My relationship with Robert. I can feel it. Everything I've built my life on. And now there's a man shot at Bella Casa. Say something, for God's sake, Diana.”

“I don't know what to say.”

“Ben made me feel ashamed. Do you remember when I screamed at you that I deserved to be hit?”

“Yes.”

“I meant it. I mean, I deserved it from Ben's point of view. From how he felt I had it coming.”

“Celia.”

“No. Let's stop all the bullshit, Diana. I'm taking his father away from his mother as far as he's concerned. He's young. He discovered his family is a lie. You think kids are more sophisticated today, but they're not. He didn't know how to accept it.” She let out a jagged sigh. “And why should he? So I could live the kind of selfish life I wanted?”

“Tell me how it happened.”

“He called and asked to meet me. He was at that place called The Den. It was around eleven-thirty at night.”

“The night Jenny was murdered.”

“Yes. He asked if I was alone. I'd just gotten home from having dinner with Robert. I didn't tell Ben that. He said he had to talk to me. No, he said he
needed
to talk to me. He begged, Diana. He wanted to come to my place, but I said no. He gave me the name and address of a bar. He said no one would see us there. And he was right. It was a vacant lot. When I drove up, he was leaning against his car waiting for me.”

“Why didn't you drive away?”

“He's Robert's son, and he wanted to talk. That was very important to me. Can't you understand?”

“I think so.”

“He apologized for the location, said he couldn't think of any place where we wouldn't be recognized. Then he got into the passenger seat of my car. And the rest is as I described it to you earlier.”

“You mean he just started hitting you without saying anything?”

She shook her head. “He said ‘I don't know what to say to you.' Then he reached over as if he was going to rest his hand on my shoulder. Instead, he was on me, kissing me, and suddenly he was hitting me harder and harder, screaming ‘bitch' at me. Then he stopped and just stared at me as if he'd never seen anything so ugly.” Her voice broke. She took a deep breath and continued. “Finally he jumped out of the car and drove away in his. I hadn't expected him to … I don't know what I expected. I really believed we'd have some cathartic meeting where we could talk and that I might even become his friend.” She let her head flop back against the headrest and closed her eyes. We sat for a long time in the dark.

Then she asked, “What are you going to do about what I've told you, Diana?”

A deep sorrow, not for the dead but for the living, engulfed me. “Nothing. It's all been done.”