Eats to Die For! (11 page)

Or why
she
left you alive
, Lauren Bacall's voice said in my throbbing head.

Right. Or she.

There was nothing I or anyone else could do for Avery now, except find his killer.

Having decided that reporting the murder was the proper thing to do, I had
nine
and the first
one
already pressed when I heard the siren.

Sirens were pretty commonplace in Los Angeles, but this one was getting closer and closer, and pretty soon it was joined by a friend. Then two more friends. Within seconds it was an entire chorus of sirens, which became deafening before they suddenly wound down.

That meant one thing: they were stopping here.

Somebody had already called the police, and I had a feeling I knew who.

I had to get out of this apartment.

I could chance running down the hall and hope nobody saw me, or I could be sneakier about it.

Operating on the assumption that the drivers of those emergency vehicles were already on their way up, I decided to take the back route. Rushing out to Avery's balcony, I crawled on top of the ledge and then leapt over to Louie's, managing to clear the balcony wall without injury, though when I landed, the jolt made my head feel like a railroad spike was being driven through it.

Checking her balcony door through the pane, I was relieved to find it still unlocked, so I let myself in, crawled to a corner and sat still…at least until I noticed that I had never closed Louie's front door! Racing to it, and hearing the sounds of people approaching from down the hallway, I shut the door as silently as possible and turned the lock, then dashed back to my hidey-hole.

Voices now filled the apartment hallway, including a woman's who asked: “What's going on here?”

A man's voice answered, “We don't know yet, ma'am, please go back to your apartment and close the door.”

I could hear people entering Avery's apartment, and after a few more seconds heard a voice shout, “In here!”

For a while the only sound I heard was my heart beating, which sounded like Eleanor Powell tap dancing on a gigantic drum, and then was able to make out the distinct sound of Avery's balcony door being opened.

Then a voice called, “Anybody down there?”

I could only barely make out the reply from the ground below: “I don't see anyone.”

Clearly, escaping by jumping off of the balcony was out, though I can't say it had ever rated very high on the option list.

Then from the hallway I heard a voice, presumably that of the policeman in charge, say, “All right, get statements from the neighbors, see if anyone saw or heard something.”

Someone was going to be knocking on Louie's door at any moment. Sure, I could pretend no one was home, but with a dead body next door, there was going to be no shortage of policemen for quite some time.

I knew enough about real police investigations, as opposed to filmed ones, to know that a crime scene was sequestered for far longer than it took to deliver a few snappy, cynical lines of dialogue. The cops could be next door for days, a week even, and I would have to leave at some point during that time.

My sudden appearance and emergence from an “empty” apartment would not make me look innocent.

If any of my interior brain mentors had an idea…any idea… this would be an excellent time to bring it up.

Anyone?

I think your best course of action would be to come clean
, Dick Powell offered.

Did he mean give myself up? That hardly seemed helpful. Then a moment later I got it.

Rushing to the bathroom, I turned on Louie's shower and stripped off all my clothes, then jumped in, unfortunately before the water was fully warm.

That, however, was not as bad as the fact that the water from the shower felt like buckshot on my aching head.

After wetting myself, I stepped back out and listened for the front door. The knock came about three minutes later, by which time I had to re-immerse myself under the water.

At the second knock I called, “Just a minute!” and then turned the shower off and wrapped a towel around my waist. I put another one on my head, wincing as the weight of the towel came down on the bump on my head.

Dripping my way to the front door, I unlocked it and cracked it open, just enough to let the officer, a policewoman, outside see that I had just gotten out of the shower.

“What is it?” I demanded.

“Oh, sorry, sir,” the policewoman said. “There's a situation next door and we're talking to the neighbors.”

“Next door, with Avery? What's going on.”

“Well, sir, we need to ask if you've seen or heard anything unusual this morning.”

“Um…could you come back in a few minutes, maybe? I was in the shower.”

“Yes sir, take your time, Mr…” she said, fishing for my name.

“Sandoval,” I said, “Louie Sandoval. Thanks.”

Then I closed the door.

Drying off as I ran back to the bathroom, including drying my hair as much as my bump would allow comfortably, I put my clothes back on and waited.

If only Louie's tomato outfit were here somewhere, I could have put it on and run out, and if anyone happened to see me, all they'd report to the police was the suspect was about five-eleven, very round, and red ripe. But it was not here in the apartment, or else I would have discovered it by now.

Moving back to the front door of the apartment, I listened until the voices had abated, and then cracked the door open again and peeked out. I could see the back of a uniformed officer standing in the doorway of unit 214, but not his face. Nobody else was visible.

Now was my chance.

Taking a deep breath, I exited Louie's apartment as quietly as I could and ran like hell for the elevator, pressing the down button. Making it down to the lobby unnoticed, I got out and saw a group of people, presumably tenants, collecting in the lobby. Walking through them, I headed for the front door.

Once outside, I counted four police cruisers, two fire trucks and a yellow paramedic's vehicle, which unless one of the other tenants had fainted from the shock, was redundant.

I almost made it past them when a man standing on the sidewalk stopped me. “Hey, what's going on?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” I replied. “All these vehicles just showed up, so I guess someone is sick, or had an accident, or something.”

“You look a little sick yourself, buddy.”

“I do?”

“You're all pale.”

Yes, well you try getting hit on the back of the head with a statue of Batman and then trip over a dead body and see how you react to it
, a voice said in my head, and strangely enough, it was my own.

“That's why I'm on my way to the doctor,” I said, leaving the guy and walking, but not running, to my car.

Sliding behind the wheel, I sat there for a moment, thinking about what had just happened. I had touched nothing in Avery's apartment, except for the doorknob, and I did not see that as a problem since the prospect of isolating one specific set of prints from a frequently used doorknob seemed daunting at best.

As best as I could tell, I was in the clear. The real question at this point was, what do I do now?

Despite my lack of actual information, I felt it might be best to keep Zareh Zarian at the
Journal
apprised of the fact that this seemed to be turning into a highly complex problem. I reached into my pocket for my cell phone to call him, but it wasn't there. I checked my other pocket and found nothing.

I checked every pocket I was currently wearing: nothing.

Where the hell was my cell phone?

The last time I had seen it was when I checked the time and then started dialing 911 to report Avery's death, and…

“Oh,
jeez
,” I moaned, lowering my aching head onto the steering wheel. I must have set down my cell when I first heard the approaching sirens. It was still inside Avery Klemmer's apartment, waiting to be found by the police.

And when it is found, I become the prime suspect in Avery's death.

“If I'd been a character in one of Jack Daniel's novels,” I told the steering wheel, “this never would have happened.”

CHAPTER TEN

I actually ran a red light driving back to my office, something I never do.

Normally I never even run a yellow light unless stopping in time means excessive tire damage, but I was preoccupied. Fortunately there was no cross traffic coming, and even better, no cops around to pull me over. Because of my sudden vehicular crime spree I slowed down to a grandpa-crawl for the rest of the way.

It was nearly two by the time I arrived at my building. After parking in my spot, I went up to my office, finding that it took me three tries to get the key into the lock on my door, my hands were shaking so badly.

Take it easy, kid
, Bogart told me.

“Hey, don't you give me any guff,” I said, finally opening my door. “Your hands shook, too, in
The Maltese Falcon
. Remember?”

Must have been Huston's idea
, he argued, and then disappeared.

Maybe I was overreacting. Maybe I hadn't dropped my cell phone in Avery's apartment. Maybe I had put it back in my pocket and it had fallen out in Louie's bathroom when I peeled my clothes off to do the shower pretense.

Naw, you gotta expect the worst on this beat, sonny
, Charles McGraw said in my head.

Swell.

I flopped down in my desk chair and started searching through my top drawer where I was pretty sure I had a bottle of Advil, which I desperately needed right now. Finding it, I popped three of the remaining five pills in my mouth and then went to the kitchen sink to wash them down.

Returning to my desk, I decided to take score. I had one vanished client and two dead witnesses, my cell phone was probably in the hands of the police right now making me a prime suspect for at least one of those murders, while Detective Mendoza desperately wanted to frame me for the other one.

And I had no leads.

I tried to think on the bright side: at least no one had kicked me in the crotch so hard I required surgery.

The Advil were beginning to work to the point where I could probably withstand the sound of another real voice without my head splitting open, so I picked up my desk phone and put in a call to Zareh Zarian.

“Hey, Beauchamp, what've you got for me?” he asked.

“An expense report for a crate of Advil,” was the best I could come up with.

“That's it? How about Sandoval's notes?”

“Sorry. She either hid them so well no one can find them, or she has them on her, or someone else has them, or they've been destroyed, I just don't know. Look, Zarian, I have a rather awkward question to ask. Would Louie go to bed with someone just to get information from them?”

He laughed. “You think it's going to be that easy getting in her panties?”

“I'm serious. Would she sleep with someone in return for information?”

There was a long pause before he answered, “She is a very dedicated reporter.”

“So that's a yes?”

“Why are you asking?”

“I'm just curious, is all.”

“Okay, you're not hearing this from me, okay? That story I was telling you about, the exposé of the developer, well, for that one she did what she had to do to get close to someone who works for the city permit office. I should say used to work for, since he got canned when they found out he was the source of an information leak.”

So somebody wanted to get even with her,
William Demarest's voice barked in my head.

“I don't know,” I absentmindedly responded. “It doesn't fit.”

“What doesn't fit?” Zarian asked.

“Hmm? Oh, uh, what I meant was, opening herself up like that is kind of a dangerous business practice, isn't it?”

“You don't know Louie like I do. She has a little bit of a jones for getting into danger.”

“She should be having a field day right now, then.”

“Why, what have you learned?”

I quickly laid out everything that had happened since we had last spoken, but left out the business of finding the picture in her apartment.

“Holy shit, two murders?” Zarian said. “This is big!”

“Big and serious. But getting back to Louie's method of gaining information, would she ever go so far as to…”

“As to what?”

“Well, might she ever trade herself to the other team if that's what it took?”

“Are you asking if she's a lez?”

“Well, maybe, or would she go to bed with a woman even if she wasn't a lesbian just to get information out of her?”

“Look, Beauchamp, I really don't know where you're going with this, but I don't have to answer these kinds of questions about my staff.”

“It might be important.”

I heard a sigh at the other end of the line, and then Zarian said, “Sandoval is a dedicated reporter, the best I've got. Sometimes I wonder myself how far she'd go for a story. That's all I can tell you. Now, if there's nothing else, hang up and let me get the hell back to work.”

“There is one other thing. Whatever is going on might have something to do with the Temple.”

“The temple?”

“The Temple of Theotologics.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“You didn't assign Louie to investigate them, did you?”

“Hell no!”

There was a pause and I heard him yell off into the distance, “Ashley, close my door, would you?”

After another moment, he came back on.

“You're not wearing your headset any more, are you?” I asked.

“My headset? No, I couldn't get used to that frigging thing. What difference does that make?”

“None, I guess. It's just that I heard you move away from the phone, which means you're using the receiver.”