Looks to Die For (16 page)

I parked in the open lot next to her building and noticed shreds of yellow police tape hanging limply from the wire mesh fence. Another damp remnant inscribed
POLICE LINE DO NOT CR
was flapping on a telephone pole nearby. The police had come and gone, apparently figuring their investigation was over.

At the front door of the building, I studied the name cards next to the buzzers. Number 4C said
BARLOW
/
WILSON
. Without thinking, I pushed the buzzer. Nothing happened, and just when I was about to leave, I heard a scratchy, “Who’s there?”

“Hi, I’m Lacy,” I said. “I wanted to talk to you about Tasha.”

“What about her?”

Well, that was a good question.

“Um, I’m a friend of Roy Evans.”

The intercom went silent. And then a moment later, a buzzer sounded to let me in.

I gathered my courage, pushed open the door, and made my way down a dark, dingy hallway. Ahead was another door, and as I passed through it, the grim tenement feel of the building suddenly dissolved and I stepped into an outdoor courtyard, complete with a large swimming pool. The water was murky and most of the lounge chairs on the cement deck seemed broken, but streams of sunlight flooded the courtyard and brightened the scene. I had to laugh. After growing up in flat, rural Ohio, I always found that even the tackiest apartment buildings in L.A. weren’t bad. The five-story complex formed an L shape around the pool, with a staircase at the middle point. Not seeing any other way to get upstairs, I started climbing, stopping after four flights to walk along the outdoor corridor.

But 4C didn’t exist.

What was going on? The numbers in the corridor went from 3D to 4D to 5D.

I paused and then headed back down a floor. Sure enough, even the numbering system in Hollywood had to be creative: 1C, 2C, 3C…At the next door, I knocked.

The woman who opened the door was probably in her mid-twenties, but she was fat — no polite way to say it — with stringy black hair that needed to be washed. Her bulging stomach made ripples in her white T-shirt, and pale, flabby legs stuck out beneath her black shorts.

“So?” she asked. “Roy has something to tell me?”

I must have been too slow formulating an answer because the woman glared at me and then shook her head impatiently.

“I’ve packed up his tapes,” she said. “Come on in. You can take them to him. I don’t want to see him again.”

The sunlight that filled the courtyard didn’t make its way to the apartment, and it took my eyes a minute to adjust to the gloom. Then I had to adjust to the gloomy decor. A ratty brown sofa adorned with glittery red-and-orange throw pillows teetered on a standard-issue tweed carpet that must have come with the rent. A matching brown love seat was oddly angled away from the wall, probably in an effort to hide a dark, ominous stain creeping along the carpet. A rickety bamboo stand from Pier 1 held a small television, and some random lamps and a chipped Formica table finished the scene. Nobody had painted in a long time, and the dull beige walls were cracked and peeling.

“The tapes are in Tasha’s bedroom,” my guide said, continuing on.

She pushed open the closed bedroom door — and I unwittingly gasped. The sense of going from Hades to heaven was even more startling than in the courtyard downstairs. Tasha’s private sanctum was a glowing palace, shimmering in shades of white and gold. Center stage was a king-sized brass bed, covered with a gold moire duvet and a pile of intricate, expensive, silk-tasseled European squares. A thick, plush white carpet was the background for a delicate Persian rug, and the walls were draped in a subtle silk-patterned wallpaper. A wafting, diaphanous fabric — I’d swear it was Scalamandré — fluttered gracefully from the windows. I could have done without the six-foot-long plasma-screen television and the heavy brass Medeco lock on the door, but even that couldn’t distract from the overall opulence.

“Wow,” I said. Then, guessing, “Gifts from Roy?”

She snorted. “No way. Your Mr. Roy pretends he’s generous — big tipper and stuff — but he has a cheap heart. And you can tell him I said so.” Her eyes welled over with tears. “Terry knew it, too.”

Going over to the closet, her thighs trembling, she pulled out a Whole Foods shopping bag and thrust it at me. Some clothes and a jumble of tapes and DVDs were crammed inside — some in neatly labeled boxes and some just jammed in.

“Give these to him,” she said. “Tell him they’re from Nora. And tell him they all suck.”

“What are they?” I asked.

“Him,” she said. “On the air. He liked to watch himself on TV when he was in bed with Terry. Disgusting, huh? Terry thought it was funny, but I thought it was sick. I told Terry, ‘Why does he need you when he gets off on himself?’”

She looked at me for a reaction, and when I didn’t have one, she said, “
Celebrity Jeopardy!
was his favorite. Know the show? He’d been on once and won nine thousand dollars. Big deal.” She dropped her voice an octave, offering a good imitation of host Alex Trebek’s monotonous singsong. “Final Jeopardy category: Rock Bands. Answer: ‘It gathers no moss.’” She slipped back to her own voice again. “Whoo, whoo. ‘What’s a Rolling Stone?’ He got it. So would my great-grandmother. But he made Terry and me watch it so many times you’d think he’d won the Nobel prize.”

I snickered. Lying in bed watching tapes of himself. Even in Hollywood, that scored pretty high on the narcissism meter. An easy bet said that the interview with Jennifer Lopez had landed in the bag, too. Roy Evans was definitely more fascinated by himself than by anything else on the planet.

But Nora had veered from fascinated. “Tell your friend Roy that I think he’s a sleazebag,” she said, blinking back tears. “And he’s just lucky they pinned the murder on that other guy.”

I took a second to register that the other guy — the one they’d pinned the murder on — was Dan.

Nora marched back into the living room, and when I followed her, I noticed a half-packed suitcase shoved into a corner.

“Are you moving?” I asked.

“Not right now.” She followed my gaze. “You mean the suitcase? I haven’t managed to unpack yet. I was away when…” She hesitated because, like me, she didn’t have a way of talking about the murder yet. “When…
it
happened, I was visiting my parents in Twin Falls. I’d seen Theresa’s parents, too. They gave me her Idaho Potato Queen crown to bring back.” The tears welled again. “When Terry got famous, I’d be her posse. Protect her. But I couldn’t even protect her now.”

I was getting the picture. Theresa, the prettiest girl in Twin Falls, Idaho, had gathered her money and courage and escaped her small town, moving to Hollywood to try her luck. Nora, her loyal hometown best friend, had come along for support.

“Do you think the police got the right guy?” I asked.

“You mean do I think Roy did it?” She looked at me, almost for the first time. “Are you his new girlfriend?”

“Um, no. Not really.”

“Well, watch out. He starts out all sweet, but he’s a perv if you ask me. Always trying weird stuff. Made her wear high heels to bed. Said he liked women in killer heels. Brought over dirty magazines and triple-X videos and liked to tie her up and stuff. Plus watching the tapes of himself. Theresa said it was all compensation because he had a little dick. Really little.”

We were getting out of my league.

“When I first heard about…” Nora gulped. “About…what happened, I didn’t think it was Roy. My thought was, ‘Johnny. Oh my God. Johnny got violent again.’” She shrugged. “Pretty ironic. Theresa gets involved with a weirdo and an ex-con, and then it’s a doctor who did it. And he did. He was the one who was here that night.”

I felt my chest tighten.

“Was she involved with the doctor, too?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant and probably failing.

“I don’t know.” She sniffled loudly and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “She was involved with too many people. This is a mean town. It makes girls do bad things. But Johnny was the one she loved, you know? And Johnny loved her. Roy was just using her. I’d always say, ‘Terry, he’s using you for sex.’ And she’d say, ‘Yeah, but I’m using him, too.’ She figured he’d help her with her career. But he wouldn’t. I knew he wouldn’t. All he cared about was himself.”

Nora sat down on the ratty sofa, scrounged for a tissue that was half buried under one of the pillows, and blew her nose loudly.

“I want to tell Johnny how much Terry loved him,” she said. “I have a lot of things to tell him. But he hasn’t called or anything. I guess he’s scared.”

“Is he the ex-con?” I asked. Now that could be interesting.

“Yup, but he was completely reformed. Johnny DeVito. Six years in jail, I think. Or maybe eight. He told Terry everything. Bought her everything she wanted. Everything in that bedroom came from him. He told her how beautiful she was all the time, and he couldn’t believe she loved him because he’s so…” Her voice trailed off and she rubbed at her nose with the tissue.

“He’s so what?” I asked.

“Ugly,” Nora said bluntly. “He’s ugly. And the one thing he wouldn’t tell is how he got all the scars on his face.”

I put down the shopping bag of tapes that I was still holding and plopped on the sofa next to Nora. Since she needed to talk and I was handy, she wasn’t going to send me away.

“Have you told all this to the police?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I was in Twin Falls, remember? By the time I got back, they had the guy. The doctor guy. My friend Tony says once the police know who did it, they don’t care about anyone else. They just build the case. Like with Robert Blake. Or O.J.”

Did Nora think that the cops had the right guy or wrong guy in those cases? Guilty or innocent? Well, we weren’t going there, as Ashley would say.

“If the police are building a case against this doctor, what’ve they got?” I asked instead, trying to keep my voice steady. Chauncey had said the prosecutors didn’t have to share their information with him yet. Maybe I could provide him some details.

“Everything,” Nora said, biting at the cuticle on her thumbnail. “Eyewitness identification. Fingerprints. DNA. Gracie Adler next door saw him coming into the apartment. Gracie heard her screaming at the top of her lungs —” Nora paused, then, raising her voice half an octave to imitate Tasha, said, “ ‘Stop it, Dr. Fields, stop it! Stop it, Dr. Fields, stop it!’”

I felt myself trembling from head to toe. “There must be more than one Dr. Fields in L.A.,” I said, just to say something.

“But there was the car,” Nora said importantly. “Gracie had noticed it in the parking lot two or three times — a navy blue Mercedes 520 with the license plate
BESTDOC
. Can’t really miss that, can you? Gracie had asked me about it before. She says she wasn’t being nosy, but at her age she could use the Best Doc, so when she saw him pull in, she watched where he went.”

The vanity license plate had been a gift to Dan from his office staff one Christmas. He’d been embarrassed at first, but they’d kept renewing it — and now it was his calling card.

“Maybe someone else was driving the car,” I said, my voice raspy. “Someone other than the doctor.”

“The police artist made a sketch from Gracie’s description, and it turned out that the doctor looked
exactly
like the picture. Plus his fingerprints were on a wineglass.” She pointed to a dilapidated buffet littered with liquor bottles and beer cans. “They found two glasses right there — one had his fingerprints and the other had Terry’s.”

“DNA?” I asked weakly.

“He’d thrown a tissue in the wastebasket. That matched, too. He was here. He killed her. And if only I’d been around…” She started crying again, and I stood up and walked over to the window, just to make sure my limbs were functioning. The rest of me was numb. I’d heard enough.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, my voice barely registering now. “I’ll let myself out.”

Nora tried to pull herself together. “Wait,” she said. She sniffed loudly and stared down at the thumb she’d been biting. “Could you ask Roy one thing for me? Ask him if he ever gave Terry any money.”

“Money?” I repeated the word dumbly. “For what?”

“I don’t know exactly. Maybe for some weird stuff he liked. The cops found an envelope from the doctor that was stuffed with cash. A lot — like five thousand dollars. Now they think that all the men paid her and Terry was…a professional, if you know what I mean. For all that money, the doctor must have wanted something really kinky. Even kinkier than Roy. And probably that’s how she ended up strangled.”

I staggered back, feeling as if Nora had just delivered a hard punch to my head. Everything went black for a moment, and I grabbed dizzily for the sofa, trying not to fall over.

“I couldn’t bear it if Terry became a whore,” Nora continued, not noticing that I was reeling. “She pierced her tongue and she showed me the gold stud. But that doesn’t mean she was being paid for blow jobs. The men loved her for herself. Probably even the doctor. She used to say she had to do what she had to do but —”

I didn’t wait to hear the rest. I took the Whole Foods bag and left.

Devastated, I drove up the coast and got out at the Santa Monica Palisades, joining the parade on the promenade path. Taut young women in spandex jogging shorts and paunchy middle-aged producers walking well-groomed dogs eased by homeless men sprawled on the park grass, where they’d been welcome ever since Jerry Brown was mayor. I turned down the long staircase carved into the cliff, crossed under the Pacific Coast Highway, and came out on the beach. Kicking off my shiny Sigerson Morrison sandals, I made my way across the hugely wide beach, avoiding skate-boarders, bikers, and volleyball players, and didn’t stop until the chilly Pacific was lapping at my ankles.

I stood staring out at the ocean. Suddenly, everything had changed. Nora’s information wasn’t pretty — but it was probably pretty accurate. How could I keep pretending that Dan had nothing to do with Tasha Barlow? Despite his whispered protestations and hang-dog eyes, I had to face facts.

I took another step into the water, watching a leaf drift back and forth on the gentle surf. What was I supposed to do now? I was the wife of a man who might have committed a murder. I rubbed my foot back and forth, creating small eddies of water and sand. The good news was that I could kill myself. Just swim straight out until the ocean engulfed me and I reached oblivion. Like Virginia Woolf, though maybe without the stones in the pockets. Or answer the call of the seductive sea like the heroine in Kate Chopin’s
The Awakening
. Great novel. And boy, I’d had an awakening from Nora.