Pie A La Murder (33 page)

When I finished making a chart of the dates and times of the cell phone calls, I saw that the first two calls to Galen Light had been made by Roxanne. On the day of Roxanne’s second personal call, but an hour earlier, Alec had called Light.

Roxanne’s calls to Light occurred either during the middle of the day—typically, the lunch hour—or late at night.

As for Alec’s calls to Light, beginning with the second one, each of those calls were placed Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at four o’clock in the afternoon, and lasted between twenty-eight and thirty minutes. Alec’s final call to Light happened the afternoon of the day before Alec was murdered.

Alec’s calls to the office of Sanford Udall, the erectile dysfunction doctor, were made between eight thirty and nine in the morning, and lasted three or four minutes. His calls to the San Clemente number for April Zane were placed late at night; each lasted from fifteen to twenty minutes.

That conjured up an image in my mind of Roxanne and Alec, in separate parts of the house, each thinking the other was asleep, doing their private phoning. They wouldn’t have used a landline because they had two old-style lines where a light would appear on the instruments when one of those receivers was picked up. Anyone in the house who was near an extension would know someone was on the phone.

Redding’s late night calls to a beautiful actress from one of his cell phones suggested that they might be having an affair. But his morning calls to an erectile dysfunction specialist suggested that he might be having some trouble in that area. Perhaps Redding was planning an affair and getting himself ready to consummate it. The actress lived more than one hundred miles south of here, and Redding had had appointments to photograph subjects almost every day. They could be in that stage of exciting each other with anticipation until they could manage to get together.

And his erectile dysfunction. How long had that been going on? How had it affected his marriage? The regular communications with Doctor Udall seemed to imply that he was being treated for it. But how? With injections? Not with pills, unless Alec had hidden them somewhere. The medical examiner who went through their bathroom cabinets found that the only prescription medications were Roxanne’s birth control pills.

Did Roxanne’s many calls to Light, at times when her husband was likely either to be occupied or asleep, mean that they were having an affair? My guess is that they were. But had something happened to that relationship shortly before Alec Redding’s death? Was that why Light had spoken of Roxanne in the past tense, and in a negative tone? Was that why he had been drinking? Or was he simply covering up what was going on between them?

Roxanne had claimed to be at a movie theater in Little Tokyo watching
Seven Samurai
while her husband was being murdered. It’s a long movie, and an old one, shown many times in theaters and on television. She could have seen it before that night, and been able to answer any questions about it. She produced a ticket stub, but it’s easy to slip out of a theater without being seen. She could have come back to Brentwood, parked in the alley, come in through the back gate, killed Redding, and left the same way. Officer Willis had said that the gate at the back of the property wasn’t locked.

Where had Galen Light been that night?

And where—
really
—had Tanis, Prince Freddie, Celeste, and Freddie’s butler, Mordue, been that night?

Mentally, I crossed Celeste off my list of murder suspects. Also Mordue. I could imagine the butler, who had no connection to Redding, as an accessory after the fact, but not as a killer. It didn’t seem likely that Freddie could have made it to Redding’s house unless someone, Mordue or Tanis, drove him there.

I could imagine Freddie and Tanis going together to Redding in an attempt to buy the pictures of Celeste. If they were refused, and they would have been because the salacious pie photo was still stored at Redding’s after his death, one of them might have been angry enough to pick up that white stool and hit Redding with it.

But who killed Gretchen Tully, and why? It seemed likely she had discovered something about Redding’s murder that threatened the killer with exposure. But what?

John or Weaver or Detective Keller must have her cell phone. If it wasn’t with her body, then they must have obtained her records from the phone company.

This exercise in trying to formulate a theory was frustrating because of the things I didn’t know. I wanted to go to John and tell him what I’d pieced together, and ask him to share what he had learned. But if I told him that I had the Reddings’ phone records it wouldn’t be more than a minute before he would deduce that someone had stolen copies for Gretchen, and who would have done that except her live-in boyfriend? Then Officer Downey would, at the very least, be fired from the police force. He might even be prosecuted.

I was in the middle of a collision of wrongs. Downey had been wrong to steal the phone records for Gretchen so she could try to solve a murder and win a promotion to hard news reporting. To be honest about it, Nicholas and I had been wrong to make an illegal search of Gretchen’s apartment. We’d been wrong to blackmail the grieving Officer Downey—there was no other word for it—into giving us the envelope of numbers.

Downey, Nicholas, myself: we’d all had good intentions . . .

Now I’d hit a wall.

I needed to know what John, with his much greater resources, had learned. And what I had figured out, and charted, could be helpful to him in constructing the picture that would lead to the solution.

How could I confide in John, and protect Officer Downey? Not to mention Nicholas and myself.

The phone was ringing. So deep in thought was I that for a moment I didn’t realize what that sound was.

I answered and heard Roxanne Redding’s voice.

“Hi, Della. I’ve been looking at your pictures, and I think they’re good. Before I make any prints, I’d like you to pick the ones you like best. Can you come over to the studio this evening?”

A glance at my wall clock showed it was a few minutes after two. “I can come over now,” I said.

“No, I’m busy until seven. How about after that?”

I didn’t want to go to the Redding house at night. Call me paranoid, but I wasn’t going to be one of those too-stupid-to-live females in horror movies. I didn’t know there was a murderer lurking at 190 Bella Vista Drive, but on the other hand, I didn’t know there wasn’t.

“That’s not going to work for me,” I said. “Tomorrow night I do a live TV show and have to prepare for it during the day. Why don’t you e-mail the proofs to me?”

“I’d rather we be able to go over them together so I can answer any questions you may have, and I can show you how I’d like to crop them, and what retouching I suggest.”

“I’d rather not have my picture retouched.”

“Aren’t you the one who said you wanted to look like yourself but a little bit better?”

I had to admit that I was. “But I can’t come over tonight or tomorrow. What about Friday morning?”

“Let me check my book,” she said.

We settled on ten o’clock Friday morning.

Returning to the kitchen, I picked up my chart of names, numbers, and times of the phone calls that seemed most relevant.

John had more information than I did. What I knew made a picture with large holes in it. Whatever John had learned probably would fill in at least some of those holes. But maybe he wasn’t yet able to see a picture—he may not have had time to organize the phone calls the way I did.

It was a daunting task, but I had to think of some way for us to merge what we knew without destroying Officer Downey’s career, or involving Nicholas. Or, for that matter, me.

How could I make a bargain with John without landing all of us in hot water?

Then the idea came to me.

I dialed a number I no longer had to look up. Olivia wasn’t in her office—she was most likely at Butler Avenue with Nicholas and Celeste—so I asked her assistant to have her call me as soon as possible.

Turning to a fresh page in my pad, I began to make a need-to-know list.

First: What had Gretchen Tully been doing between leaving my house on Friday afternoon and when her body was discovered on Tuesday night?

Next: Where was her car? If she wasn’t killed in her apartment, and there wasn’t any indication that she had been, then she must have driven to the place where she either met her killer or the killer surprised her.

If Gretchen’s vehicle was anything like mine—full of reminders to myself, receipts for gas and other items I’d bought—there could be useful information in it.

I didn’t have her and Officer Downey’s home phone number. Why hadn’t I thought to make a note of it when I was in their apartment?

Los Angeles telephone books are divided into various areas of this sprawling metropolis, which is more like a collection of smaller communities rather than one big city. Most households are provided with several targeted phone books. On the shelf above my desk I found the one for the area that included Hollywood, and flipped to the “Ts.”

There she was: G. Tully, at her address on Hollywood Boulevard.

It was only two thirty. Officer Downey was on the four to midnight shift. Unless he was still answering questions about his relationship with Gretchen, he should be at home.

When he answered his voice was thick with sleep.

“This is Della Carmichael, Officer Downey. I’m sorry if I woke you.”

I heard him yawn. “It’s okay.”

“Are you going on duty this afternoon?”

“No. After I told the bosses about me and Gretch, they gave me a couple days off. What do you want?”

“I was wondering where Gretchen’s car is.”

“Her car . . . ? Gee, I don’t know. It’s not here.”

“Do the police have it?”

“Maybe . . . They didn’t say . . . I wasn’t thinking about . . .”

“What’s the make and model? And do you know the license number?”

“It’s a Toyota Camry, white, three years old.” His police training kicked in and his voice was stronger now. “The taillights don’t match: one’s red and one’s amber. The dealer didn’t have the right one in stock, but it’s on order. Plate number’s Three-Bravo-Yellow-Ernest-One-Six-Zero. If it wasn’t recovered, I’ll put it on the Hot Car list.”

“Before you do anything, tell Lieutenant O’Hara and Detective Keller that you don’t know where her car is. Let them take it from there,” I said.

“Yeah, right. Okay.”

After hanging up, I thought about where Gretchen’s car might be. If someone from Parking Enforcement spotted it and thought the vehicle had been abandoned, it could have been towed to the police impound yard.

Or, whoever killed Gretchen might have driven to a high-crime area and left the car there. If so, it would have been stripped to the bare frame and sold for parts quicker than a school of piranha could reduce an unlucky swimmer to a skeleton.

But there was another possibility. . . .

I brought Tuffy into the house, told him I’d be back soon, and grabbed the keys to my Jeep.

What had Gretchen stumbled upon that would make Alec Redding’s killer believe she was a threat?

The fact that her body had been dumped behind the Olympia Grand Hotel suggested that either she was concentrating on the trio in the Presidential Suite, or the killer had wanted detectives to think she was. Or Tanis and Prince Freddie put her there so that the police would think they
wouldn’t
have done that and thereby implicated themselves. Oh, no—that was too convoluted. I could make myself crazy going in circles like that. Better to find some facts.

Whatever the reason Gretchen’s body was found in back of the hotel, the five people she would most likely have been checking on were all either in Westwood, where the hotel was situated, or in the adjacent enclave of Brentwood, where Roxanne Redding and Galen Light lived less than a mile apart.