Pie A La Murder (40 page)

My hiding place was a pretty good one—on a narrow shelf of rock beside the falls, below a thick outcropping of bushes that had grown straight out from the side of the cliff.

Unlikely survivors, those shrubs. I was an unlikely survivor, too.

Tension and terror had given me a powerful thirst. My mouth and throat felt dry as sand, but I didn’t dare drink the water that sprayed me; I knew it wasn’t pure. There had been newspaper articles about people who’d acquired serious internal parasites because they thought that what was gushing from a natural waterfall was safe to drink.

I took inventory of my situation. Against big odds, I was still alive, but I couldn’t stay on this narrow ledge. If exhaustion overwhelmed me and I fell asleep, I might well tumble over it to my death.

From what I could see of the face of the cliff below me, I couldn’t go down. No more life-saving branches to cling to.

There was no hope of rescue because no one knew where I was. My car was parked on Liberty Avenue, but it wouldn’t get attention from Parking Enforcement until tomorrow, when one of those people saw that the meter had expired and slipped a ticket under my windshield wiper. My handbag was on the front seat—as were my cell phone and Harmon Dubois’s bouquet of brandy roses. Would the parking person glance inside and become suspicious that something had happened and report the contents of the car to police? I doubted it. Generally, those warriors against parking scofflaws were single-minded in their search for expired meters and other forms of vehicle sins.

Eileen would call John to tell him that I hadn’t come home, and that I hadn’t answered my cell phone, but it probably wouldn’t occur to her to worry until midnight.

My best chance to get out of this situation alive would be to climb back up the cliff—but not at the place where I came down. If Roxanne and Light were still up on top, they would be trying to spot my body, and were probably looking down from where I’d taken flight. I couldn’t predict how long they would wait before concluding that I was dead.

The narrow ledge I was on stretched to my left perhaps another dozen feet, but there was no covering brush above that part of it.

If I couldn’t go left, I would have to go right and explore the cliff behind the waterfall.

Feeling my way along, I saw there was a depression behind the cascade. But first I’d have to plunge through that chute of water.

Yikes—was it
cold
! But behind the sheet of water was a dry hollow that went about four feet deep into the cliff.

Out on the ledge, I’d been dampened by the spray from the side of the rushing water; having gone through the deluge, I was soaked. Not a bad thing, actually. A thorough dousing would probably wash away most of the poison oak, but I still had to be careful not to touch my face.

The red wool jacket I wore over my pale blue sweater and navy slacks was my favorite, but it was too heavy to wear now that it was soaked. I shrugged out of it and let it drop to the rock floor of this little cave. Immediately, I felt lighter, and my arms were no longer constricted by the jacket’s sleeves.

As I explored behind the falling of water, I saw it was a shaft that went way up the face of the cliff. It looked as though it reached to the mouth of the opening through which the water gushed from the underground spring that was its source.

Running my hands along the face of the shaft, I felt a few rocks jutting out. I grasped the closest one, tested it for strength, and found that it held my weight. Bracing my feet against the wall, easing myself up another foot, I found other chunks of stone—big enough to hold on to.

Could I climb up the cliff behind the waterfall until I reached the roof of the cave from where the surge was coming? If I could manage that, I’d be only a few feet below the top of Malibu Falls. If I got that far, I would hide there, invisible, until daylight. Then I’d have a good chance to attract the attention of someone below or of hikers above.

No one was coming for me. What choice did I have?

Pulling myself up by the first jutting rock, forcing the toes of my shoes into any crevice, I mentally gave thanks for all those sessions at the climbing wall on the Santa Monica Pier. My times there had begun as a friendly competition with Nicholas. Later, I used it in an attempt to keep my arms from acquiring the dreaded “middle-age flap.”

Ironic that Roxanne’s caustic warning about loose underarm flesh might be what saved my life—after she and her lover tried to kill me.

I put fierce concentration into inching myself up without sliding back down. When I finally reached the crude ledge just below the gush of water from the underground spring, I had no idea how long it had taken. All I knew was that my arms and my thighs burned as though my bones were on fire.

But it was a pain I could stand—no, almost welcomed—because it meant I was still alive. I lay on the floor of the last shallow cave beneath the opening in the cliff from which the Malibu Falls poured, taking long breaths, exhaling slowly. In a few minutes my pulse had retreated from its pounding high back to a near normal steady beat.

Thirsty, hungry, and shuddering with cold, I felt wonderful.
It’s amazing
, I thought,
that one can be thankful for epic discomfort
. Given the alternative . . .

Looking through the sheet of water, I was startled to see what looked like bright light.

I sat up and leaned forward. It was bright light—a search light.

My ears had become so accustomed to the sound of the falls that suddenly I could hear another sound:
voices
. Yelling. Calling my name! And yet another sound: the
whup, whup, whup
of a helicopter!

Crawling to the side of the rush of water, I fought my way through to the other side where there was just enough room to stand.

“Here!” I shouted. “Here I am! Down here!”

A man peered over the top of the cliff.

I waved at him wildly.

He turned his head and called, “Here she is!” Back down to me: “Stay where you are!”

I laughed. Then I felt hot tears filling my eyes and making rivulets down my cold, wet cheeks.

The helicopter hovered over my head, the lights from it pinning me. A rope ladder, with a man on it, was lowered down. Closer. Closer . . . Close enough for me to grab the man’s extended hand. He held on to me as the helicopter began to rise and I was able to grasp the bottom rung of the ladder with my other hand.

Once again, I felt nothing but air beneath my feet—but this time, instead of going down, I was being pulled up to safety.

The man who had come down the ladder helped me up into the body of the helicopter.

I yelled “Thank you!” There was too much noise for him to hear my words, but he grinned and gave a thumbs-up in acknowledgment.

In what seemed only like moments, the helicopter settled onto the ground. Another man—now I could tell he was dressed in some kind of uniform like the first—helped me down.

My feet touched solid ground, and suddenly my knees buckled under me. He kept me from falling, and steadied me for the seconds it took for me to be able to stand on my own.

Looking around, I saw at least a dozen more men wearing those same uniforms. Sheriff’s department, I thought. They were smiling and high-fiving each other. And then I saw yet another man. I knew him, but his was the last face I would have expected to see: Harmon Dubois.

Harmon Dubois? What was my elderly cooking school student doing
here
?

Harmon rode with me in the Fire Department Rescue Squad’s all-terrain vehicle.

He said, “I was following you from the TV studio—”

“Following me?” I sat up on the gurney.

“Please don’t be angry,” Harmon said quickly. “I wasn’t following you for any bad reason. You see, I had a present for you, but I didn’t want to give it in person, so I was going to leave it on your doorstep. Or put it through your mail slot, if you have one of those. But I didn’t know where you lived.”

“So you followed me?”

“I was a few cars behind, but there wasn’t much traffic. When I saw you stop and talk to those people, I thought they were your friends. Then you got into their car, but you didn’t take my roses. That seemed strange because I didn’t think you’d leave them in your car to wilt. But you might have forgotten. So I followed your friends’ car . . . not thinking anything was wrong. But when they went so far, and up that canyon, I began to worry.”

“You followed us all the way up? I didn’t see your car.”

“I turned off my headlights when we left PCH. I parked below them, and walked the rest of the way, avoiding the poison oak. I recognized the plants because I taught botany before I retired. At the top, I saw the man had a gun pointed at you. I didn’t know what I could do to help you—I’m not brave around guns, but I had to do something. I went back down to where their car was parked and unscrewed the valve stems on their two back tires, to let all the air out. Then I hurried back to my car and dialed nine-one-one. I told the operator that there were two people up on top of Malibu Falls and I was afraid they were going to kill a television star. I gave them your name and begged them to hurry.”

I took his hand and gave it an affectionate squeeze. Touching him was safe because the paramedic, aware of the poison oak, had cleansed my exposed skin with disinfectant and slathered me with some kind of lotion. “Harmon,” I said, “you caught two killers and rescued me.”

He beamed, but then, suddenly shy, he withdrew his hand from mine.

To cover the awkward moment, I asked, “What were you going to give me?”

He looked puzzled for a moment. Then he beamed again, reached into the pocket of his jacket, and withdrew a booklet. “This is an epic poem I wrote for you. Only forty stanzas. I could have gone on longer, but brevity is important in poetry. I had the pages printed into a booklet for you.”

I took the booklet. It had a laminated cover, with a color photograph of a bouquet of brandy roses. Superimposed on the flowers was the title of the poem:
Della Bella
.

“This is the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me, Harmon.”

“Please don’t think I have expectations,” he said. “I recognize that we were born at incompatible times, but I wanted you to know how very much I admire you.”

John O’Hara and Nicholas were waiting for me in the emergency room at St. Clare’s Hospital in Santa Monica. I introduced them to Harmon and told them everything he had done for me. Then I asked, “What happened to Roxanne Redding and Galen Light?”

“In custody,” John said. “Being interrogated separately by Weaver and Keller. When I left they’d started rolling over on each other, proclaiming their own innocence and claiming the other one did it.”

Nicholas said, “Roxanne found out about her husband’s affairs, and that he was planning to leave her to marry a movie star.”

“April Zane,” I said.

“That’s the one. Marriage to April would have catapulted Redding onto Hollywood’s top social tier, leaving Roxanne as just another photographer in a town crammed to the rooftops with them.”

“The young woman reporter got a photo of April and Light kissing in the alley behind the Redding house. She recognized Light because she’d interviewed him a few months before,” John said. “According to Roxanne, Light invited Ms. Tully into the house, pretending he wanted to explain what she saw. While they were talking, Ms. Tully mentioned having visited you for an interview, and that you encouraged her to investigate Alec Redding’s murder. Roxanne said that’s when Light went ballistic, killed her, and hid her body until it was dark enough to dump her behind the Olympia Grand. Roxanne—I call her the Black Widow—said that she was terrified of Light. When he said they had to kill you because you must have found out too much, she only went along because she thought she could figure out how to stop him before he actually did harm you.”