Pie A La Murder (9 page)

It wasn’t only her posing with nothing to cover her except the chef’s apron that made the picture such a shocker to me. Her left hand was raised shoulder high, palm pointed backward, like a waiter carrying a tray. Celeste was smiling at the camera—a sly smile, as though she was enjoying some private joke.

I got the joke because I was sure it was aimed at me.

Balanced on her palm was a
pie
.

I closed my mouth and looked away from the screen—to find Tanis whatever-her-name-was staring at me with venom in her eyes.

She said, “Do you expect me to believe that this surprises you?”

“Of course it does.”

“You introduced Celeste to that man, Redding. Surely you must have known what kind of pictures he took.”

I wasn’t going to betray Liddy by correcting her, so I said, “All I know is that Alec Redding is reputed to be one of Hollywood’s top photographers. His wife works with him—she does his lighting—so it didn’t seem as though Celeste would be asked to do anything . . . inappropriate.”

“Inappropriate!” Tanis snapped the laptop’s lid closed. “This is a catastrophe!”

I reminded myself that this was the anger of a mother being protective of her child, so I spoke gently. “It’s a shock, I understand that, and if she were my daughter I would be as upset as you are, but nowadays many young actresses pose nude. Several even have had sex tapes pop up on the Internet. This photo isn’t going to ruin Celeste’s chances for a movie career.”

“Celeste?” Her eyes widened, then narrowed again into a white-hot glare. “I’m not worried about Celeste’s fantasy of becoming an actress. And there won’t be any sex tape because I’ve kept her a virgin.”

I wondered, silently, how many other mothers had thought that about their teenage daughters, and been wrong.

Tanis shook the pink laptop as though that would remove the offending photo.

“This is a disaster for
me
,” she said. “I’m planning to marry a member of royalty. He’s very conservative. His family is very conservative. If this picture gets into the press or on the Internet it will ruin everything. Not only for myself, but for the future I have planned for Celeste, once she gets this acting nonsense out of her head.”

But I didn’t say that. Instead, “Of course you’re upset. Why don’t you come inside and have a cup of coffee. Or tea. No bags—I brew it with leaves.”

“Tea?” she said with loathing. “I drink coffee. With a sweetener. No sugar.”

“Then may I offer you”—I paused, then added—“black. With a sweetener. No sugar.”

Oblivious to my gentle mockery, she signed heavily, glanced at the laptop, sent a quick sideways look toward the limousine. After weighing her options, finally she said, “Yes. Coffee.”

When I opened the door, Tuffy gave us his whole-body wag.

My unexpected guest looked at him in a way that suggested she regarded Tuffy as worthy of her attention. “A standard poodle,” she observed. “They’re actually German dogs, not French as everyone thinks.”

“Not everyone,” I said briskly. “Please come this way.”

Tuffy preceded us down the hall. Despite my best efforts to have her go next, she gestured impatiently for me to lead off. I don’t consider my back view to be my best feature. All the way to the kitchen I was very conscious that Tanis was assessing me critically.

In the kitchen, I said, “Sit down while I make the coffee. It won’t take long. I have some sour cream pecan coffee cake. Would you like a piece?”

“No, thank you. I don’t eat sweets.”

She sat, and placed the laptop on the chair beside her. I didn’t know whether she was afraid I was going to snatch it from her if she put it on the table, or if she didn’t want to look at the thing. Probably some of both.

I took two china cups and saucers from the cupboard, cloth napkins from a drawer, and spoons from the chest that held the sterling silver place settings that had been a wedding gift from my parents, and put everything on a tray.

“Do you live here alone?” she asked.

“No.” I spooned ground coffe into the machine. “A young woman friend lives here, too. Eileen O’Hara.”

“Ah.” Her tone was ambiguous. I couldn’t decipher its meaning.

“Eileen is only four years older than Celeste. We’re partners in a small business that she runs. Eileen and Celeste might like each other.”

She ignored that and said, “I gather that you’re seeing Nico.”

“Yes,” I said.

“He looks wonderful. But then he always did. He’s a few pounds heavier than when we were together, but Celeste tells me you cook. I didn’t leave Nico because he wasn’t terribly attractive and superb in bed.”

Ouch.
She opened that door, so I kept my voice level and asked, “Why did you leave him?”

“I wanted a different kind of life.”

“But why in the world did you keep him away from his daughter all those years?”

“Frankly,
I
didn’t want to see Nico and be tempted to fall into bed and return to a dull life I didn’t enjoy.” A brief smile curved her lips. “At least I didn’t enjoy life with him when I was standing up and fully dressed.” Then the smile was gone. “Looking back, I suppose that was selfish of me.”

“You
suppose
? Not being able to see his daughter broke his heart,” I said.

That didn’t seem to faze her. She went on as though I hadn’t spoken.

“I was young and I wanted excitement. Naïvely, I thought a reporter’s job was glamorous, that we’d be traveling all over the world having adventures. But it wasn’t like that. He wrote articles, and didn’t get to go any farther away than San Francisco. I was so disillusioned that I had intended to leave him sooner, but then I found out I was pregnant. I thought perhaps motherhood would make me feel differently, but it didn’t.”

The coffee was ready. I brought the tray with the cups, coffee, and a little crystal bowl of artificial sweeteners to the table and sat down opposite her.

She put one packet of sweetener into her coffee. After taking a sip, she said, “I was planning to go back to Vienna tomorrow, but then I saw”—she nodded toward the pink laptop on the chair beside her—“that.”

“Did Celeste show it to you?”

“No. She was out driving her new car. She’d left the computer in my suite so I could use it to send an e-mail to my houseman. Just as I was about to, I saw a message come in with the subject line ‘photo proofs,’ so I opened it. I was horrified. Even worse, I was afraid my fiancé, who was standing there with me, was going to have a heart attack.”

Tanis put down her coffee cup. “What influence do you have with this man Redding?”

“None.”

“This is really Nico’s fault.”

I didn’t try to hide my anger. “How do you figure that?”

“He allowed her to keep her appointment with that Redding creature. Now he’ll just have to get us out of this mess.” She huffed in frustration. “I’m desperate for a cigarette, but my handbag’s out in the car. Do you have one? I’ll take any brand.”

“I don’t smoke.”

“But don’t you keep some to offer guests?”

“None of my friends smoke.”

She swore softly in German.

I don’t speak German, but it wasn’t hard to guess the essence of what she was saying.

Tanis picked up Celeste’s laptop and stood. “Thank you for the coffee. I should get back to the hotel. Freddie is terribly upset, and he’s not in the best of health—he’s a hemophiliac.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Oh, he’s fine unless he accidentally cuts himself,” she said in an offhand manner, “but sometimes stress makes him careless.”

I saw her to the door and we exchanged polite good-byes.

Barely had the door closed behind her when my telephone rang.

It was Nicholas. “Della.” His voice vibrated with anger. “Do you know what Tanis has done?”

“What?”

“She turned the perfectly good, safe Honda I bought Celeste back to the dealer and leased her a BMW instead. She said a BMW presented a better image!”

“Nicholas, Tanis was just here.”

“Where? At your house? Why?”

“
She’s
upset about something. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but I think you should be prepared.”

When I told him about the photo of Celeste, he exploded. In Italian. But in school I’d made “A’s” in Latin so I understood almost every word.

“No, Nicholas—don’t do anything foolish!”

He hung up.

I ran to the kitchen to the computer to look up Alec Redding’s address. It was on his Web site. I prayed I could get there before Nicholas did.

The address of Alec Redding’s photo studio was the same as his home address in Brentwood. If Nicholas had phoned me from his place in Larchmont, then being here in Santa Monica I was closer to Redding. I’d have even more time to get there if he’d called me from the
Chronicle
office in downtown Los Angeles.

Even though I’d scribbled down his phone number along with his address, I couldn’t call Redding to warn him that an outraged father was on his way. Suppose he had a gun? He might think he needed to defend himself. I imagined them struggling for the weapon and Nicholas being shot.

That image was so horrible I snatched up the phone and dialed Redding’s number.

The call went right to voice mail. I didn’t leave a message.

Because Nicholas drove like a NASCAR champion, it would be a race to Redding’s no matter where he started from. I grabbed my wallet with my driver’s license and rushed out of the house without giving Tuffy a good-bye pet.

One-ninety Bella Vista Drive was a block and a half north of Sunset Boulevard, near the border—visible only to real estate agents and tax assessors—where upper-income Brentwood melts into upper-upper-income Bel Air.

Redding’s house was a tall, two-story red brick, trimmed in white, with smooth white columns on either side of the front door and a satellite dish on the roof. The numerals “190,” in black iron, were affixed to the top of the carport. One car was there: a tan Lexus. The other half of the carport was empty, but parked behind the Lexus was an older model green Buick. I heaved a huge sigh of relief that Nicholas hadn’t arrived.

I parked on the street in front of the house, hurried up the walk, and pressed the little mother-of-pearl bell button. A few seconds passed, during which I anxiously scanned Bella Vista Drive while listening hard for the familiar roar of the Maserati’s motor. Simultaneously with my pushing the bell again, the door was opened by a woman of sixty or so with silver hair in a braid coiled on top of her head and a light pink complexion. From her pale gray domestic’s uniform I guessed this was the Reddings’ housekeeper.

“Hello,” I said. “I’d like to see either Mister or Missus Redding.”

“They are no’ at home.” Her voice had the slightest trace of an Irish brogue.

“What time will they be back?”

She shook her head. “They be gone until Friday. Would ye like to leave a message?”

“No, that’s all right, I’ll—”

At that moment, I heard the Maserati’s engine and turned to see Nicholas’s car zoom up the street. It came to a screeching stop so tight behind my Jeep that if his brakes hadn’t been in perfect condition he would have plowed into it.

I said a hasty “Thank you” to the woman at the door and started down the front walk. Nicholas confronted me halfway up.

“He’s away until Friday,” I said.

Nicholas’s eyes blazed. He was angrier than I’d ever seen him. “Where did that miserable bastard go?”

“Out of town. I don’t know where, but the mood you’re in I wouldn’t tell you even if I did know.”

His fury dropped from a boil to a simmer. “What are you doing here?”