The Trials of Nikki Hill (24 page)

Corben had made a long but complete circle and was now steering his sedan toward the curb in front of Goodman’s apartment. “Any ideas on how to find the new blackmailer?” he asked.

“Got a pretty good hunch.”

“Fine, then you got your things to do and I got mine.”

As Goodman opened the car door to the afternoon heat, Corben added, “You go on a hunt for this blackmailer, take Morales along.”

“I may not be able to get hold of him.”

“Then somebody else on our team. Until we get this other matter cleared up on Monday, I don’t want you out there among ’em by yourself. If somebody’s fucking with you, let’s keep the odds at two to one in your favor.”

What Corben said made sense. But if Goodman was going to have to spend his Saturday afternoon with another cop, he could do better than Morales.

Unfortunately, Gwen Harriman didn’t seem to be near her phone. And Morales answered his on the first ring.

F
ORTY-FOUR

G
angbangers,” Morales said with disgust as their car started up Laurel Canyon toward Maddie Gray’s house.

Goodman looked back at the vehicle that had just passed, a nondescript black 1963 Chevrolet. “How do you know?” he asked.

“Bunch of black kids drivin’ in a Chevy and they all got shaved heads, orange shirts, and an attitude. What d’ya think, amigo? A basketball team?”

Actually, Goodman had barely noticed the Chevy. His thoughts had been elsewhere. Arthur Lydon, the late Madeleine Gray’s assistant, was the most likely candidate to have stepped into the blackmail breach left by his employer’s death.

When no one answered the buzzer at Lydon’s hillside apartment, the only other place Goodman could think of to look for him was the Gray home.

“This a wile goose chase, amigo. Le’s go back and roust those bangers.”

“Even if they are bangers, which I doubt, they’re not our concern.”

“Concern? It’s our day off,” Morales grumbled as he parked in front of the multitiered house. “We’d get more accomplished checking out those bangers than lookin’ for the li’l man who isn’t here.”

“If
he
isn’t, somebody is,” Goodman said. “The front door’s open.”

Morales scanned the area. “No car. Prob’ly vamoosed.”

“Maybe,” Goodman said.

They left the sedan cautiously and headed for the open door. Someone had pried the police lock from the jamb. They automatically drew their guns.

Instead of entering the house, they split off. Morales circled to the right. Goodman took the left, pausing at the first window to peek past the curtains into the sitting room. No sign of life. Likewise the room directly behind. The kitchen seemed empty, too. That was as far as Goodman could go: the house had been constructed to fit snugly in a pocket of the canyon wall.

The detective retraced his steps and found his partner waiting for him. Morales shrugged, then walked to the front door. He entered, quickly and silently. Goodman moved a bit more slowly, but just as noiselessly. It took them nearly fifteen minutes to convince themselves that the house was unoccupied. By then, sweaty and on edge, they made another tour of the place, hoping to discover some reason for the break-in.

Morales found it in Arthur Lydon’s office. He called his partner.

“Why would the little
maricón
pry open his own desk?” he asked.

Goodman looked at the mess behind the desk. The contents of the drawers had been dumped on the floor.

“If not him, who? Burglars?” he asked.

“Leaving all the TVs and stereos?”

With a grunt, Goodman hunkered down to get a closer look at a leather folder resting on top of a pile of papers. He used his pen to flip the top of the folder back.

“Wha’chu got?”

“Lydon’s checkbook. Last check was ripped out. Not nice and neat like the rest.”

“Somebody broke in here jus’ to steal a blank check from Mr. Sweetie?”

Goodman looked at the next unused checks. “His address is on the checks,” he said, standing up. “I think they broke in looking for him. And now they know where he lives. We’d better hop back to his place.”

“We was jus’ there and we know he ain’t home.”

“Let’s make sure.”

Lydon resided near the Hollywood Bowl, in an art deco trilevel apartment building halfway up a scrub-and-rock hill, accessible from the street level via a separate stone tower that housed an elevator. The detectives rode it to the top. When they emerged from the tower they were standing on an exposed stone platform that led directly to a third-floor balcony running the length of the building. An equally exposed stairwell led down to the other floors, each of which had its own walkway/balcony.

Lydon’s apartment was at the far corner of the bottom floor.

Heading there for the second time that afternoon, Goodman and Morales ignored the cityscape as they moved down the stairs and along the walkway, shooing pigeons from their path. The birds seemed to have taken over the building.

Their defecation, dry and fresh, mottled the walkway. “Flying rats,” Morales said disgustedly.

As they approached Lydon’s apartment, he said, “Looks like we got lucky.” The card they’d stuck in the little man’s front door was resting on the cement walkway.

Morales pushed the door buzzer.

No reply.

Pigeons flapped their wings in the sunlight, soaring from the roof of the building down the hillside. The detectives ignored them, concentrating on the quiet apartment.

Morales knocked on the door. “Hey, Mr. Lydon.”

The door to Goodman’s right opened. The young woman who stepped through it was dressed in starlet housecleaning chic—blond tendrils escaping a tied kerchief, scrubbed face, astonishing body barely covered by a stained muscle shirt and short shorts, two-hundred-dollar running shoes on sockless feet. She was carrying a pillowcase filled with what Goodman assumed was laundry. His imagination went a step further, conjuring up an image of rumpled little items from the Victoria’s Secret catalog.

She glanced at him, then Morales, and, registering no emotion at all, started away.

“Miss?”

She turned, wary now.

“Would you know if Mr. Lydon has been home recently?” Goodman asked.

Her large, empty blue eyes seemed puzzled. “Isn’t he there now?”

“Doesn’t seem to be.”

“He was in the laundry room a half hour ago, tying up every one of the machines.”

“You’re heading there now?” Goodman asked, startled by

the arrival of a pigeon on the walkway rail right next to where his hand rested.

“Uh huh.” He saw her eyes shift to the pigeon, then follow it as the bird flew off. She stepped closer to the railing and continued to watch its progress. “I still have...”

She paused.

Goodman, who’d been a little lost in those blue eyes, saw them widen. Then the generous mouth opened, ready to scream. But no sound came. He couldn’t tell what was happening to the woman. Some sort of seizure?

Her bundle of dirty clothes slipped from her fingers and she began to sway. Goodman grabbed her before her knees gave out. She was no wisp of a girl and her inert weight dragged him down with her, pinning him to the cement walk. He looked up at Morales for help, but his partner was running past them, ignoring them completely.

“What the hell . . .” Goodman rolled the woman off of his legs. She was breathing easily, but she was out. He lifted her head and placed her stuffed pillowcase under it. Then he straightened out her limbs.

He stood up and leaned over the balcony railing in time to see Morales stumbling down the hillside toward...

Holy God!

In all his years on the force he’d never seen anything quite like it. Definitely not in the bright Southern California sunshine. A body—certainly Arthur Lydon’s—was lying on its back a hundred yards or so down the hill. Blood covered everything—clothes, face, hands, spiky hair. It still looked red enough to be fresh. Even worse, entrails spilled from a gaping wound in the man’s stomach like glistening worms. The birds—the pigeons—were engaged in an afternoon meal the horror of which was light-years beyond anything Alfred Hitchcock could have imagined.

Then Morales was there flapping his arms and scattering some of the birds. He looked up at his gawking partner. “Need some help here, amigo,” he shouted, “before these fucking flying rats eat up all our evidence.”

F
ORTY-FIVE

N
ikki realized that the only difference between arriving at the Criminal Courts Building on that particular Saturday afternoon and on a regular weekday morning was that you didn’t have to wait as long for an elevator. Most of the CCB’s nine-to-fivers were out enjoying another weekend in paradise, but, thanks to the forthcoming Dyana Cooper trial, the eighteenth floor where Joe Walden held sway was fully staffed.

The prosecutor navigated her way past the guard from county security, a sister with an unyielding attitude, then circled the glass panel desk behind which Jewel, the nicest of three alternating receptionists, pressed a buzzer that unlocked a wooden door on the right. Beyond it was a waiting area that took on an appearance quite apart from the industrial grimness of the rest of the eighteenth floor. Clean and brightly painted, dull floor tiles replaced by a thick new beige carpet, it reminded Nikki of what a real law office should look like.

At one end of the room, two secretaries occupied twin desks. At the other sat a D.A.’s investigator, his jacket open, exposing a gun in a worn leather shoulder holster. The secretary whose name Nikki thought might be Jeri indicated the closed door to the conference room. “Please go in, Ms. Hill,” she said. “They’re expecting you.”

“They” were fourteen casually dressed coworkers and the D.A., gathered at the enormous conference table, several of them dwarfed by their high-backed, blue-gray leather chairs. Nikki was amused to note that the pecking order was being followed: Walden was at the head. On his left was Ray Wise. Past Wise, the lower-echelon D.A.s and clerks who comprised the special prosecution team sat in order of their seniority. One of the lessons learned from the O. J. Simpson murder case was the impracticality of assembling a team in increments to meet the needs of an ongoing trial. It was much more efficient to keep a full team in place, ready to handle high-profile prosecutions as a functioning unit.

“Hi, folks,” Nikki said. “Sorry I’m late.”

“We’re just starting,” Joe Walden said. There were two empty chairs to his right. He indicated that she should take the one nearest him, a gesture that buoyed her confidence.

“Need some coffee? Water?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” she said, getting out her pen and opening her notebook.

“We’re still waiting for—” Walden said. “Ah, here she is.” Dimitra Shaw entered the conference room and moved to the empty chair beside Nikki. She was immaculately dressed in a smartly cut Italian suit not unlike one that Nikki would have been wearing herself if it had been a workday and not the weekend. She nodded to the crowd. “Afternoon. Joe, Ray. Nikki.”

Nikki smiled back through clenched teeth, wondering what the hell Dimitra was doing there. She was not a member of the special team. At least she hadn’t been. Nikki looked across the table at Ray questioningly, but he avoided her eyes. Not a good sign.

“Let’s get rolling,” Walden said. “We’ve got a lot to cover. Ray, why don’t you present your murder time line.”

Wise’s face contorted into a fleeting grimace and he began. “According to Mrs. Willins, at approximately five

P.M. on the evening of the murder, she arrives at Gray’s home in her beige 1970 Jaguar XKE Series III.” Walden wanted them to use Dyana Cooper’s married name in the hope of separating the murderer from the movie star. Nikki thought it was a dumb idea, but if it made Joe happy...“An argument ensues. They fight. Willins hits Gray with a sculpture, draws blood. Gray scratches Willins. Of course, all we have is Willins’s word for it that the fight took place at this time and not later that night between the hours of eight and eleven P.M., when Dr. Fugitsu tells us Gray was murdered.

“Willins lied to Detectives Goodman and Morales during their first interview at her home and again later at Parker Center when she told them she didn’t leave her house that night. Witnesses have definitely placed her car at Gray’s at the approximate time of the murder. A probable scenario is that she drove back there, passions erupted again, and Willins brutalized and murdered Madeleine Gray, rolled her body into a rug, and carried that to her car. She then drove the body to the Dumpster in South Central.”

Walden opened the floor to questions.

Was there anything to the speculation on the news that the Gray home was not the scene of the crime? “We’re ninety-eight percent certain the murder took place there,” Wise replied. “We’ve found signs of a fight. Blood. We know with certainty that Mrs. Willins removed the rug from the premises. Threads matching those on the floor were found in her sports car, along with a strand of the vic’s hair. That’s confidential, by the way.”

“Everything said here is,” Walden added sternly.

Could Dyana Cooper have murdered Maddie and disposed of the body without help? “Mrs. Willins is in excellent physical condition,” Wise said. “The LAPD is, of course, investigating the possibility of an accomplice. But the assumption is that she acted alone.”

Could a celebrity as well known as the suspect have driven a fancy sports car to South Central and dumped the body without being seen? “We’d love for some witness to come forth,” Wise said. “So far we’ve been unable to find anyone who saw Dyana Willins, or anybody else for that matter, placing the body in the Dumpster. We’re assuming she used the Jag, although she might have transferred the body to some other, less ostentatious vehicle. If so, we haven’t found that vehicle. It isn’t any of those at the Willins estate. The police have checked.”

On TV that morning, Mrs. Willins had claimed she had no motive. Was this true? Wise was starting to reply when he was interrupted by the harsh sound of a buzzer. Obviously piqued, the district attorney picked up the phone in front of him. “Jeri, you know I said...Oh, okay, put him on.” The room was quiet while Walden responded to the call with mumbles and grunts. Finally, he said, “I really can’t comment on that right now. Sorry.”