To Die in Beverly Hills (35 page)

Chagra turned toward the window. "Okay," he said. "I'll go through with it."

As Higgins flipped open the briefcase again, Carr phoned the Field Office and asked for B. B. Martin. He gave surveillance instructions and told him to pick up Jack Kelly, then hung up.

Chagra took off his shirt. It took Higgins less than fifteen minutes to tape the four-inch battery pack to the small of Chagra's back. He looped the microphone wire around his left shoulder and taped it above his collarbone.

Chagra put his shirt back on. The microphone was invisible.

"I'm scared to death."

"We'll be close by," Carr said.

Higgins packed up the briefcase. "Just relax and pretend you're not wearing it."

"But I am, man. If he finds it he'll kill me. I know he'll kill me."

They barely made it to the meeting spot on time. Carr parked the government sedan around the corner from the Blue Peach and let Chagra out. He walked to the corner and turned right toward the nightclub.

"I have our boy in sight," Kelly said over the radio.

Carr clicked the transmit button twice to acknowledge receipt of the transmission.

"I can see him too," B. B. Martin said. The radio made a squelch sound.

Higgins sat in the passenger seat with the transmitter briefcase open on his lap. He adjusted the volume. There was the sound of footsteps and the rustling of clothes. "If Bailey doesn't admit to the murder on the tape, we're through. There's no way the district attorney will ever file a murder charge on him."

Carr didn't respond. He knew Higgins was right.

A few minutes later the radio buzzed. "We have an arrival," Kelly said.

Carr started the engine and put the car in gear.

"Bones is getting in the passenger side," Kelly said. "It's a white police sedan with no markings. He's taking off southbound ... southbound and pulling up to a stoplight."

Carr stepped on the accelerator and raced to the corner. He proceeded slowly around the corner. As he made the right turn, Bailey's car was a block or so ahead.

Static buzzed from the transmitter. Higgins adjusted the dials frantically. More static. He plugged and unplugged the recording jack, flipped switches. More squelch sounds. "Come on, you son-of-a-bitch." He slapped the sides of the briefcase.

"...half gold and half silver," they heard Bones Chagra saying. "I haven't even looked at the coins real close yet." Higgins turned up the volume.

"Where are they?" Bailey said.

"I've got the coins in a rental locker. But that's not what's important right now. Carr just paid me a visit. He was with some guy from
L.A.P.D. Homicide. They
asked me about Amanda. I think they know something."

"Tell me exactly what they said." Bailey's voice was calm, almost soothing.

As the transmitter volume became weaker, Carr stepped on the gas. Ahead, he saw Bailey's police car pull into a lane leading to a freeway on-ramp. The car entered the northbound freeway. A traffic light turned red and vehicles in both lanes stopped in front of Carr. He backed up and swerved around the tie-up in a parking lane. Cross-traffic sped by, blocking him from going through the red light. The voices on the transmitter faded to nothing. The Treasury radio barked with Martin's and Kelly's voices. They had lost sight of the police car.

Brakes from the oncoming traffic squealed as Carr slammed the accelerator to the floor and zoomed through the red light and onto the freeway.

Travis Bailey flicked the turn indicator and exited the freeway. He turned right on Santa Monica Boulevard and drove east for a mile or so. He made a left turn onto a manicured residential street and continued north toward Sunset Boulevard. He noticed that Chagra kept wringing his hands.

"So they asked me what I was doing the night Amanda Kennedy was killed," Chagra said. "I told them, 'How the hell do I know what I did on such and such a day? I don't keep a daily diary.' DeMille, the bondsman, gave them my name. He told them that I put up the money to bad Amanda out of jail. The rotten bastard copped out on me. So Carr says he wants me to come down to his office to make a statement. I said no, but I'm worried, Travis, really worried."

Travis Bailey said nothing. He made a left turn on Sunset Boulevard. A block later, he turned right onto a side street and then left into a steep driveway leading to the porticoed entrance to the Beverly Hills Hotel. He proceeded up the driveway and turned into the outdoor elevated parking lot, which faced the front of the hotel. A black limousine with smoked-glass windows was parked at the front door.

"I don't want you making any statements," Bailey said as he gazed at the panorama of million-dollar homes below.

"I have to tell 'em something," Chagra said, "If I just clam up they can get me for being an accessory. I bailed her out of jail and she ends up dead. They can arrest me."

"So let them arrest you. They'll never get the case filed. They don't have enough evidence."

Chagra's hands were shaking. He clasped them together."That's easy enough for you to say. Nobody's knocking on your door."

"And if anybody does knock on my door, I'll know just who gave them my address," Bailey said. "You and Emil are the only ones who know I killed her."

Chagra licked his lips, cleared his throat. "What if they trace the bullets to your gun?"

"I didn't use my gun."

"How did you--?"

"I squeezed her neck," Bailey said. "Which is exactly the same thing I'd do to both of you if I thought you were going to talk." He smiled coldly.

A sedan with two men drove out of a side street west of the hotel. Slowly, it entered the parking lot entrance. Another police-type sedan occupied by two men drove past the front of the hotel and drove in the parking lot's exit lane. The passenger in the car looked like Jack Kelly and the black man driving was the same man he'd seen drive past him -as he stood in front of Chez Doucette.

The cars were moving toward him; a car horn sounded three times.

Frantically, Bones Chagra fumbled for the door handle.

Bailey grabbed him by the hair. Chagra yelped as his head was jerked backward. Bailey's left hand tore open the front of his shirt.

"They made me do it," Chagra cried.

Brakes squealing, the sedans blocked him in from behind; their doors swung open. Chagra pulled away from his grasp, flung the door open and vaulted out of the car. He ran and dove for cover behind Martin's car.

Travis Bailey pulled his gun. Checking the rearview mirror, he saw that men were shielded behind the doors of the sedan in the usual "felony-stop" police configuration.

"It's over," Carr shouted. "We have you on tape. Place your hands on the steering wheel."

Travis Bailey squeezed the butt of his revolver. He glanced down at it, then at the rooftops that started across Sunset Boulevard and extended south on wide streets to the Beverly Hills business district. The thought of bending over waiting for a swat in the Pascoe Military Academy commandant's office flashed through his mind, as did the memory of peeking out a dormitory window and watching his mother walk out the front gate of the Pascoe Military Academy. The wind had carried the smell of her cologne.

There was the sound of sirens in the distance.

He touched the barrel of the revolver to his temple.

"Don't do it!" Carr screamed.

Bailey pulled the trigger.

With the blast from the gunshot was the sound of breaking glass. As Bailey's bead slammed against the driver's window, Carr dropped his .38 to his side, left the safety of the car door and crept slowly toward Bailey's sedan. As he reached the rear fender, he saw the bullet hole on the blood-sprayed driver's window. Bailey was slumped against the steering wheel. Carr bolstered his weapon.

Jack Kelly walked to the passenger side of the car and peered in. "Holy Mother of Christ," he said. Carefully, he leaned in the passenger door, reached across the seat and touched Bailey's neck. He drew his hand away and backed away from the sedan. He looked at Carr and shook his head.

Higgins used the car radio to call for the coroner.

B. B. Martin handcuffed Chagra and shoved him in the backseat of his sedan. Having locked the car, he removed a rope from its trunk. By looping the rope around bumpers and door handles of the vehicles parked on either side of Bailey's sedan, he secured the crime scene. He got into his car, started the engine and drove over to where Higgins stood with Carr and Kelly.

Reaching behind him, Martin swung open the rear door.

Higgins climbed in the backseat next to Chagra and shut the door. He leaned his head out the window to speak. "We'll book him in and see you back at the Field Office," he said. He sat back in the seat.

"You said you were going to let me go!" Chagra screamed.

Carr nodded. B. B. Martin put the sedan in gear and drove out of the parking lot.

During the next two or three hours, police and emergency vehicles sped in and out of the parking lot. Various police brass, including Captain Cleaver and the Beverly Hills Chief of Police, arrived and departed, as did Special Agent in Charge Norbert Waeves and the Chief of Detectives of the Los Angeles Police Department. Delsey Piper broke into tears after seeing the body and was helped away from the scene by another policeman.

In the midst of the activity a doorman dressed in gray tails and an Austrian soldier's hat helped people in and out of Rolls-Royces and limousines. Carr noticed that some of the people arriving at the hotel pointed at the jumble of police cars. Others did not.

Coroner's deputies wearing olive drab overalls finally arrived and lifted Bailey's body onto a gurney, then covered it with a plastic sheet.

"I can't help but feel sorry for him in a certain way," Kelly said. He stared at the body as it was loaded roughly into the Coroner's station wagon. "Nothing is so bad that a man should take his own life."

"He might have beat the case in court," Carr said somberly. He continued to make notations in a small notebook.

A thirtyish man with suntanned features and a tailor-made suit approached from the direction of the hotel. He introduced himself as the resident hotel manager. Carr nodded and kept writing.

"May I ask how long you people plan to be here?" he said.

Carr stopped writing and looked up at the man.

"We're short parking spaces because of a studio party, he said.

Carr and Kelly both glared at the man. He turned and hurried back to the hotel.

****

NINETEEN

IT WAS after nine o'clock by the time Carr arrived at his apartment that night. He heard the phone ringing as he unlocked the front door. Hurrying inside, he picked up the receiver. It was Sally Malone.

"I thought you might like to join me for a late dinner," she said. "No big thing."

"Sure," he said, though he wasn't hungry because of what had happened earlier. At her suggestion, they agreed to meet at a small seafood restaurant on the Santa Monica Pier that was an equal walk from either of their apartments.

Knowing she would never arrive anywhere before him, he decided to wait for her outside at the entrance to the pier. She arrived a few minutes after him, wearing a new jogging outfit. They touched lips and headed toward the restaurant, a tiny weathered building situated in the middle of the pier next to a bait shop. Its only identification was a flaking sign over the door that read Seafood. Inside, the tables and small bar were filled. They stood at the bar while a young T-shirted bartender whose nose was covered with a layer of zinc oxide served them drinks.