Web of Evil: A Novel of Suspense (8 page)

“So how are things?” Edie Larson asked. “And how are you?”

For some reason, those two questions, coming from Edie, were enough to cause Ali’s emotional dam to break. All the tears she hadn’t shed in the coroner’s office—all the tears she had put on hold and hadn’t shed during her visit to the house on Robert Lane—burst through now. Sobbing, she let herself be pulled into her mother’s arms—held and comforted—while Edie patted her shoulder and crooned soothing words.

“Shush now,” Edie murmured. “It’s going to be all right. You’ll see. Now then, have you had any lunch?”

This was so typically Edie Larson that Ali had to smile through her tears. Edie’s daughter might be a crazed killer on her way to the slammer, but Edie would move heaven and earth to be sure Ali was properly fed beforehand.

“Not yet,” Ali said.

Edie heaved her oversized suitcase up onto the bed and unzipped it. “Now then,” she said. “Let me hang up my clothes and put things away. I’ll be able to think better once I get organized.”

“When you finish, maybe we can go downstairs and have something to eat.”

“Bad idea,” Edie said. “We’d probably be better off ordering from room service.”

“How come?” Ali asked.

“Because there are a lot of people milling around down in the lobby who looked like news people to me. I asked one of the helper guys, a doorman, I think, what they were doing. He said they were looking for you.”

“For me?” echoed Ali.

“Not by name,” Edie answered. “He said they were here because there’s a ‘murder suspect’ reportedly staying at the hotel right now. He said they’re trying to get a glimpse of her. This may be California,” Edie added, “but I’m assuming that even in L.A. there’s not more than one murder suspect at a time staying in a place like this.”

When Ali had worked the news desk, one of the rules had been that suspects weren’t mentioned by name until they’d actually been charged with a crime. But that wouldn’t help her. Her face had already turned up on camera the night before as she and Victor were leaving the coroner’s office. And people had noticed. People had recognized her. She didn’t know how they had managed to trace her to the hotel. Most likely someone had followed Victor’s Lincoln when they left Robert Lane. Now, knowing they were here, Ali felt besieged.

“Room service sounds good to me,” she said.

Half an hour later, Ali’s cell phone rang. “How do people stand this traffic day in and day out?” Dave Holman wanted to know. “And it’s not just during rush hour, either. It lasts all day long.”

“Where are you?” Ali asked.

“Motel 6. That’s a little more my speed than the place you’re staying.”

“Where?”

“Highway 101 and some other freeway, I-210, I think. The good thing is, I should be able to make my way back there from here on surface streets. The people driving on the freeways are nuts.”

Ali had come to L.A. from New York. The metro area had seemed different to her but not entirely alien. Dave hailed from Sedona. She could see how foreign the city must seem to someone accustomed to living in small-town Arizona.

“Our room number is 703,” she told him. “When you get back here to the hotel, come directly up to the room. Whatever you do, don’t ask for me by name. Mom says there are reporters down in the lobby. One of them might be listening.”

“No kidding,” Dave returned. “I may be a hick, but when I met up with Edie a while ago down in the lobby, I did notice one or two reporters had been added to the mix.”

“So we’ll have lunch up here,” Ali said. “From room service. What do you want?”

“A burger. Medium rare. No tofu!”

Ali laughed at that. “No tofu it is.”

She called room service and ordered a burger for Dave and tortilla soup for Edie and herself. When she put down the phone, she found Edie studying her daughter’s reflection in the mirror.

“Have you met her?” Edie asked.

“Met who?”

“April Gaddis,” Edie replied. “Paul’s fiancée.”

“How do you know her name?” Ali asked.

Edie reached into a capacious purse and pulled out a handful of newspapers. “I stopped for coffee at that truck stop on the far side of Palm Springs and picked up a couple of newspapers,” she replied. “I wanted to know what we were up against before I got here.”

Edie laid the papers on the desk and then pulled out a brand-new spiral notebook. She opened the notebook to the first page, which was blank. “When Dave Holman is working a homicide, I know he always keeps a casebook,” Edie added, picking up a pen. “I think we should do the same thing. I’m going to write down everything so we don’t forget details. So tell me. What’s April like?”

Under any other circumstance, Ali might have found her mother’s businesslike approach amusing, but this wasn’t funny. As Edie sat with her pen poised over paper, it was clear she wanted answers.

“Very young, very pretty, very pregnant,” Ali said finally.

“And she was supposed to get married today,” Edie said.

Ali nodded.

“Is she considered a suspect in Paul’s murder?” Edie wanted to know.

“Probably not,” Ali said. “No motive. Had the divorce been finalized and the wedding ceremony performed, it might be a different story, but when the will was read this morning, I was still Paul’s legal wife and primary beneficiary. If April was going to knock him off, surely she would have been smart enough to wait until they were actually married.”

“Is she that smart?” Edie asked.

Ali thought about what Helga had said—about April being smart enough to throw herself on Ali’s mercy. “I think so,” Ali responded.

“Who else would have a motive then?” Edie asked. She was approaching the problem in her accustomed manner—with no nonsense and plenty of common sense. “Is there a chance there’s another man in the picture?” she added. “If money isn’t the motivating factor, maybe something else is—like jealousy, for example. From what I see on TV, jealousy works.”

Ali had thought about April Gaddis and Paul Grayson primarily in terms of the two of them cheating on her. The idea that they might have been cheating on each other had never crossed her mind.

“It’s possible, I suppose,” Ali said dubiously. She wasn’t entirely convinced.

“Of course it is,” Edie declared. “If Paul would cheat on you, he’d cheat on her, too. That’s what your father says: Once a cheat, always a cheat. So the first thing we have to do is find out everything there is to know about April Gaddis.”

“We should ask Christopher about that,” Ali said. “He knew about April long before I did. She’s related to some friend of his. April was working for Paul as his administrative assistant, but I don’t know which came first, the chicken or the egg—the job or the affair. I think it’s likely that he got her the job so she could earn enough money to support herself. That way there wouldn’t be a paper trail linking money from him to her.”

“Right, a little prenuptial nepotism never hurt anybody,” Edie observed. “So I’ll ask Christopher about April.”

“I met her mother,” Ali supplied.

“April’s mother?” Edie asked. “You have?”

“Her name’s Monique Ragsdale. She came to the house this morning to meet with the attorneys. She claims she’s looking out for the interests of the baby. I suspect she’s mostly looking out for herself. She came hoping we’d agree to a postmortem divorce decree.”

“You can’t divorce someone after they’re dead, can you?”

“Helga doesn’t think so,” Ali said.

There was a knock on the door. When Ali opened it, the room service trolley was waiting out in the hallway, and so was Dave Holman. His broad-shouldered, military bearing was something Ali really needed about then—something she welcomed. Reaching past the waiter, she gave Dave a brief but heartfelt hug.

“Thanks for coming,” she said.

“Wouldn’t have missed it,” he said.

While the waiter set up a table out on the deck, Dave prowled the room. “This one’s a little nicer than mine,” he said. “There’s no room service at Motel 6, but there’s a Denny’s up the block, so I’ll live.” He peered over Edie’s shoulder at the notebook.

“Just trying to get an idea of who all’s involved,” she explained.

“Good work,” he said.

All through lunch, Edie and Dave continued to pepper Ali with questions while Edie took copious notes. Once again Ali recalled what Victor had told her: “Anything you say…” But surely what she told her own mother and her good friend Dave couldn’t hurt her, could it? Especially since everything she said was the truth.

They were just finishing lunch when the phone rang. “Ted Grantham here,” he said. “This is a bit awkward, but…”

“What is it?”

“April called while Les and I were having lunch,” he said. “I didn’t get the message until I came back to the office. She said she was having a problem with her mother about planning the funeral. She wanted to talk to you about it if you wouldn’t mind coming back up to the house to see her.”

“Of course,” Ali said. “I’ll be glad to.”

“Glad to what?” Edie asked when Ali got off the phone.

“April wants me to come back up to the house and talk about funeral arrangements.”

“With you?” Dave demanded.

“Yes. With me.” Ali was already searching the room for her purse and her keys.

“How come?” Dave wanted to know.

“Because she’s twenty-five years old and doesn’t know how to go about handling all those details.”

“Shouldn’t her mother help her with that?” Dave asked.

“April doesn’t want her mother involved.”

“Wait a minute,” Dave said. “Your dead ex-husband’s girlfriend is arguing with her own mother about Paul Grayson’s funeral arrangements, and she expects you to walk right into the middle of it? What’s wrong with this picture?”

“You don’t understand,” Ali said. “You haven’t met Monique Ragsdale. I have.”

“I do understand,” Dave said. “All too well. Stay out of it, Ali. Run, do not walk, in the opposite direction.”

Ali looked at Dave. He was a nice enough man, but he had no idea what it was like to be pregnant with someone’s baby and to have that person snatched out of your life. No matter who April Gaddis was or whose baby she was carrying, at this point it was impossible for Ali to feel anything but compassion for her.

“April asked for my help. I’m going to give it to her,” Ali said.

“Well then,” Edie declared. “If you’re going, so are we.”

“All right,” Dave said glumly. “But when it all goes to hell, just remember—I told you so.”

Ali called down to the desk for her car. “This is Ali Reynolds,” she added after relaying her valet parking ticket number to the bell captain. “Are there still reporters down there looking for me?”

“Yes,” he replied. “I’m afraid there are.”

“Is there a chance you could smuggle me out of the building without my being seen?”

“Sure. I could come up and get you in the service elevator and take you out the back way, through the kitchen.”

“Would you?”

“Of course.”

Dave shook his head the whole way down in the service elevator and raised a disapproving eyebrow at the size of the tip Ali handed over to the bellman, but the ploy worked. Ali was relieved that in the paparazzi bidding wars, her tip was large enough to allow them to exit the hotel without meeting up with even one of the waiting reporters.

With Edie in the backseat of the Cayenne, Ali drove back up the hill to Robert Lane. The broken front gate was still open, but filming had ended for the day. The Sumo Sudoku RVs were nowhere in evidence. The film crews had pulled up stakes and gone home, too. Leading the way to the front door, Ali was surprised to find it ajar. The
DO NOT DISTURB
sign had been removed. She paused long enough to ring the bell, but no one answered.

The entire entryway was awash in banks of floral bouquets, even more than had been there earlier.

“Hello?” Ali called. “April? Anybody home?”

There was no answer.

With Dave and Edie trailing behind, Ali ventured farther into the house. They found Monique Ragsdale lying sprawled at the bottom of the stairway. While Dave bent over the stricken woman and checked for a pulse, Ali dialed 911.

“Is she still breathing?” Ali demanded.

“Barely.”

“Nine-one-one,” the operator responded. “What are you reporting?”

“Someone’s fallen,” Ali found herself yelling into the phone. “She’s fallen down a flight of stairs.”

“Is she conscious?” the operator asked.

“No! She’s barely breathing. Send someone. Hurry.”

“Units are on the way,” the operator said. “They’ll be there soon.”

Not soon enough,
Ali thought.
Not nearly soon enough.

“And your name is?”

“Ali,” she answered. “Alison Reynolds.”

“You just stay on the line with me, Ms. Reynolds. Help is on the way.”

A
li remained on the phone with the emergency operators while Dave stayed with Monique. Edie was dispatched to the upstairs bedrooms for a blanket to cover the injured woman. While she was at it, she searched through the rest of the house to see if anyone else was home.

“No one’s here,” she reported. “No one at all.”

“Not even the cook?” Ali asked. “Did you check the kitchen?”

“I looked everywhere,” Edie replied. “The whole house is empty.”

The EMTs arrived within minutes. As they worked to shift Monique onto a board in order to load her onto a gurney, Ali spotted a cell phone and a key ring lying on the floor. She grabbed the phone, opened it, and hit the “redial” button. The words “April Cell” appeared on the screen.

“Where will you take her?” Ali asked one of the EMTs.

“The ER at Cedars-Sinai,” he said.

Ali pressed the “talk” button and was disappointed when, instead of being answered, her call to April went straight to voice mail.

“April,” Ali said urgently. “It’s Ali Reynolds. Call me back as soon as you get this message. Your mother has fallen down the stairs. The EMTs are taking her to Cedars-Sinai. You may want to meet us there.”

When she finished the call, Ali slipped the phone into her pocket.

“You shouldn’t have touched that,” Dave observed.

“Why not?” Ali asked. “I needed to get hold of April to let her know what’s happened.”

“If this turns out to be a crime scene, you’ve contaminated some of the evidence.”

“A crime scene?” Ali repeated. “What crime scene? She fell.”

“After she and her daughter quarreled,” Dave pointed out. “You should put it back.”

Ali looked around at the field of debris being left behind by the EMTs. The crime scene was contaminated, all right, and not just by her.

“I’m not putting it back,” Ali insisted. “I told April to call me back on this number when she gets the message.”

Dave shot her an exasperated look and then went to greet the pair of uniformed police officers who had arrived on the scene as the gurney was being wheeled out the front door.

Ali was still holding her car keys. She thrust them into her mother’s hands. “I’m going to the hospital,” Ali said. “Once Dave finishes with the cops, the two of you can come to the hospital in my car.”

“But how do we get there?” Edie wanted to know.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “Use the GPS. You should be able to key Cedars-Sinai into it, and it’ll lead you straight there.”

“But—”

“No buts, Mom,” Ali returned. “I’m going.”

By the time she got outside, the doors on the ambulance had already slammed shut. Knowing she wouldn’t be allowed to ride in that anyway, Ali went looking for an alternative. By then a fire department supervisor had arrived on the scene. After some persuading, Ali managed to convince the driver to take her along to the hospital.

“You’re a relative?” he asked.

Mentally Ali thought through her actual connection to Monique Ragsdale:
“the mother of my murdered husband’s pregnant girlfriend.”

That would sound more than slightly suspect. “Yes,” Ali said. And let it go at that.

By the time Ali arrived at the entrance to the ER, Monique had already been wheeled inside and out of sight. Ali started toward the registration desk and then stopped. There was no point in even talking to those people. She knew nothing—no social security numbers, no insurance information. Saying she was a relative might have been enough to bum a ride to the hospital, but it wasn’t going to wash with some sharp-eyed receptionist whose main purpose in life was to ascertain who would be responsible for authorizing lifesaving treatment and/or paying the bill.

Walking to one of the few unoccupied chairs in the room, Ali took Monique’s phone out of her pocket and once again hit “redial.” Still April didn’t answer.

Where the hell are you?
Ali wondered in frustration.
Why don’t you answer?

Gradually, the sights, sounds, and, even more, the smells of the waiting room assailed her. She had been pregnant the whole time Dean was sick. While he struggled with cancer, she had struggled with morning sickness, sitting in ER and hospital waiting rooms and clutching her own barf bucket. Being there brought all the memories back with awful clarity.

Around the room people sat huddled in their own private miseries. An older woman, in a wheelchair and on oxygen, sat with her eyes closed while the old man next to her periodically patted her hand. A few feet away from Ali, a feverish-looking toddler wailed inconsolably while his young mother, speaking in Spanish, tried in vain to comfort him. Then, with no warning, the anguished wail suddenly devolved into a spasm of projectile vomiting.

Ali knew that active puking or bleeding was the key to getting ER attention, and this was no exception. A nurse appeared from behind a curtained doorway, collected the sick baby and his mother, and then disappeared again. In less than a minute, a janitor, wearing gloves and a face mask, was there to clean up the mess. Meantime, a hugely pregnant young woman, also Hispanic, walked into the lobby on her own. At the receptionist desk, though, she was hit by a contraction that brought her to her knees. Someone grabbed a nearby wheelchair and whisked her away as well.

Living and dying,
Ali thought.
Coming and going. That’s what hospitals are all about.

She tried April’s number again, with the same result, then Ali closed her eyes and tried to shut all this out; tried to make it go away. But it didn’t work. She was back in Chicago, lost in that awful time more than twenty years ago. Back in her own peculiar version of hell.

“Ms. Reynolds.” A voice from far away pierced her reverie. “Ms. Alison Reynolds. Would you please come to the registration desk?”

As Ali rose to answer the summons, a phone rang. It wasn’t her ring and so at first she didn’t realize it was for her. Then Monique’s phone began to vibrate as well as ring.

“Mom?” April asked.

“It’s not your mother,” Ali interjected. “It’s me. Ali. Where are you? Did you get my messages?”

“I went for a drive. I had to get away for a while. The walls were closing in on me. I couldn’t stand to be in the house a minute longer. But what are you doing on my mother’s phone? I saw that she had called three times. I didn’t bother listening to the messages. There’s no point. She’s always bossing me around and saying the same thing, over and over.”

“The messages weren’t from your mother,” Ali said firmly. “They’re from me, April, all of them. Your mother’s been hurt. She’s in the ER at Cedars-Sinai. You need to get here as soon as you can. Where are you?”

“Hurt? What do you mean, hurt?”

“She fell down the stairs at the house. She must have hit her head, either on the way down or on the tile floor at the bottom of the staircase.”

There was a pause—a long pause. “Is it like, you know, bad?” April asked.

“I don’t know how bad it is,” Ali returned. “Since I’m not a blood relative, the people here at the hospital won’t tell me anything.”

By now Ali had reached the registration desk, where a woman seated in front of a computer terminal glared at Ali impatiently, waiting for her to finish the call.

“You brought Ms. Ragsdale in?” the receptionist asked. “We’re going to need some information.”

Ali thrust Monique’s cell phone in the woman’s direction. “There’s no point in talking to me because I don’t know anything. This is April Gaddis, Monique Ragsdale’s daughter,” she added. “You should probably talk to her.”

The receptionist took the cell phone and handed it over to the same nurse who had come to collect the puking toddler. About that time two uniformed LAPD officers—a man and a woman—made their way into the ER. Ali recognized them at once. They were the same officers Ali had passed as she sprinted out of the house on Robert Lane intent on hitching a ride to the hospital. Unfortunately, three other people followed the two cops. Two of them carried cameras—one still and one video. The reporters were still on the hunt, and this trio had just gotten lucky.

The officers spotted Ali standing near the reception desk and hurried toward her. “Ms. Reynolds?” the female officer asked. “Could we speak to you for a moment, please?”

The flurry of activity that marked the arrival of the cops and the cameras caused every head in the waiting room to swivel curiously in Ali’s direction. The room went totally silent as everyone strained to hear her answer.

“Yes, of course,” she said. “How can I help?”

“I’m Officer Oliveras. We understand you’re the person who found Ms. Ragsdale at the bottom of the stairs?” she asked.

“Yes,” Ali answered. “That’s correct.”

“Can you tell us how you came to be there?” That question came from Officer Oliveras’s partner, one Dale Ramsey.

“Monique’s…that is, Ms. Ragsdale’s daughter, April Gaddis, sent a message to me and asked me to come there—to the house. April said she needed my help.”

“With what?” Ramsey asked.

“With making funeral arrangements,” Ali began, then she paused and looked around the room. All ears seemed to be cocked in her direction. “It’s all rather complicated,” she added.

Officer Oliveras didn’t smile. “Maybe you’d rather speak to us in a somewhat more private setting,” she offered. “Our squad car is right outside.”

The idea of being closeted in a vehicle with two more inquisitive cops didn’t sound all that appealing, especially if there were photographers here ready to capture each and every vivid detail on film.

“No,” Ali said quickly. “This is fine. I was sitting over there in the corner. Maybe we could do this there.”

She led the cops into an area where the distinct odor of puke, barely covered by some astringent cleaning solution, still lingered in the air. Officer Oliveras followed Ali while Officer Ramsey rounded on the reporters.

“All right, you bozos,” he said. “Enough! Get the hell out of here. Can’t you see there are sick people here? You’re botherin’ ’em.”

“So,” Officer Oliveras said to Ali. “We’re given to understand that the house where this happened, the house on Robert Lane, actually belongs to you?”

“Supposedly,” Ali said. “But all that’s pretty much in a state of confusion right now. You see, my husband died the night before last. Because our divorce hadn’t been finalized and because his will hadn’t been changed, the house evidently comes to me.”

“And Ms. Ragsdale is the mother of your ex-husband’s intended bride.”

“Yes,” Ali said. “That’s correct.”

“And you know her?”

“We’ve met,” Ali admitted. “Only this morning. We were at a meeting together there at the house—a meeting with our several attorneys.”

“Where you discussed this will situation—where your husband left everything to you and nothing to Ms. Ragsdale’s daughter, the mother of your husband’s baby?”

“Yes,” Ali said, although her answer was barely audible. It was difficult to speak when what she was hearing loud and clear in her head were Victor Angeleri’s words: “What part of ‘whatever you say’ don’t you understand?”

“Should I have an attorney with me when I’m answering these questions?” Ali asked.

Officer Oliveras’s face darkened. “It’s up to you,” she said. “If you feel you need one, that’s fine, but at this point, all we’re trying to do is get a handle on who all was there at the house this morning and why.”

“We gathered there for a reading of my husband’s will,” Ali answered after a pause. “I was there along with April Gaddis, my husband’s fiancée; Ms. Ragsdale; and then four attorneys. No, wait. There were five attorneys actually, counting Ms. Ragsdale’s.”

Ali reeled off each of the several attorneys’ names while Officer Oliveras took notes.

“You say this last one, Mr. Anderson, is Ms. Ragsdale’s attorney?” Oliveras asked. “Why would she need one? Is she a beneficiary under the will?”

It didn’t seem wise to mention the possibility of a postmortem divorce. That wasn’t necessarily lying. “No,” Ali said finally. “Mr. Anderson was there ostensibly to protect the rights of the unborn baby. My understanding is, however, that regardless of whether or not the baby is named in the will, she’ll still benefit from it.”

“The baby?” Oliveras asked.

Ali nodded.

“You already know the baby’s a girl then?”

“Yes.”

Officer Ramsey sighed and shook his head impatiently, as though all the marital back-and-forthing was boring him to tears.

“If you and Ms. Ragsdale met just this morning, it’s fair to assume you didn’t have any particular bone of contention with her?”

“No. None at all.”

“Was anyone else there?”

Ali did her best to recall everyone else—the cook; Jesus, the gardener; Tracy McLaughlin and the Sumo Sudoku people along with the accompanying film crew. Of those the only name she knew for sure was that of the interviewer, Sandy Quijada.

“All right now,” Oliveras said. “Tell me again why was it you went back to the house this afternoon.”

“April called and invited me over. Or rather, she called Ted Grantham’s office and left a message asking me to come over and help her work on making funeral arrangements.”

“For your ex-husband?”

“Yes.”

“You must have a pretty cordial relationship with your husband’s fiancée,” Oliveras observed. “It seems to me she would have asked someone else for help with that kind of thing—her mother, for example.”

This was exactly what Dave had said when he had warned Ali to stay away. And, as he had predicted, things were indeed going to hell.

At that moment April herself came charging through the ER’s automatic doors. Her eyes were wide, her skin deathly pale. Panting, she raced up to the receptionist, who, after only a few murmured words of conversation, immediately summoned the nurse who was still holding Monique’s cell phone. With no more formalities than that, April was handed the phone and then ushered through the curtains and back into the treatment rooms.

Across the crowded waiting room another baby started to cry. An ambulance arrived, sirens blaring, and discharged a new gurney along with a new set of stricken relatives into the mix. But Ali paid almost no attention to any of that. She knew without having to be told that Monique Ragsdale’s condition had to be grave at best. The only thing that rushed anyone past loyal ER gatekeepers was the reality that someone in one of the back rooms was hanging by a thread between life and death.