City of Mirrors (8 page)

T
he gunman helped me up onto the yacht. Heath followed. The driver, my purse still slung over his shoulder, remained on the dock.

A bar with stools, lounge chairs, and built-in banquets filled the spacious deck.

“She goes in alone.” The man blocked Heath's way.

“No, I go in with her.” Heath glanced down at the One Night With You tattoo on the guard's muscular arm. “Finally got lucky, uh?”

The guard's neck stiffened, and his biceps flexed as if he had no control over them.

“He's waiting,” Heath reminded him.

Fierce resentment oozed from the man as he ushered us into a mahogany-paneled salon about the size of my house. The floors were dark wood, and rich Burgundy-colored drapes were pulled over large rectangular windows blocking the sun and the water from view. A crystal chandelier glowed from the beamed ceiling. Old oil paintings of someone's royal ancestors and their dogs hung on the walls. A dining room table surrounded by twenty matching Chippendale chairs took up the end of the room. I felt as if I had walked not onto a yacht but onto the set of an old Merchant Ivory film about the English upper class.

A man in his sixties sat on a paisley velvet sofa. Tall and thin, ash-gray hair swept back from a face as bony and grim as a skeleton's. His long narrow chin ended in a goatee. Staring with red-rimmed, stone-colored eyes at a heavily draped porthole, the man seemed to not to know we were there. Heath leaned against the wall near the salon door. I remained standing, trying to control my fear, which was fighting for dominance with my anger. The tantrum-squawking of the seagulls outside punctuated the tense silence. The thug waited, his thick arms hanging down, fingers twitching.

Finally the man said to him, “Leave.”

As he did he bumped Heath's shoulder. Heath pretended not to notice.

The man continued, “You found my daughter's body.”

“You're Mr. Parson?”

“Sit down, please.” He gestured to a burgundy leather club chair opposite the coffee table.

My anger beat out my fear. “Look, I'm very sorry for your loss, but you had no right to have me abducted, to scare the hell out of me, to drag me up here …”

He raised a hand up, stopping me.

“I'm meeting two detectives at my house in Montecito in about an hour. They're going to explain what happened to Jenny. I know how the police operate, Ms. Poole. They won't give me the complete picture even if they knew it, which I doubt they do. So I brought you up here to tell me exactly what you saw before I talk with them.”

“There is such a thing as a telephone. You could have called me. Or at least your driver or Heath could've told me where they were taking me.”

“If they told you that it was I you were to meet you'd naturally begin to plan what you were going to say. I've found over the years I gain more information from spontaneous discussions. I haven't slept much, so let's get this over with.” He rubbed his long fingers against his thigh as if trying to massage life into it. His navy blue slacks matched his polo shirt. Black velvet slippers with gold embroidered crests added a hint of Old World decadence to his outfit.

A door opened near the dining room table and a young man with teak-colored skin and glistening black hair entered. He wore a white polo shirt and khakis.

“What would you like to drink after your journey?” Parson asked me.

“Nothing.”

“Same here,” Parson said to the young man, then turned to Heath. “You?”

“No.”

“Please, sir, eat something.”

“I can't, Luis. Leave us.”

Frowning with concern, Luis drifted out, closing the door.

“Do you still wish to stand, Ms. Poole?”

“I wish to be taken back to my house.”

“Not until we talk.”

“He just wants to know what happened to his daughter,” Heath said. “Make it easy on yourself.”

I relented and sat down, crossing my legs. Parson stroked his goatee, a ghost of a connoisseur's leer playing on his dry lips as he took in my body. Heath shifted his weight.

I focused on the red garden roses exploding from a vase on the coffee table and wondered what kind of power this man had that he was able to force Zaitlin to cancel our meeting, if there really had been one. There was no doubt Parson was a grieving father. But he was also surrounded by armed thugs, and that made him a very dangerous grieving father. I decided to ask a few questions myself.

“How were you able to get Zaitlin to cancel my meeting? Do you control him in some way?”

“I like an intelligent woman. Don't you, Heath?”

“Not always.”

I ignored Heath as Parson leaned forward. “You might say Jenny was murdered on Zaitlin's watch. He's only trying to accommodate me. And your meeting has been postponed, not canceled.”

“Yet he felt the need to send Heath with me. Why?”

“Heath owns one of Los Angeles' best investigative security firms. He is looking into Jenny's death for Zaitlin. Zaitlin will share any information he learns with me.”

Seemingly unaware he was being talked about, Heath pulled a strand of blond hair from his lapel and flicked it onto the floor. It was mine.

“I thought it might be because of all the heavily armed men you have surrounding you.” Not waiting for an answer, I continued. “Where is Jenny's mother? Doesn't she want to know what happened to her daughter?”

The deep lines around Parson's mouth twitched. “You really want to make this difficult, Ms. Poole?”

“After what you've put me through, it's only fair you should answer some of my questions first.”

He let out a heavy sigh. “My wife, her mother, is at our Montecito home. She's devastated and under sedation. When I married her she was just twenty and I was forty-five. Now she's forty-five. Jenny was our only child. My wife blames me for her death because I let her move to Los Angeles to work.” He paused, considering. “Are you worried about your friend Ryan Johns?”

I tensed. “How did you know we were friends?”

“It's what I do. Knowledge of people is important in my business. But I never harm people who owe me money. What's the point? Unless, of course, he's involved in my daughter's death.”

“What is your business?”

“I'm an investor.”

He tapped the crown of his diamond-encrusted Rolex. Even Parson with his self-created, Old World, upper-class trappings couldn't resist some major bling. “It's getting late. There won't be any more questions unless I ask them.” Like a bony pasha, he settled back into the abundant pillows and stretched his long thin arms across the back of the sofa as if to receive grapes or sex or both. “I'm waiting for my information, Ms. Poole.”

If he had been another kind of father I would have been kinder in my assessment of Jenny. But I decided for him I would be brutally honest. “Jenny couldn't remember her lines, so Zaitlin asked me to go over them with her.”

“Are you saying my daughter came to the set unprepared?”

“Yes.”

“That doesn't sound like Jenny.”

“Maybe you don't know much about her. The night before she was murdered …”

“That would be last Monday?” Heath asked.

“Yes. The day I met you,” I said pointedly, then I turned back to Parson. “I talked with Jenny in her trailer. She couldn't make it through her scenes without forgetting her lines. She ran off the set. Zaitlin had to call a wrap. Jenny was costing the production time and money.”

He shook his head. “Jenny would never behave that way.”

“But she did.”

Parson paused. “What did you two talk about in her trailer?”

“She told me she didn't care about the movie or her obligation to it. She was more interested in going clubbing. She confessed she didn't want to be an actress, that you'd forced her into it, that she was doing it for you.” As I watched his face flush and the tendons on his neck protrude, I continued. “She said you were a dreamer, but she was the one who was the realist. She told me she didn't believe in pretending. Even when she was a child.”

“Stop talking,” Parson commanded, in a low threatening voice.

I did. Heath's muscles tensed but he stayed where he was.

Except for the seagulls, it was quiet as Parson mulled over what I had just told him.

Finally he spoke in a calm voice. “When I was child I used to sneak into the one movie theater in our neighborhood. Not because I cared about the movies being shown, at least at first, but because in the dark with no one watching me I could eat the popcorn and candy stuck on the filthy floor. And if I didn't get kicked out, I'd sleep there overnight. I was starving on the streets, and that's one way I survived. But that also began my love affair with the movies. They saved my life.” His voice deepened with pain and anger. “They should've saved Jenny.”

I suddenly realized that Jenny had grown up in a world of fantasy, her father's, right down to the décor on his boat. But the guns were real.

“Did she appear to be afraid of someone?” he asked.

“Quite the opposite. She struck me as being a tough, singular young woman who delighted in not letting Zaitlin tell her what to do. Or anyone else. Except …”

“Yes?” He leaned forward licking his lips, greedy for more information.

“When I told her I thought she was a good actress, she let down her defenses for a moment and became a vulnerable young woman who needed to hear just how good she was.”

“I knew she wanted to act.” He sat back and pounded his fist into the palm of his other hand. “I knew it! She was her father's daughter.” Then he asked, matter-of-factly, “Describe how you found her body.”

I told him about conning the doorman to get into her condo. Looking out her window, seeing the garbage truck, and then the sun reflecting off the silver heel of her shoe. How I ran into the alley screaming for the sanitation workers to stop dumping the bin. As I talked he listened with an eerily distant expression, as if I were recounting a nightmare I'd had that didn't relate to him.

When I finished he closed his eyes. “I bought her those shoes.” Tears ran down his sunken cheeks, and I felt both loathing and sympathy for him. Taking a white handkerchief from his pocket, he wiped at his face. “Why were you so intent on getting inside her condominium?”

“I was worried about her. She had left my name with the doorman. That meant she wanted to see me and go over her lines.”

“Once you got into her condo, why did you look out the window?” It was Heath.

“What?”

“Something must've prompted you to.”

“What else do you do with a window but look out of it? And I was vamping for time. The doorman couldn't understand why I wasn't leaving the urn, which was why he'd let me into her condo in the first place. I was trying to come up with a plausible answer. Then I saw the glint of her high heel.”

“So you didn't see the actual murder scene?” Parson asked.

“No. I mean there was no blood or upset furniture in her condo, so I doubt she was killed there.”

“She wasn't.” Heath removed a battered leather notepad from inside his jacket. It was stamped with a military insignia of some kind. “One of my contacts in LAPD told me that they think Jenny was murdered in her car, an Audi, while it was parked in the condo's underground lot. They've impounded it.”

“What else did you learn?” Parson was now fixed on Heath.

“Do you want to discuss this in front of her?”

“Ms. Poole seems to know my daughter quite well. No reason she shouldn't know more. It may help her memory.”

Heath shrugged and flipped his notebook open and read from his notes. “I was told she died of blunt-force trauma to the back of her skull.”

“How many times was she struck?” Parson asked sharply.

“Don't know. They haven't been able to start the forensics yet. Too much backlog of waiting cases. She may have been slammed against the passenger side of the car window. Or someone could have been hiding in the back seat, rose up, and struck her from behind.”

“You said passenger side?”

“Jenny wasn't driving. The police have her car on the garage security tape coming in at 12:33
a.m
. But a man is behind the wheel.”

“Can they identify him?” He sat forward.

“The images are shadowy,” Heath continued. “So far they can't make an identification on the male. But it's early yet. There is equipment that should be able to resolve the image well enough—and if the cops don't have it, then you can afford to pay some company to do it for them.”

“There has to be a security tape of them stopping, of the man getting out of her car,” Parson said.

“Her parking space is out of range from the cameras.”

“Christ. What happened to the driver?” Parson snapped. “He had to leave the garage somehow.”

“About fifteen minutes after they drove in, there's an image of a male wearing a hooded sweat shirt walking into camera range from where her car was parked. He ducked his head as if he realized he was being taped. There's an exit door to the alley. You can leave through it without using a key, but it locks behind you automatically, so once you're outside you can't get back in unless you have a key. The door isn't in camera range either.”

“Is he the same man who was driving?”

“At this point the police can't say.”

“What about the plastic bags she was wrapped in? And how was she transferred from the garage to the …” he paused, then said, “Refuse area.”

“Nothing on that so far.”

Parson shifted his body toward me. “Do you know who my daughter was with the night of her murder?”

I remembered Ben Zaitlin had told me he was at the same club that night, but I wasn't about to give Parson his name.