Cut to the Quick (35 page)

Banging open the door to Luddy’s room, Hale saw her son, the deep sleeper, rubbing his eyes and yawning.

“He’s broken in. I’m getting my children.” Hale jerked Luddy harder than she had intended to. She was losing her composure. She told the dispatcher, “Get the police here now!”

Downstairs, she heard Scoville cursing and hoped he’d cut his feet on the broken glass.

“Run to Mommy’s bedroom, Luddy. Fast. Don’t stop. Wait there for me.”

The boy was faster than she was, running like mad to where his sister held her arms open in the doorway to Hale’s suite.

As Hale crossed the top of the broad staircase right behind her son, the toe of her rubber flip-flop caught on the edge of the runner. She yelped and windmilled her arms, trying to regain her balance. The phone, still connected to 911, was in one hand, Scoville’s bloody shirt in the other.

He was running up the staircase, raging incoherently.

Hale regained her footing and ran, but not quickly enough. He lunged at her, grabbing one ankle, landing across the steps, and bashing into the banister, pulling her foot out from under her. He broke through several of the old balusters and slipped halfway over the edge of the staircase. He held on to her to keep from falling.

She began slipping backward with him, and with both hands she grabbed the leg of an armoire on the landing. The heavy piece of furniture slid on the floor under the pressure of their combined weight, stopping when it hit the runner.

Scoville swung one leg back onto the stairs and pulled himself up, his fist twisting Hale’s thin nightgown, which was now pulled taut around her neck. She choked and struggled to breathe. The armoire teetered against the edge of the runner, threatening to tumble onto them.

Dahlia ran from where she’d been crouching in the doorway, shielding Luddy. She picked up the phone that Hale had dropped and, with a roundhouse swing, bashed it against the side of Scoville’s head. It stunned him long enough for Hale to break free.

Dahlia helped her up and they ran to the open door of the suite. Hale shoved Dahlia inside and leaped to clear the distance herself, one hand flinging the door closed, when she was brought up short.

Scoville had grabbed hold of her ponytail. Hale’s head snapped back.

Dahlia snatched her mother’s arm.

Hale held on to the heavy old door, smashing it against herself. Scoville still held fast to her hair. Her lower body was inside while her head and shoulders belonged to him. Dahlia wailed and cried, but she held on to Hale’s arm as hard as she could. Scoville got his hands around Hale’s throat.

She couldn’t breathe.

Dahlia braced her foot against the doorjamb, pulling on Hale’s arm with both hands. She screamed, “Let her go, let her go!”

Hale saw spots before her eyes. Still she clung to the door, the weight of her body painfully squeezing it against her.

All of a sudden, Scoville cried out and released Hale. Dahlia pulled her inside, the momentum causing them to collide and crash to the floor.

Luddy slammed the door closed and turned the bolt lock, a remnant from when Mark’s mother used to barricade herself from her husband’s rages. Luddy leaned against the secured door.

Bewildered, his mother and sister looked up at him from the floor. Breathing hoarsely, Hale gingerly rubbed her neck.

Luddy opened his hand and dropped a sterling silver letter opener Hale kept on her desk. It had been a gift from Scoville when she’d landed the cohost spot on
Hello L.A
. He’d had it engraved “To Dena, the costar of my heart.”

Outside, they heard Scoville’s Porsche.

Dahlia bolted to her feet and ran to the side window in time to see the sports car’s taillights veer crazily as it sped around the corner and out of sight.

THIRTY-THREE

S
coville wondered
why the police were taking so long to respond to Dena’s 911 call. He was prepared to go out in a gunfight. A hail of bullets. At least he’d leave this world standing on his feet. Nude, but on his feet.

He drove fast, yet not too fast, on the surface streets, avoiding major thoroughfares when he could and keeping off the freeway, where he’d be easy to spot. He’d lived most of his life in this part of the city and knew it like the back of his hand.

While he was driving, he dug inside his gym bag in the storage area behind the seats and pulled out shorts, a T-shirt, and tennis shoes. He twisted the rearview mirror to get a look at his face and almost didn’t recognize himself. The sight was both horrifying yet strangely fun, as if he was wearing a Halloween mask.

At a stoplight, he pulled on the shorts and T. He ran his hand down the blood on his thigh from where Luddy had stabbed him. At another stop, he opened his briefcase, took out the gun Jenkins had given him, and set it beneath his seat. On the floor of the passenger side was the leaping cat hood ornament, sticky with blood and brain matter from his bookie’s hapless henchman.

Scoville recalled something his mother used to tell him, claiming it was a Native American proverb: “Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked a mile in his moccasins.” The sort of Hallmark-card philosophy his mother tried to pass off as wisdom. His father, of course, had laughed at her. But now, Scoville saw the truth in the adage, and he enhanced it with personal experience: Don’t judge a murderer until you’ve wielded your own bloodied blunt instrument.

Scoville was now a member of a different club. He was no longer one of the men who lived in the shadow of demanding fathers and passive mothers. He no longer shuffled along in the great line of also-rans, wielding good but not stellar report cards, bringing home trophies for “Most Improved” and “Best Sportsmanship” while he watched others collect honors for first, second, or third place. He’d have been happy with third place. Now, he possessed a more potent trophy—a heavy hood ornament covered with a man’s blood and brains. A dead man. And Mark Scoville was the man—the
man
—who had made him that way.

Now he was off with a loaded gun to make his next kill. Bowie Crowley. He didn’t have to take crap from the Bowie Crowleys of the world any longer. Or even from the Dena Hales. Both of them were social-climbing hicks who overestimated their value in the world. Or even from bullies like Jack Jenkins. He’d kill Crowley all right. He’d kill him and then kill Jenkins and frame him. He had wanted to kill Dena too, but whatever. Best in the long run not to leave his son motherless. Still, it had been good fun seeing her face when he’d messed with her by the pool. He chuckled, just thinking about it.

He knew where Crowley lived. After the night he’d happened upon him and Dena going at it in his own living room, he’d followed him to his Hollywood Hills
home. He’d lurked in the shadows and watched him through the windows of his house. He didn’t even have window coverings, a detail that ticked Scoville off. Here was a guy who thought he could get away with anything: murder, writing a book about the murder, screwing someone’s wife, and walking around in the altogether for anyone to see.

Crowley had come to the window at one point when Scoville had tripped over a bowl of water left out for a cat. Big, manly, macho Bowie Crowley owned a scrawny, battle-scarred black cat that must have come from the same pit from which Crowley had crawled. If Scoville had been the man he was now, the
killer
he was now, he would have lured Crowley outside and whaled at his head with a brick.

But that night, he’d lost his nerve.

That was
before
. Now he’d found a gun and his cojones. In a way, he was grateful to Jenkins for showing him the light. He would thank him before he blew his head off.

Scoville navigated the meandering road off Laurel Canyon Boulevard. The neighborhood had always been artsy and hippieish. Figures that Crowley would live in a pseudowoodsy house in Laurel Canyon with a hot tub on the back deck overlooking a eucalyptus grove. A freaking Writer’s Retreat. Scoville had seen a photo of Crowley in his home office there. Where The Writer Works. The Writer.…

Scoville sneered as he slugged down a bracer from the bottle of Grey Goose, which luckily hadn’t broken during his fight with the thug.

He cut his headlights and drove slowly as he approached Crowley’s house. He passed it, looking for suspicious cars or the police. Dena had probably called Crowley to warn him, but when Scoville didn’t see anyone
around, he wondered. Maybe she was too busy with all the cops she’d rained down upon Hancock Park.

He parked down the street from Crowley’s house. Opening the car door, he put on his tennis shoes. Standing, he slipped the gun under the waistband of his gym shorts, then snatched it before it hit the ground when it slid from beneath the elastic and headed down his leg. He had sought the gangster, gangbanger panache of the gun beneath the waistband, but he was having a wardrobe malfunction. Instead, he put the gun in his shorts pocket and pulled his T-shirt over it.

Walking around the car, he reached inside, opened the glove compartment, and took out a small flashlight. Dena had put it there, along with a disposable camera. In case he was ever in a car accident, it was important to have a camera to take photos, she’d said. The safety precautions seemed ludicrous now.

He took another pull from the bottle of vodka, wrapped it inside the paper bag, and set it on the floor.

He walked up the street to the house, then sprinted and ducked behind a large willow tree in the middle of the lawn. Crowley’s motorcycle was in the driveway. Scoville guessed he was home.

The house was small, made of stained redwood and river rock in a boxy, utilitarian style. It looked as if it had been built by the tender hands of hippies in the sixties, with that homespun natural look that Scoville had always found pretentious in its attempt to look unpretentious. Give him the genuine pretension of an overblown mansion any day. Looking at Crowley’s cottage, Scoville could almost smell the decades-old pot smoke that had permeated the wood and the spilled sangria that had leached into the floor.

The house was completely dark. Scoville saw that as another example of Crowley’s unbridled arrogance.

Look at me. I’m the big Bowie Crowley. I don’t care who looks through my windows. I don’t even keep a light on at night. I’m not afraid of anything
.

The motherfucker.

Scoville darted to the side of the house, avoiding the front picture windows. He stretched to peer into a side window. The full moon cast enough light for him to see that the sparsely furnished living room right off the front door was empty.

Creeping farther, he stepped over the cat’s water bowl and empty food bowl on the cement back porch. From there, he could see into the kitchen. He slid a hand beneath his T-shirt and yanked up his shorts that had slid well beneath his healthy belly from the weight of the gun. He couldn’t see much of the kitchen, but it seemed empty.

He tried the back door. The doorknob turned. It was unlocked.

Of course it’s unlocked. I’m Bowie Crowley. I can fuck a guy’s wife in his own house in front of his living room windows
.

Scoville felt a jolt of excitement as he slowly pushed the door open.

It’s a new day, Bowie. Time to wake up and smell the gun smoke
.

He set a foot on the linoleum floor. The thin light that filtered in through the backdoor showed that the kitchen was undergoing renovations. The cabinets had been yanked out. Sawhorses and power tools strewn about suggested that Crowley was doing the work himself.

It was yet another thing that frosted Scoville.

Inside the kitchen, he risked turning on the flashlight. It was cheap, the hardware-store brand, and didn’t cast a bright beam. He didn’t know whether it
was better to leave the door open or closed. He opted for closed.

A door to the right led to a dining room. An opening off it led to what looked like a living room. Scoville navigated around the construction project and went into the tiny dining room. The table was covered with a tarp. On it were piled the dinette table and chairs that must have been in the kitchen.

He crept from there into the living room. A hallway extended off it. Crowley’s bedroom had to be back there.

The house was silent. Dena must not have called him. Maybe she did call him and he’d left in a vehicle other than the Harley. He’d gone flying over there to be by Dena’s side, the chivalrous prick. Of course he would.

Maybe he was asleep. Early to bed. Up to see the sunrise. The dawning of a new day in the glorious life of Bowie Crowley.

Scoville’s hate for Crowley burned like unrequited love.

He turned off the flashlight, not wanting to signal his approach. He took the gun from his pocket and put the flashlight in, again tugging his shorts up around his waist. He moved down the hallway until he reached a doorway. Holding the gun between both hands, he spun inside, staying close to the wall, as he’d seen in a million TV cop shows. It was Crowley’s office. Flashlight again out, he saw that the small room was crammed with a 1940’s vintage desk, an Aeron chair, and a computer with a large monitor. A flat-screen television was on a wall. There was a printer/fax/scanner combo. While other parts of Crowley’s life were spartan, his work area was not.

He looked at the answering machine. The display showed that he had no messages.

Scoville moved back into the hallway. A doorway across it led to a small family room off the kitchen. There were two more doors. The first one was likely a bathroom. The last had to be Crowley’s bedroom.

Scoville took a second to think about his next steps and to try to calm his pounding heart. He wiped his sweaty palms against his T-shirt, shuffling the gun and flashlight. He was annoyed that his body was sabotaging him while his mind was gung ho. His hands were trembling. His machismo was melting.

Keep your wits about you, Skipper
.

He smiled as he recalled his father’s advice and the nickname the old man had called him. Would his father be proud of him? One never knew with Ludlow, but Scoville thought he might. Ludlow considered himself an outlaw, and took pride in it.