Diagnosis Murder 5 - The Past Tense (17 page)

The strangest thing about driving the car wasn't its immense size, its luxury, or a sticker price that was half the cost of a new house. No, the strangest thing was the knowledge that only a few short hours ago, the murderer had sat where I was sitting, his hands on that same square steering wheel, driving Tess Vigland to her death in a vacant lot.

I intended to deliver the car straight to the LAPD crime lab, but I had a few stops to make first, to gather the evidence I needed to convince Harry Trumble that I knew who the killer was.

My first stop was Joanna Pate's apartment. I'd avoided her ever since the kiss, but now I saw things in an entirely different light. Dr. Whittington's suicide note was a fraud, but perhaps much of what the killer wrote was based on truth—only it applied to him, not Dr. Whittington.

Joanna Pate lived only a few blocks from the Chrysler dealership. I parked in front of her apartment and ran through the wind-driven rain to her door. I leaned on the bell until I heard her voice.

"Who is it?" she asked.

"Dr. Mark Sloan." I had to yell to be heard over the roar of the storm.

She opened the door and I hurried in, dripping water on her linoleum entry. It was a simple two-bedroom apartment, with a small living room furnished with matching couch and easy chairs that were cheap, basic, and probably rented. The only personal touches were some vases of fresh flowers, a few throw pillows, and an old rug on the pile carpet.

Joanna was barefoot, wearing Capri pants and a sleeveless white blouse. Her entire face lit up when she saw me.

"Is your roommate here?" I asked.

"No, she's waiting tables at Norm's." She smiled coyly. "We're all alone. May I take your coat?"

"I'm not going to be here that long."

"You were just in the neighborhood and you thought of me." Joanna wiped some water from my cheek. "I think that's very sweet."

She kept her hand on my face and rose up on her tip toes to kiss me, but before our lips could meet, I spoke.

"How much do you charge?"

"Fifty cents an hour for one child," she said. "Fifteen cents more for each additional one."

"Not for babysitting," I said. "For sex."

She dropped her hand from my face. Her eyes turned cold. "Get out."

"Dr. Whittington was murdered by the same man who killed your friends Sally and Muriel," I said. "Maybe you know him. Maybe he's one of your regular customers."

"If you don't go now, I call the police," she said, backing away from me.

"Please do," I said, advancing on her. "Ask for Homicide Detective Harry Trumble and tell him everything you know. Tell him how you slept with Dr. Whittington and the men you babysat for. Tell him how you were blackmailing all of them. It might just save your life."

"I wasn't blackmailing anybody," she said. "None of us were."

I noticed she hadn't denied the rest of my charges. I didn't really know if she was blackmailing anybody or not. I was just taking wild shots in the dark, hoping something would stick. But if she was telling the truth, and none of the girls were involved in blackmail, then Dr. Whittington's murder made a lot more sense. And so did the opening of his safe.

"Where did you take the men you slept with, Joanna? I'm sure it wasn't here. A motel? An apartment?"

"Why should I tell you anything?"

"Because it could help me stop the killer before he murders someone else," I said. "Someone like you. It wouldn't surprise me if your name was the next one on his kill list."

The color drained from her face. "Dr. Whittington had this house in Northridge," Joanna said. "In one of those new subdivisions."

I thought back to Dr. Whittington's party and the bomb shelter brochure that encouraged us to make an appointment to visit their model home in the valley "before the inevitable day the A-bomb is dropped." I also remembered the deeds to two properties that were among the papers removed from his safe.

"Did all of you take your men there?" I asked.

She nodded. "Dr. Whittington insisted."

I hail a pretty good idea why, and it wasn't because it was a distant, discreet location unlikely to be accidentally stumbled upon by the men's wives or anybody who knew the babysitters.

I asked her for the address of the house and the key. She gave me the address, fished the key out of a big bowl on her kitchen counter, and tossed it to me. I caught the key and pocketed it. I didn't have to look at it to know it matched the keys found on the dead women.

"I'm going to Northridge. Make that call to the police now," I said. "Tell Harry Trumble everything you told me."

"And end up in a reformatory for girls?" she said. "No, I don't think so."

"Would you prefer to end up in a coffin?"

She stared at me. "There must be another choice."

"Why did you kiss me that night in the car?" I asked. "Was it really a misunderstanding? Or were you trying to seduce me into being another one of your clients?"

She looked me in the eye. "What would you like it to be?"

"Call him," I said, and I walked out.

The contemporary ranch-style homes in the Walnut Acres subdivision were set back from the street on perfectly square, flat lots with wide lawns bisected by a ribbon of concrete leading to big front doors trimmed with decorative rectangles. The dominant feature of each house on Langelinie Street was a bold two-car garage that reached out to the street. Although the houses all had the same floor plan, they were distinguished by superficial architectural flourishes. A steepled roof and an Asian symbol on the garage made it a Pagoda Ranch. A simulated-thatch roof and half-timbered walls made it a Danish Ranch. A red-tile roof and fake-adobe walls made it a Spanish Ranch. A flat, white-gravel roof and large front windows made it a Moderne Ranch. And so it went throughout the neighborhood.

Most of the homes on Langelinie, in keeping with the Street name, were Danish Ranch. The trees on the street were recently planted, spindly and naked, barely held in place with wires and wooden stakes against the driving wind and rain. The front yards were soaked. Entire flower beds floated free, tossed by the whitecaps on the surface of the submerged lawns.

The Danish Ranch home where Dr. Whittington's aspiring nurses brought their men was indistinguishable from any of the others on the street. And there was nothing about the place that indicated it was the display home for a bomb shelter. Several cars were parked on the street, but none of them directly in front of Whittington's house. The blinds were closed and no lights were on inside.

I parked the Imperial in the driveway, got out, and slogged through the water on the front walk to the door. I used Joanna's key to unlock the door and entered the house without knocking or announcing myself.

The home was as sterile as any uninhabited model home I'd seen on my drives with Katherine and Steve. It was decorated with brightly colored, high-heeled furniture. There was a stone fireplace and a large sliding glass door that opened to the back patio. The kitchen was separated from the living room by a broad counter. A picture-framed sign that said THE FAMILY ROOM OF TOMORROW was mounted beside a set of double doors off the kitchen. I figured that had to be the entrance to the bomb shelter.

There wasn't a single personal knickknack or photo in evidence. No newspapers, no magazines, no grocery lists taped to the refrigerator. This wasn't a home people lived in. It was one they walked through. Or, in the case of the nursing students and their clientele, it was a place to exchange money for sex.

I walked down the hallway to the master bedroom and found definite signs of life.

The wallpaper was ripped away, the air vents removed, light fixtures pulled down from the ceiling. Huge holes had been smashed into the walls with a pickax, which had been discarded on the floor. A tiny cubbyhole had been revealed in the wall across from the bed. An 8 mm Honeywell camera was mounted inside. I pushed my hand against the back of the cubbyhole. It was a hatch that opened into a closet in the hallway.

The women weren't blackmailing Dr. Whittington.
He
was the blackmailer. He was using
them
to extort money from the men they were sleeping with. Whether the women knew it or not didn't matter.

One of the men was making them all pay.

Now I knew why the safe was open in Dr. Whittington's study. It wasn't enough to kill the women involved. The killer wanted the film. He ransacked the office and forced Whittington to open the safe. The killer cleaned up after himself, laying out everything he removed on the coffee table to hide the fact that the room had been painstakingly searched.

Judging by the mess in the bedroom, the killer hadn't found what he was looking for. He still hadn't found the film.

I went into the master bathroom. There were two sinks, a shower, and a large bathtub. I crouched beside the rim of the tub and examined it, the tiles, and the linoleum floor. I figured Sally must have put up a fight, kicking and splashing water everywhere. Judging by the haste with which the killer had dressed her, I didn't think he'd done a thorough job of cleaning up.

I was right. There were traces of red dye on the tile caulking and where the edge of the linoleum met the bathtub.

This was where Sally Pruitt was murdered.

I rose to my feet and became aware of a slight draft. I shivered, but not from the cold. I went back into the bedroom and noticed the shades billowing gently. The sliding glass door in the bedroom wasn't entirely closed and the carpet was wet.

Was it that way when I came in?

I left the bedroom and was heading back down the hall when I noticed something else.

The double doors that led to the Family Room of Tomorrow were open, revealing the second set of steel doors that they hid.

The steel doors were ajar.

And then I sensed a shift in the air, a presence displacing space. It was a presence I'd felt before, in the morgue, at that instant when I matched Sally Pruitt's key to the one that belonged to Muriel Thayer.

"Hello, Chet," I said and turned around slowly to face the man behind me.

Dr. Chet Arnold stood in the doorway of the open linen closet. He was wet. He was angry. And he was holding a gun.

"You don't seem surprised to see me, Mark." I'd never had a gun pointed at me before. I couldn't take my eyes off the barrel.

"Believe me, I am," I stammered.

"But you knew I killed those girls." He stepped to wards me and I backed up into the living room, raising my hands even though he hadn't asked me to. "And Whittington, too."

"Yes," I said.

"What was my mistake?"

There was a calm, casual attitude about his voice that I found thoroughly unnerving, nearly as much as the gun aimed at my chest.

"The socks," I said, almost apologetically. I didn't want him to shoot me, but of course I knew he would. And if he didn't, he'd find some other way to kill me. He had to.

"The socks?" he said. "What socks?"

"The ones you loaned me," I said.

"What did they have to do with anything?"

"It was the way they were folded," I said. "It's not how your wife folds them, but it's the way Sally Pruitt's mother does. And probably it's the same way Sally did, too. She washed your clothes when you had your trysts, didn't she, Chet?"

"I couldn't take the risk that Gladys would smell another woman on me," he said, shaking his head in disbelief. "So that was it? The socks?"

I nodded. "You also made some mistakes with the suicide note you wrote for Dr. Whittington, but it wasn't until the salesman at the Chrysler dealership told me you'd returned a black Imperial yesterday that I knew for sure you were the killer."

"But lucky for me, you still had to come here looking for more evidence," Chet said.

I shifted my gaze from the gun to Chet's face for the first time. In doing so, I saw two things.

I saw from the expression on his face that he hadn't known I was chasing him until I walked into the house.

And I saw Harry Trumble creeping out of the master bedroom.

"You didn't know that I was investigating the murders, did you?" I wanted to keep him talking and distracted, to give Harry time to get a clear shot from the hallway if he needed to.

"I knew you'd figured out Sally was murdered," Chet said. "I saw you leave the hospital with the medical examiner. But I didn't know you were playing detective until you walked in here and went straight to the bathroom to check the tub."

"Why did she dye her hair?"

"Because I asked her to," he said. "I like redheads. I wish I'd married one."

A floorboard creaked behind Chet. He whirled around, firing his gun at the same time Harry fired his. A vase exploded beside me and I hit the floor, the shots ringing in my ears. When I looked up, I saw Harry on the floor, twitching in an expanding pool of blood.

Chet kicked the gun away from Harry. It skittered down the hall into the bedroom.

"Who the hell is he?" Chet yelled.

I scrambled over to Harry, not caring whether Chet would allow me to or not.

Harry was shot in the throat. Blood was oozing out of his wound. He made a gurgling, sucking sound as he tried to breathe through his perforated and blood-choked trachea. If I didn't do something fast, he would die.

"He's a homicide detective," I said, getting to my feet and marching into the kitchen, my back to Chet.

"You already called the police?" Chet railed in fury. "Goddamn you, Mark!"

I wasn't listening. I yanked open cupboards and cabinets until I found a spray bottle of window cleaner under the sink and a steak knife in one of the drawers. I turned back towards the hallway and the barrel of Chet's gun.

Chet yelled at me. "Put that knife down."

"He's dying, Chet," I yelled back. "He needs an emergency tracheotomy."

"I don't care," Chet cried out furiously. "He's a dead man and so are you."

That's when I realized we were both yelling to be heard and not because of the ringing in our ears. The house was filled with an increasingly loud roar, like a squadron of helicopters was hovering over us.