Murder and Mayhem (3 page)

“Or you guys are shitty at your job.”

That
scored a direct hit on Montoya. The man was proud of being a cop, and his eyes went flat as he peered at Rook over the red file folder.

Pushing a little bit further, Rook slid in, “Or maybe just the ones who come after me.”

One of the first things Rook learned while growing up barefoot and loose among the carnies was to poke the bear when he was cornered. People—especially cops—usually wore their egos close to the surface, and a few judicious jabs at their tender spots tended to make them lose control. While a dangerous thing to do to a cop out on the street, it was the perfect line of attack when sitting in an interrogation room. Loss of control could do marvelous things for someone caught in a sticky situation.

This time it was Camden who bristled up and flushed red with anger. Montoya, if anything, got colder, and Rook slid a quick look over to the redhead sitting a few feet away from him before gifting Montoya with a broad smile.

“Let’s talk about Dani Anderson, shall we?” Montoya headed Camden off before the man could dig into Rook. The partners were definitely on more equal footing than the old man Rook’d seen Montoya with before. “Why’d you kill her?”

“I already told the last five people who accused me….” Rook tried to keep his voice steady, but the strain of being held was growing, especially since he couldn’t seem to get the smell of Dani’s death out of his nostrils, despite the Silkwood shower he’d taken in the police evidence pen. “Dani was… she was like that when I found her.”

“One of the officers states they saw something in your hand when you bolted,” Montoya read off a report. Unlike what Camden held in his hand for a prop, Rook was pretty certain Montoya wasn’t pulling
that
particular accusation out of his ass. “Any idea where you put that thing?”

“I didn’t have anything in my hands… except Dani. And that’s only because she rolled over and I caught her.” Rook leaned forward. “Like I told you guys before.”

“That’s when you say you got her blood on you.” Camden’s sneer was small, barely a twist of his upper lip. “Care to explain how you got so much of it on you if you only
caught
her as she rolled over? Assuming a dead woman
would
roll over. What do you think, Montoya? How likely is that to happen?”

“Gravity happens,” Rook cut in before Montoya could speak. “She was on her side. I was crouching over her, and she toppled over—”

“Any reason you did that? Crouch over her, I mean. Allegedly, of course,” the redhead said smugly. “Instead of maybe calling the cops because there was a dead woman on your shop floor? And don’t tell me you didn’t know she was dead. You blasted a hole through her abdomen.”

“With what? An elephant gun? Blow darts? The Klingon disrupter I had in the front case? Did you find a weapon? Because I sure as shit didn’t have one.” Rook twisted in his chair to look at Montoya. The cop’s shoulders were squared off and firm, but his face was unreadable. Rook hated the slight pleading waver in his voice, but he was getting desperate. “Look, Montoya, you
know
me. I wouldn’t kill anyone—”

“And how would I know that?” Montoya’s softly accented voice ruffled Rook’s nerves.

“Because you’ve hounded my ass for years.” He shoved down a wince at the unintentional double entendre. “I might have done some things—things I’m not going to apologize for—but I don’t do murder. Especially now that I’ve gone—” He almost crossed a line, confessing he was out of the con and thieving business, something the cops never had proof of, and Rook realized he wasn’t the only one playing at breaking another man’s self-control.

Montoya was affecting him more than he liked. The whole damned thing was getting under his skin, and for the first time since he’d been brought in, Rook was scared—scared he’d found the
one
time he couldn’t talk his way out of something, and it wasn’t even something he’d done. “I didn’t kill her.”

Camden shifted his stance, rocking the table. “So you say. Thing is, Stevens, we don’t believe you.”

“Then I’ll say it again.” Taking a deep breath, Rook centered himself before speaking calmly and slowly. “I didn’t kill Dani Anderson. I don’t even know why she was there in my shop. Shit, I haven’t seen Dani since… hell, I don’t remember the last time I saw her. She screwed me over on something, and I walked away.”

“But you definitely knew her?” Camden pressed. “And had problems with her. How about we talk about why she might have come over to your place?”

“No idea,” Rook replied smoothly, keeping his attention on the redhead. “I don’t even know how she got in. Charlene, my assistant, closes up on Sundays at five. Knowing Char, it was probably closer to three. Hell, it could have been noon. Dani must have gotten in after that, because even as bubbleheaded as Char is, she’d have noticed a dead woman in the middle of the store.”

“We’ve yet to locate your assistant to find out when she closed down.” The redheaded detective put his menu facedown on the table. “Any idea on where
she
is?”

“Try a street corner. Sometimes she hands out flyers and condoms to hookers,” Rook snarked. “Char’s what you call a free spirit. If she shows up for work, I call it a good day.”

“And she’s the only one who works there?” Montoya slid in.

“No. Well, yes. For now,” he replied. “Look, there’s a couple of part-timers that worked the store sometimes, but they moved to Oregon together. I haven’t gotten around to hiring new ones.”

Montoya cut in, “You told the officer who took your statement that you don’t have an alibi for the afternoon. The last person who can verify your presence is a Mrs. Viola Cranson. She said you bought a few items from her estate sale and then went back to negotiate the purchase of a decoder ring, is that right?”

“Yeah. I knew her husband. He passed away, and she was selling off some of his things,” Rook agreed slowly. He’d paid way too much for the ring, but Viola was old-school stubborn. Handing her a check would have gotten it thrown back in his face. “What about it?”

“Five thousand dollars. For a piece of plastic in a bag?” Montoya leaned back, meeting Rook’s glance. “Do they normally run that much?”

“No,” he ground out. “The lady’s broke. Her husband just died. He used to work the lots and scored me a lot of deals over the years. I thought I’d do her a solid. It’s worth about twenty-five bucks, tops.”

“And you gave her five grand for it?” Camden whistled. “Some solid. Kind of looks like you were buying an alibi.”

“Like I said, her husband did me a lot of favors, especially when I was first starting out.” Rook shrugged. “I’m not the only one who gave her money. A couple of collectors were there too doing the same thing. Mark, her husband, was a good guy. A lot of people liked him.”

“It’s less than an hour’s drive from Cranson’s house to your shop. You left there at four. Where’d you go in between four and eight?” Montoya asked. The ping-pong of questions was meant to frustrate Rook. It was a move he’d used himself when sharping someone for information. Hell, he and Dani’d been great at it until she screwed him over. She’d been the last straw, the final betrayal. “You burned four hours doing what?”

“Driving, mostly.” He shrugged. “I don’t get days off a lot. I wanted some space, so I went to Potter’s warehouse in West Hollywood, checked on a few things, then drove a bit up the coast.” Rook tilted his head. “I’d have said the store’s cameras would have a record of me coming in, but the cop told me the power was shut off.”

“Dead cameras also are good at not showing someone being murdered,” Camden pointed out. “The lines were cut at the box outside. You’ve got keys to that box, right? With the power out, you could have done a lot of things in that shop without anyone really knowing what you were up to.”

“The whole damned block has keys to that box,” Rook protested lightly, spreading his hands on the table. “Shit, it’s not like it’s Fort Knox. They probably use the same key for all the line boxes in Los Angeles. And those are the same fucking dead cameras that would have recorded the cops coming through the front without IDing themselves, so yeah, I’d say taking the power out fucked me over something royal, but I didn’t do that either. Costs a lot of money to get an electrician out to fix that kind of thing.”

“Yet you paid an old woman five K for a piece of plastic,” the Hispanic detective pointed out.

“She’s worth the five grand,” he retorted. “Killing Dani Anderson isn’t.”

“No, but the fifty-carat diamond found in her pocket would be worth a hell of a lot more than the five grand you paid Cranson for her story.” Montoya drew out an evidence photo showing a large, sparkling pear-shaped gem positioned against an L-shaped ruler to show its width and height. “Strangely enough, it matches a diamond you were suspected of taking six years ago. One we never recovered… until just now.”

“And guess what, Stevens?” Camden slid closer, something in his pocket scratching the table with a loud screech. “It’s got your fingerprints
all
over it. Now I’d call that something worth killing Dani Anderson over.”

Rook dropped his gaze, confused and alarmed. He’d flipped that diamond years ago, nearly hours after he’d taken it from a Beverly Hills mansion. There’d been no connection to Dani on that job. Hell, he hadn’t told
anyone
about the take from that night, not even Char, who’d been his lookout on more than one occasion. Shifting in his chair, Rook looked up and damned himself with the one word he’d wanted to avoid but now couldn’t.

“What do you have to say to that, Stevens?” Montoya asked softly.

“Lawyer,” Rook growled at the two cops sitting across of him. “I want my lawyer.”

There was a gaggle of drag queens in Dante’s house.

A gaggle—if that was the right word—getting drunk off their asses and chattering loud enough to wake the dead.

To be fair, Dante reminded himself, one of them
did
live there, but no man needed to come home to find a man the size and hirsuteness of a water buffalo dressed only in a gold lame thong bending over his leather couch.

Dante avoided a pinch from a four-foot-tall Asian man slinging margaritas from the dining table, then liberated a couple of sodas from a Styrofoam cooler near the kitchen door. Another hop, skip, and dodge, then he was free, closing the screen door behind him before joining his partner on the front porch. Handing Hank a root beer, Dante winced as the questionable party inside the house erupted with bursts of high-pitched screams, giggles, and spiced profanities. He checked the cushions of one of the rattan chairs for any of the neighborhood cats, then sat down to open his drink.

“Thanks for the soda.” Hank looked over his shoulder when another auditory assault hit. “Do I even want to know what’s going on in there, Montoya? They need help or something?”

“Waxing,” Dante muttered. “Trust me. You do
not
want to go in there.”

They’d come back to Dante’s house, worn down to the bone, tired, and thirsty. A brief stop at a fish taco shop on the way up Wiltshire was enough to ease their hunger, but a street party near the park stalled traffic to a standstill, cooking the detectives in Los Angeles’s muggy evening stew. By the time Dante pulled up in front of the two-story bungalow he shared with his uncle Manuel, he and Hank were drenched to the skin and more than a little bit tired of being in a car.

East Hollywood was quiet—with the exception of the burlesque and body maintenance cabaret going on behind them. Old-school Mexican music whispered out of a tiny pink adobe bungalow across the street, and a few houses down, a young woman in a yellow bathrobe stood next to a shivering tiny dog on a leash, encouraging the oversized rat to piss so she could go back inside. The sidewalks lined both sides of the street, slightly broken in spots where an old tree trunk lifted the cement or a quake rattled a panel too hard. The yards ran small, sometimes even to tiny squares of gravel or concrete painted green or terracotta, and nearly all of the houses boasted low chain-link or white-post fencing, mainly to keep dogs and children from wandering out into the broad street.

Gentrification was slow to move into the area. The houses were legacies passed on from one generation to the next, and Dante considered himself damned lucky to score his house from a property-seized auction nearly three months after he’d moved to Los Angeles. Neglected to the point of almost being uninhabitable, he’d installed his uncle in the mother-in-law cottage at the back of the property and spent most of his spare time breaking down walls and tearing up piss-stained carpet.

Now the back cottage was a beauty salon for Manny’s occasional clients, and Dante concentrated on the smaller projects he’d put aside—like tearing out the ugly concrete water fountain languishing in his sunburned front lawn.

“Want me to run you up home?” Dante asked, sipping at his soda.

“Nah, the Red will take me right to my doorstep,” Hank refused with a shake of his head. “And don’t take this wrong, but the last thing I want to do is crawl into that POS speck you drove us in.”

“Not my piece of shit, remember? The truck’s in the shop. Just be thankful Manny loaned us his car. It was either the Z/28 or your wife’s minivan.”

“God no, not the Cheerio-mobile. The dog puked into the AC vent last week. I think we’re going to have it exorcized or something. I can’t even get into it without wanting to vomit.” Hank slurped on his can, then rolled the cold aluminum across his face. “Hey, how is Manny doing? Better?”

“Yeah, doing good.
Tío
got the all clear from his oncologist last week. Cancer free, five years running. He’s just happy his hair’s back, but I know he was scared.” Dante caught himself crossing his fingers over his chest and shot Hank a sheepish look. “I don’t know what’s worse, not being able to shake off old habits or just being too stupid to learn new ones.”

Their phones buzzed and sang at the same time, and Dante frowned, dragging his cell out of his back pocket while Hank hunted his down. Scrolling through a long text message, Dante resisted the urge to fling his phone across the yard and possibly take out a piece of the damned fountain while he was at it.