Perfect Sax (8 page)

When I mentioned the Woodburn, Baronowski and his partner, Hilts, exchanged looks.

“Can you account for your time between midnight and now, Ms. Bean?” asked Baronowski, flipping open a small spiral-topped notepad.

“I…” I looked at the room, the dead woman, my trembling hands. “I had a little trouble getting home from the Woodburn, actually. It’s a long story. I was sort of stranded downtown, but I ended up having breakfast at the Pantry on Figueroa with a friend. His name is Wyatt. Dexter Wyatt. He may still be downstairs. Anyway, he brought me home.”

Honnett had been standing close to me as I took in the scene. Now he put his arm around my shoulders, a move that was far from lost on the other police detectives. But I needed space. I shrugged it off. There was a dead woman in my bed. The police thought I was connected to her death. I didn’t need to melt into anyone’s arms. I needed to think.

W
e stood in the little bedroom, which was really getting claustrophobic, what with three men and myself and Sara Jackson’s lifeless body. The morgue guys were running behind, I had been told. It was barely 4
A.M.
The phone on the bedside table rang loudly.

“You expecting anyone to call?” Detective Baronowski asked, making me suddenly feel guilty about the phone.

“No,” I replied. It rang a second time, and I felt I was somehow being viewed with even more suspicion. “But then I wasn’t expecting any of this.” I didn’t have to gesture at the body in the bed. “Should I answer it?” I asked, confused, as it rang out again. “Or I could leave it. My machine picks up after four rings.”

“Why not take it?” asked Baronowski quietly. “We’re done fingerprinting in here.”

I reached out for the phone, disturbed that I had to walk a step closer to the bed to reach it, a step closer to Sara Jackson’s corpse. I was keenly aware of being observed.

“Hello.”

“Madeline?” It was Holly’s voice, very screechy and breathless. And before I could reply, I heard her continue to shout, but she wasn’t talking to me anymore. “Oh my God, Wes! She’s okay. I got her. She’s home!” And then back to
me: “Maddie! We heard on the news you were dead. And then we both kind of fell apart. But then we just heard on the news you were
not
dead.”

“They already have that I’m not dead on the news?” I asked, realizing the news reporters down in the street must have talked to Dex or something.

“Maddie. Did you hear me? Wes and I thought you had been shot. We heard about it on the radio when we got home to Wes’s house. And we have been just
falling apart.
”

“Not that we believed it,” I heard Wes say in the background, trying to manage Holly’s end of the phone conversation.

“And hell, Mad,” Holly said, “at first, Wes just kept calling the police, but all they would do was take messages. No one would call us back. They said it was too soon. And then, when we heard you were
not
dead,
you didn’t answer your cell phone.
I’ve been calling your cell every five minutes until I thought I’d go insane. And we just can’t believe you’re, well, like,
okay.
I mean, really okay and not dead!” She was melting down. I could hear the tears. It might be the first time, too. Holly believed in the song “Big Girls Don’t Cry.”

I looked up and saw that Honnett, Baronowski, and the other detective were actively listening. And waiting.

“It’s my friends. Wesley and Holly. They thought I was dead. And…and you can imagine their reaction now. I love them so much. They are just so…”

Honnett gave me a look. Yes, I knew he had felt it, too. He had panicked and I knew it. And that was something I would surely have to think over when I had the time. Even now, I could tell he was beginning to feel a twinge of jealousy over my relationship with Hol and Wes. Like he was a little left out. Like maybe now my real friends would show up and I’d turn him out.

“Well, that’s pretty fucked up,” said Hilts, who as a rule hadn’t said much all night.

I had to know what the cops were thinking. “What’s that?” I asked.

“The damn TV reporters.”

Baronowski looked at Honnett for a second and spoke directly to him. “You gonna look after her? Maybe it’s not a good idea for her to stay alone tonight, you know.”

“What’s this all about?” I insisted. “Lieutenant Honnett is not a close friend of mine anymore. So this is not his problem, okay?”

Baronowski turned back to me, assessing me anew. “I guess I didn’t realize how the situation stood. My apologies. See, the thing is, Madeline, we do not know squat about what happened here, do we? Some girl was killed. Now it is possible that she was followed here. Maybe she was killed by someone that knew her. That’s one scenario, and believe me, we will look into that carefully. But it is also possible the gunman was some random bad guy looking to break into this house that maybe startled her as she was returning your car. She might have been a witness to a lousy break-in who got into the wrong guy’s way. Right?”

I nodded.

“Or maybe you yourself, Madeline, have an enemy. After all, this is your house and your bed.”

I looked down at the bed reflexively. I had to get out of this room. Why were we all standing there? The harder I puzzled and demanded rational thought, the dizzier and more detached I felt. Enemies? I hadn’t any enemies. It was ridiculous. But then so was the entire night. So was this awful, awful death. I began shaking a little. If I couldn’t begin to figure any of it out, all I could think to do was to force myself to stay conscious. I tried again to focus on Detective
Baronowski’s soft voice and to concentrate on what he was saying.

“You and the victim both have red hair. You’re both young and attractive. This whole thing could have been a case of mistaken identity, and your life may very well have been saved by a mistake, have you thought of that?”

I shook my head, passive. This was too much now. I looked very little like Sara Jackson. True, we were of a similar build and size. But the way we were put together was different. She had a thinner, athletic look. I have a lot of curves. My hair was more strawberry blond, and thick and super curly, while Sara had that lovely fine, straight hair, and it was much more red than blond. No one who knew me could confuse the two of us. But I was shaken by the thought just the same.

“And if that is the right scenario,” he continued, sounding even kinder, “it might have been better if those newspeople could have just shut the hell up so the world hadn’t learned you are officially ‘not dead’ so soon.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Oh,” I could hear Holly’s voice faintly say from the receiver of the phone, which was still gripped in my dangling hand.

“Now I’m not saying that’s the case. I don’t want to spook you any more than you are already spooked.”

I nodded my head, probably looking like the poster child for “spooked.” At that, Baronowski’s partner, Hilts, laughed out loud. I noticed Honnett, standing back in the corner, looking like he’d like to punch the guy. He’d clearly been agitated all night and needed an outlet. Let a guy laugh at me, even, and Honnett was ready to knock him down. Baronowski noticed it, too.

“Look,” he said, “I apologize if I misinterpreted your
friendship with Detective Honnett. He’s not officially on this case, as I think you know. He asked to come in on the basis of having worked with you in the past, so we may have assumed too much.”

I looked at Baronowski steadily, not having the heart to meet Honnett’s eyes. Here Honnett had rushed over to my house, presuming like all get-out that I had been murdered in my bed, telling his associates on the force that he and I had been close. Hell, he’d been so stricken he hadn’t even been able to bring himself to identify my dead body. And these cops had respected him for it. And now here I was, acting like we were barely acquaintances. I could almost believe that I was, indeed, a horrible, ungrateful bitch if I didn’t also remember that Chuck Honnett had been my lover for several months before he ever bothered to tell me he hadn’t actually gotten all the way divorced from his last wife.

“Mad!” It was Holly, yelling at me through the receiver. I put the phone back up to my ear.

“Sorry, Hol. I’m here with Honnett and a few detectives.”

“Wes says we’ll come right over to get you. You’re staying with him, he says.”

“Thanks,” I told her, and I almost burst into tears as the pent-up tension of the night seemed to explode at just the thought of escape and comfort and friends. “But I have my car here.” I hadn’t seen it parked down in the cul-de-sac when I had arrived with Dexter Wyatt, but Sara must have left it down the street.

“Oh. Okay, you sure?” Holly asked.

“I’ll drive you over to Wes’s,” Honnett said, his deep voice sounding awfully warm and protective.

“Or maybe Honnett will drive me,” I told Holly.

“O-kay,” she drawled, with significance.

“Yo!” We turned and the cop who had been manning the outside stairs came to the door of the room. “This joker
downstairs, Wyatt, won’t leave until he finds out if the lady here needs a ride anywhere. He is a huge pain in the ass, and I’d like to tell him to take a hike, but he insists he’s driving her around.”

“Dex?” I asked, having lost track of the guy who was detained outside for so long.

“Right,” the young uniformed cop said, his eyes now fastened on the body of the dead woman in the bed. “And the coroner’s van is out front. They’re here for the body.”

Just the way fate does things, I guess. Only four hours earlier, I couldn’t get a ride if my life depended on it. Just now, I had four offers of transportation, not to mention a chance to hitch a lift with the coroner’s wagon.

“You stay put,” I told Holly firmly. “I’ll get to Wes’s by five.”

“Sure thing,” she said, sounding more and more like the bubbly Holly and less and less like the shrieking fiend who might have just lost her best friend. “Wes said to tell you he’s baking you something special and he doesn’t even want to
hear
about you saying you have no appetite. He just doesn’t care.”

I smiled and said good-bye. And then it hit me.

Four rides. Had there been such a surfeit of transportation around midnight and had I come directly home, as I had originally planned, what might have actually occurred this evening? Would all be calm? Would all be well? Would Sara Jackson still be alive?

Would I?

B
efore I left the house, I made photocopies of the personnel file we had on Sara Jackson and handed it to Detective Baronowski, as he had requested. And following his instructions, I made a quick survey of the house. I did not find anything obvious missing. Honnett had stayed in the background. He had offered to wait for me outside, and by his tone, I knew I’d have to spend some time talking it out with the guy before I could leave. I owed him that, I supposed. And I had to admit I was still amazed he had gotten emotional over me. Of course, it had taken me getting murdered for him to do so.

The police let me pack a bag and take all my essentials from the bathroom since they had finished examining the upstairs section of my house long before I had arrived. I caught sight of myself in the bathroom’s full-length mirror as I scooped up my makeup and stopped to take stock: Clear skin. Fairly straight nose. Full lips. Overdressed. I had to change out of this gown. I pulled it off in one quick movement and dropped it in a wicker basket.

Nice enough body, I thought, looking in the mirror critically. Well, first let me qualify that. No one is allowed to like his or her body in L.A.—it’s like a secret sick law that keeps us going to gyms and shunning carbohydrates—but I’m not
an actress or model and I guess my standards are a little more realistic. I figured until gravity did its dirty work, I couldn’t complain. Having a real bosom was a novelty in this town. I remembered, suddenly, a time I’d spent in this very room with Honnett. The steam from the shower had fogged this full-length mirror, but not so foggy that I couldn’t still see us together as we explored a new use for the old claw-foot bathtub.

I knew this was a dangerous way to be thinking since I had to face the man in just a few minutes. I kicked off my high-heeled sandals. I was longing for a shower, but simply didn’t have the time or the stomach for it right there, right then. As I heard the men from the coroner’s office bump down the narrow staircase, carrying Sara Jackson out of the house, I stood in the center of the bathroom and shivered. I dressed quickly in a pair of old jeans with a black top and flats. Since it had gotten chilly overnight, I tied a gray cashmere sweater around my shoulders for warmth and went down to see Honnett.

He was waiting outside by the front door, where I found him eyeing Dexter Wyatt. Again, I had forgotten Dex was still around and I felt pretty guilty for letting him hang out all this time.

I put my suitcase down. “Dexter, did you meet Lieutenant Chuck Honnett?” It wasn’t the timeliest introduction, since the two men had been standing around together for some time. But that’s me, Miss Manners. I had these party habits so firmly embedded I would probably still be introducing folks when I got to heaven. Or wherever.

“Sort of,” Dex said. “What the hell happened in there? The coroner came out with a body bag. Who the hell was it?”

“A college girl who worked for me,” I said. “She borrowed my car tonight and—”

“Can we stop reporting the news for a minute,” Honnett interrupted, “and just tell your friend here to shove off now.

He’s on the verge of getting arrested for interfering with an investigation.” Honnett never used to get hostile. I think this whole scene was getting to him, too.

Dex, for his part, didn’t seem too exercised by Honnett’s attitude. He just kept his laid-back charm going, no matter how many bodies might have to be loaded and taken off to the morgue before we could have a moment to chat.

“Maddie, can you ditch the cops now?” Dex asked, meaning not just the detectives still upstairs in the house, but also the one hulking around my front door. Not exactly diplomatic, but to the point.

“They said I could leave,” I answered. “I gave them the number where I could be reached. I’m going to stay at my friend Wesley’s house for a while. Maybe for a long while.”

Honnett just leaned against the wall, waiting for me to finish with Dex, but clearly not enjoying that I had a guy hanging around, interested.

“Good,” Dex said, and smiled. “I’ll take you over there. It’s like my job, you know?”

I smiled back at him.

“Not that I mind,” Dex said, “but you don’t seem an easy girl to get home. You’re a challenge. I like that.”

“I aim to drive men crazy,” I said, not bothering to check Honnett’s reaction. “But the thing is, I’ll have to take a rain check on that. I need to have my car with me at Wes’s. You understand.”

“Okay.” Dex kept his voice kind of gravelly low. It must have been driving Honnett nuts trying to hear. “So you won’t let me rescue you again?”

“Once a night is certainly enough,” I said. “But I do appreciate it. Oh, and could you do me a favor? Could you tell Zenya I think I left my purse in her car?”

Dexter agreed, and then left, taking the number at Wesley’s house and saying he would call me, maybe bring my
bag by tomorrow. I thanked him again, he glowered at Honnett, and he was out of there.

Honnett and I were finally alone. “We really need to talk, Maddie. We’ve needed to talk for a long time, but you weren’t that interested in hearing from me.”

“I found the key to my Jeep that Sara left on the kitchen counter. It’s probably parked up the street.”

He sighed. “I’ll walk with you.”

Just as we turned toward the stairs, Detective Hilts stuck his head out the front door and stopped us. “Hey,” he said, calling to me. “Wait up. We’re going to need to impound that vehicle of yours. The one the vic was driving.”

“Can you please refer to Sara by her name?” I asked, weary almost beyond words.

“Sure. Anyway, no one touches that truck until we get our lab boys to take it in and give it the works. So I’m going to need the key.”

I walked back up the steps and handed Hilts the damned key, giving him the plate number and where he might find it parked.

“Thanks.”

“But what am I supposed to drive?” I asked, suddenly worried that the entire tide of transportation was turning against me once more.

“Beats me. I can ask Baronowski if we can give you a lift, but we’re not going to be leaving anytime soon.”

“That’s okay, Hilts,” Honnett said. “My car is right here.”

“Good, then,” he said, and ducked back into my house.

Honnett grabbed my suitcase and waited for me to lead him down the front steps to the street.

That was when it hit me. What I had intended to do before all the bizarre activities of the past few hours began to twist and turn.

“Wait here,” I said, and turned back to the house. I walked
quickly through the entry and into the office I share with Wes. Below my side of the partner’s desk, where the chair was pushed neatly into the kneehole, I bent to retrieve a cardboard box. Inside were the papers and assorted pictures and files I’d cleaned up much earlier in the day—Albert Grasso’s paperwork.

I grabbed my backup diskettes from my computer and a few other necessary office folders and scooted out the door into the cool air. It was almost five and I realized Wes and Holly might start to worry again if I didn’t show up at Wesley’s place soon.

“You ready?” Honnett asked quietly.

“Let’s go.”

We got down to the street and I noticed that the cop guarding the house and the news vans were gone. Once the body had been taken away, they must have figured they were out of luck for any more dirt. It was late, they had deadlines. Thank goodness for that. The last thing I could handle at the moment was an array of microphones shoved in my face.

We got to Honnett’s Mustang and he unlocked the trunk for me, placing my suitcase inside and holding out his hand to store the cardboard carton there as well. I gave it to him and settled myself on the passenger side of the car.

“You want me to drive or you want to sit here and talk?” he asked, when he was in the driver’s seat.

“Drive and talk,” I answered.

“Fine.” He got the car in gear and did a neat 180-degree turn, heading back up Whitley. “Where does Wes live these days?”

My partner, Wesley Westcott, is constantly on the move. He’s had eight addresses in the past five years. He has a side business of fixing up historic old houses and selling them. Each time he buys a new house, he moves into the wreck-in-progress and lives among the carpenters and the dust and the
electricians. Every time he finishes one of his masterpieces, he moves in all his fine furniture and puts the house on the market. These past ten years, L.A. has been in a nonstop real estate boom and these top-of-the-line properties, fixed up to the hilt, sell very well. As it turns out, Wes spends about 90 percent of his time living in a gutted mess or a construction site, 5 percent of his time in a great mansion, and the other 5 percent boxing or unboxing all of his belongings and moving.

“He’s in Hancock Park,” I directed. “On Hudson. On the Wilshire Country Club side.”

“Near Beverly?”

“Near Third.”

Honnett nodded and steered his car out of the Hollywood foothills and into the flats, heading first south and then west.

“Look,” he said finally. “You going to be okay? This is pretty tough, finding that young woman in your house.”

“I can’t believe it.” It had yet to really sink in. Hadn’t I just been talking to Sara? Hadn’t we just put our heads together, Holly and I, to see if we could get her out of a jam? That boyfriend of hers. I just remembered him.

“Chuck,” I said quickly. “I forgot to tell Baronowski and Hilts about Sara’s boyfriend.”

“You know him?” he asked, interested.

“No. See, Sara was just a temporary employee. She worked parties when it fit into her school schedule, that kind of thing. But tonight, the reason I loaned her my old car was because she was worried about her boyfriend. He goes to ‘SC, I think. Grad student. Anyway, he was having a rough time with his Ph.D. Sara was sorry she left him alone tonight.”

“Why?”

“Who knows?” I was frustrated. When you manage a constantly changing staff of young servers and bartenders, you
don’t always listen to every little detail of their lives. If you did, you would be more into soap opera and less into event planning. “I didn’t pay the closest attention, but she was really worried. She thought he might be suicidal…”

Honnett shot me a look.

“…but I’m sure she was just getting dramatic. Anyway, she was supposed to go home and then come right over and drop off my Jeep. I specifically made her promise to return the car to me tonight. I…”

Honnett stopped at a red light on Santa Monica and looked at me. He could see me thinking it over. He could see it sinking in.

“Maybe if I hadn’t been such a hard case, she would still be alive,” I said softly. “If I hadn’t forced Sara Jackson to drive out to my place so late at night, maybe she wouldn’t have been killed.”

“We don’t know what happened,” Honnett reminded me. But kindly. “Until we do, this could have happened anywhere. Don’t beat yourself up, Maddie.”

“Right.” Like I could ever let anything like this go.

“Tell me, why didn’t Sara just drive her own car home from that party tonight?”

“Some mechanical thing,” I said absently, thinking about the role I might have played in that young woman’s death.

“So blame that. Blame her bad luck with her car. Don’t blame yourself, Maddie. You were trying to help the poor kid.”

“I know,” I said. “Some help.”

The light changed and Honnett accelerated through the intersection.

“Did you really think I had been killed?” I asked Honnett.

He didn’t answer right away. And then he didn’t answer directly. He said, “I know you don’t trust me. I get that. But you should believe me when I tell you this. I never meant to hurt
you, Maddie. I never intended to make you miserable. You are the last person in the world I would want to be unhappy.”

That sounded okay, but I was leery of Honnett. I waited to hear it all.

The fact is, a few months ago Honnett dropped the bomb on me that he was going back to his wife. His
wife.
The wife, I should point out, he
never
told me he still had hanging around. He delivered this news flash at a big party I was putting on at one of the studios and I just about flipped out. There we had been, getting closer and closer, and I had thought we were actually making a sort of good start. Then he tells me there’s a wife still in the picture. It was so classic. I couldn’t stand that I had been tricked or deceived or played. The guy I was falling for had a wife, damn it! I don’t know. I suppose there might have been a reasonable, rational way to continue such a conversation that night. For my part, I just told him to get the hell out of my life and ran off for a weekend in Vegas with a new male friend. Call me communicationally challenged. Whatever.

“You are so young,” Honnett said, with affection in his voice. I loved that voice, so masculine and deep. When it held any softness at all, it made me melt.

“I am not,” I argued. I knew Honnett had qualms about our age difference from the start. I’m twenty-nine. He’s forty-four. Big deal. He had a thing about it, though. And here he was bringing it up again, like that was the problem. Like the fact that he was hiding a wife in the wings had nothing to do with it.

“I am not putting you down,” he said. “Don’t get so defensive. I just mean that you haven’t had as many years to screw up your life as I have. You don’t have as many ghosts from the past, I’m betting.”

“I’ve got my share,” I said huffily.

“Yeah, sure you do,” he said, chuckling. “And so do I.
Since you are such an experienced old woman, I know you’ll understand how a person’s history can sometimes catch up with him.”

“You mean past relationships?”

“Well, in my case I think I told you I had been married before.”

“Right. What a convenient way for you to have put it. Not too specific, were you? And I thought you meant it was all over. You were divorced. You were free to start something new with me.”

“You want clear? Here it is. I’ve been married twice,” he said. “Once to a gal I met in college. In Texas.”

“Were you some big football hero?”

“I believe I was,” he said, laughing at me. “We Texas boys love to play ball. Anyway, she was a sorority girl. A pretty sorority girl from a nice Dallas family. She liked having a good time. She liked to buy nice clothes. You can picture the type. She wasn’t too wild about me joining the PD. Things had never been too good between us. We were too young. You hear that a lot, right? But I was working all the time anyway, so I didn’t get how unhappy we really were. After about seven years, she left me for a guy who owned a plane.”