Revision of Justice (25 page)

“George Hamilton,” she said. “I played tennis with his ex-wife once.”

She was silent for a minute and seemed to be thinking.

“I killed Reza JaFari, Justice—is that what you wanted to hear?” She sipped her drink, then smiled bitterly. “I killed him about a hundred times, in my dreams.”

“That doesn’t help me much.”

“I don’t know what I can do that would help you, Justice. I would if I could. If only for your friend’s sake. After what Bernie went through, I have a certain sensitivity to that kind of suffering.”

“Can you tell me more about the script JaFari submitted to your late husband?”

“Not much. Bernie didn’t say what it was about. Just that it would make a terrific movie.”

“You didn’t read it yourself?”

“I never read any of the scripts sent to Bernie. He got truckloads of the damned things. I could probably find a copy for you among his papers. If you thought it would help.”

“It might.”

She stared out the window again. Out on the lawn, the actor with the suntan had fired up a cigar and moved on, taking his imaginary golf clubs with him. A Latino gardener under a broad-brimmed hat had taken the actor’s place, pulling small weeds and picking off pink and white azalea blossoms that were not quite perfect.

“It’s funny, this writing business.”

“How’s that, Mrs. Kemmerman?”

“Seems like half this city is either waiting for the right script to fall in their lap or out hunting it down. All these writers with all their great ideas. Yet so much of it depends on luck, or timing.”

She tipped her glass, finished off the bourbon, then glanced my way.

“Take this script that JaFari gave Bernie. Bernie said it was a natural, one of the best things he’d seen in years. Yet he’d heard essentially the same idea before, thirty-something years ago, back when he was an agent.”

I perked up.

“Really?”

“Back in the sixties, Bernie said. He had a client who’d come up with the same story, right down to the characters and the way the story played out. But the guy’d never written it. Ideas for movies are a dime a dozen, Bernie always said. There’s no such thing as a new idea—they’ve all been done before, one way or another. It’s how they’re executed that counts.”

“And who reads the script, and when.”

“Like I said, luck and timing. Who knows? If Bernie’s client had written that script thirty years ago, maybe it would have gotten made. Maybe the guy would have won the fucking Academy Award.”

“You don’t recall the name of the writer, do you, Mrs. Kemmerman?”

“Italian, I remember that much. Nice name. Had some music to it.”

“Leonardo Petrocelli?”

She looked over, raising her plucked brows.

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s the name. You know the guy?”

“We’ve met.”

“Damn, this town is small.”

“I keep hearing that, too.”

The phone rang. She picked it up and talked briefly. I could make out enough to know someone was calling to make sure she was OK. Then she hung up.

“You through with me, Justice? I’d like to get back to my luncheon and see if I still have any friends left.”

“Are they really your friends, Mrs. Kemmerman?”

She plastered me with a look that told me she didn’t need any advice about her social life.

“I guess they’ll have to do, won’t they?”

“I’ll walk you back.”

“If it’s all the same, I’d rather not be seen with you again. Ever.”

I closed the door behind me and started back in the direction of the main building.

As I passed the window where she stood, Anne-Judith Kemmerman was staring out distantly, as if I wasn’t there. Thinking of someone she’d lost, perhaps, and better times. I knew the feeling.

The gardener looked up from the clumps of azaleas as I went by, dipping the brim of his straw hat in respect, before putting his hands back into the rich, dark soil.

The Beverly Hills phone book listed an address for Leonardo Petrocelli on Roxbury Drive, a street Gore Vidal once described as “not so much a drive as a state of mind.”

The number listed for the Petrocellis, however, put their house in the flats south of Wilshire, where Roxbury was not so much a drive as wishful thinking.

The real estate prices here were considerably lower, with a corresponding drop in acreage, design, and snob appeal. They were still nice homes, however, with neatly clipped lawns, healthy trees along the well-swept sidewalks, and sparkling windows showing off interiors worthy of
House and Garden
, if not
Architectural Digest.

The Petrocelli residence was a cozy-looking Country English in the middle of the block, with leaded windows and a shingled roof steeper than a playground slide. A winding brick walkway meandered through staked rosebushes abloom with yellow petals to the low-walled front porch.

I found a space at the curb, then followed the path up the front steps, where a copy of Walter Mosley’s
A Little Yellow Dog
sat on a canopied swing with a pair of reading glasses resting on top.

The door was slightly ajar but I rang the bell anyway.

I waited, then rang it again and pushed the door open, calling out Petrocelli’s name. No one answered.

Almost no one in Southern California walks away from his house with the front door unlocked, let alone open. I felt my internal antennae rise, picking up a signal I didn’t like.

I crossed the lawn to the driveway and found my way to the backyard, which was uninhabited. When I pounded on the back door, I still got no response. Then I looked in a rear window and saw Petrocelli.

He lay face up, his eyes and mouth open wide, his face contorted in apparent agony. If he was napping, his office floor seemed an odd place to do it.

I dashed hack to the front door, arriving just as a small woman with white hair turned briskly up the walk. She was wearing a powder-blue jogging suit and clean white walking shoes, and was slightly out of breath.

“Mrs. Petrocelli?”

“Hello. Are you here to see Leo?”

“Mrs. Petrocelli, I think your husband’s had an accident.”

A second passed as my remark registered. Then she was hurrying past me into the house.

“Leo? Leo!”

I stayed right behind her.

“In the back, Mrs. Petrocelli. His office. I saw him through a rear window.”

She dashed ahead of me into the room and before I reached the door I heard her scream his name.

“Call 911, Mrs. Petrocelli.”

She was kneeling over him, stroking his face.

“Mrs. Petrocelli?”

She looked up with frightened eyes.

“Call 911. I’ll see to your husband.”

She started across the room; I touched her arm.

“Not here. Better use another phone.”

She was gone on her springy shoes, soundlessly.

Petrocelli had stopped breathing and I found no pulse in any of the usual places. His skin bore a slightly pinkish tint, not unlike Reza JaFari’s the night of his death. Somewhere in the room was the unfamiliar scent I’d picked up near JaFari’s body.

There were brown stains on the beige carpet, streaking away from the body as if they’d been made with a splash. Otherwise, the room was neat as a pin. If there was anything odd about it—other than a dead man laying at my feet—it was the file cabinet. One drawer had been left open a few inches, another was closed but with one of the file folders caught between drawer and frame.

I began CPR and was still at it when the paramedics arrived. It was déjà vu all over again, as the quipsters like to say—a sequel, Hollywood-style, but without the requisite happy ending.

Mrs. Petrocelli huddled next to me the whole time, holding her husband’s cold hand and calling his name again and again. It sounded like a stuck record, except that the sound got more frightened and more lonely each time I heard it.

I asked the paramedics to treat the space as a crime scene and to call in a homicide detective, which didn’t exactly allay Mrs. Petrocelli’s anxiety.

She seized my wrist with her tiny hand.

“What are you saying?”

“I’m just being cautious, Mrs. Petrocelli.”

I told her who I was and reminded her that we had spoken a few days earlier on the phone, when her husband was running an errand at the Writer’s Guild.

“I think we should get out of here and let the paramedics do their work.”

“No, I’m staying.”

“There’s nothing you can do here.”

She didn’t move.

“Maybe I can ask a favor of you, then.”

She gave me a questioning look.

“I know it’s not a good time. But if you could—”

She had knelt down beside her husband again, shoulder to shoulder with one of the paramedics. “Please save him,” she said. “Please.” The paramedic gently pushed her aside, reaching for a medical kit.

“Mrs. Petrocelli.” I lifted her by her arm. “We’re in the way here.”

“I feel I have to do something.”

“Take a minute and do something for me, then. While they work to save your husband.”

“What is it?”

“Over here.”

I led her in a wide path around the area where her husband lay to his writing desk and the adjacent file cabinet.

“How well do you know your husband’s office?”

“I do all his filing. I tidy up here almost every day. He won’t let the housekeeper touch it.”

“If you would, take a quick survey and tell me if you find anything missing.”

“You think someone might have—?”

“It’s possible.”

Her scared eyes were back on her husband.

“Mrs. Petrocelli—it might be important.”

Her mouth tightened awkwardly into a brave smile.

“All right.”

“Without touching anything, please.”

Her eyes roved his big desk, where several scripts with different-colored binders were stacked to one side against the wall. Various books were held up by heavy bronze bookends—Lajos Egri’s
The Art of Dramatic Writing
, William Campbell’s
The Hero With a Thousand Faces
, Eugene Vale’s
The Technique of Screenplay Writing
, Strunk and White’s
The Elements of Style
, a good thesaurus, an unabridged Oxford dictionary. In a far corner lay a tattered copy of the shooting script for
Network
, autographed by its author, Paddy Chayevsky. An old Smith Corona electric anchored the desk front and center, where a computer might have been in the workroom of a younger writer. On the wall were several plaques—Oscar nominations and Writer’s Guild awards.

“Leo’s scripts are gone.”

“Which scripts would those be, Mrs. Petrocelli?”

“Copies of his most recent one, including the master.”

“Did it have a title?”

“
Over the Wall
. Though he’s not thrilled with it.”

“Sounds like it might be a prison movie.”

“Yes, in a way. But it’s really more about what happens after the convict escapes. He’s terminally ill, you see, and he’s never seen his grandchild. So he escapes in the hope he can hold his grandchild in his arms just once before he dies. There’s this mean prison warden who goes after him—but I’m sure you don’t want to hear me tell you the whole story. Leo is so much better at it than me. He can sum it up for you in one line.”

“I believe they call that a logline description.”

“I think you’re right. Leo says that’s what they want these days—a one-line concept.” She smiled with a bit of mischief. “He says it’s because these young executives are functionally illiterate, and have the attention spans of gnats. That many of them can’t even write a memo that meets basic grammatical standards.”

“Times have changed, I guess.”

Her eyes grew worried again, edging toward the paramedics.

“Why isn’t Leo waking up? Why is it taking them so long?”

I steered her by the elbow toward the four-drawer file cabinet.

“If you would, Mrs. Petrocelli, take a quick look through his files.”

I pulled open each drawer for her, using a tissue to keep my fingerprints off the handle.

“There are so many,” she said. “I don’t—”

She paused as she looked through a drawer marked WGA.

“How strange—all his Writer’s Guild files are gone.”

“Did he keep his script registration receipts in this drawer?”

“No. He keeps those in a wall safe. He’s always been very protective of those.”

“He would have registered his latest script?”

“Oh, yes. I went down to the guild with him. He’s very proud of that script.”

“When was that?”

“He’s had the idea forever but never got around to writing it. Then, right after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, he just sat down and wrote it out, all in a fever. Finished a rough draft in two or three weeks. Then he went in for the surgery.”

“That was about the time he met Reza JaFari, wasn’t it? Pardon me, Raymond Farr.”

“Thereabouts, yes. Why?”

“Just curious.”

I escorted her from the room, doing my best to block her view of her husband, and into the living room.

“What time did you go out this afternoon, Mrs. Petrocelli?”

“Shortly after noon.”

I glanced at my watch.

“You were gone two hours?”

“I went out for a light lunch, then a long walk. I walk for half an hour each morning, and try to do an hour in the afternoon.”

“But not Leo?”

“I try to get him to go, but his knees aren’t good. He walks up to Wilshire Boulevard each morning to buy the trade papers, but that’s about it. I do wish he’d get more exercise.”

She glanced down the hallway, where one of the paramedics was shaking his head.

“Was your husband expecting any visitors this afternoon?”

Her eyes stayed on the paramedics, while her voice grew small and distant.

“Not that I know of, Mr. Justice.”

Through the window, I watched an unmarked police car pull into the driveway. A good-looking, crew-cut detective got out the driver’s side. He was about my age and height, with roughly the same coloring, but knew how to dress.

I stepped out to meet him on the porch. I told him how I happened to be there and suggested he treat the carpet stains near the body as potential evidence. He was a low-key, amiable guy who asked the right questions and listened well.

He went inside and spoke briefly with Mrs. Petrocelli. When he went down the hallway to check on her husband, she followed him, and a moment later she burst into tears.

I didn’t need to hear or see any more to know that they had given up on Petrocelli. I found a phone and called Claude DeWinter.

I got his beeper but he got back to me within the minute, demanding to know the whereabouts of Danny Romero.

“He’s in the city, DeWinter. He’s not going anywhere. Stop worrying.”

“I get paid to worry.”

“I hope you get paid a lot.”

“Stop fucking with me, Justice. Where are you?”

I told him.

“Petrocelli? The old writer who was at the party?”

“That’s the one.”

“So what’s he telling you that he’s not telling me?”

“He’s not telling me anything. He’s dead.”

The line was silent for a second or two.

“My guess is he died the same way JaFari died, assisted by the same person. You want the address here?”

“What do you think?”

I gave it to him, and he asked me to stay put until he got there.

I said I would, and used the time to poke around.

For the most part, the kitchen was as spic and span as you’d expect of someone who kept her husband’s office shipshape and wore squeaky-clean walking shoes. Still, I saw a few telltale signs of disorder that reminded me of the mishandled file drawers in Petrocelli’s office.

A jar of instant coffee sat on the white tile counter, the lid slightly askew and a sprinkling of dark crystals visible at its base. In the drainer were two coffee cups and a spoon. They appeared to have been washed and rinsed, rather hurriedly from the looks of the water drops splashed around the sink and on the floor below.

I put my hand to a tea kettle on the stove and found it warm.

In a waste can beneath the kitchen sink was a dish towel, wadded up and shoved deep beneath a pile of trash. I shook it gently open; brown stains covered most of it, similar in color to those on the carpet in Petrocelli’s office. From the towel, I picked up a now-familiar scent. When I held the towel to my nose, the odor deepened. It was a sharp, bitter smell that vaguely reminded me of almonds.

I found a plastic Baggie in a drawer, dropped the towel into it, and delivered it to the crew-cut detective, letting him know what I’d seen in the kitchen. I also asked him if he’d smelled anything unusual in the room where Petrocelli died. He said he hadn’t, and wanted to know why I’d brought it up. When I told him, he came back with three words.