Self-Defense (54 page)

“You did it for a job?” said Milo.

“Not a job.” Graydon-Jones’s voice was
strangled. “A
career.”

Leah looked at Milo. “I’m sorry, sir.
That’s a little hard to believe. I’d never go to court with that.”

“But it’s true!” Dropping his head. “All
right, all right, there was one more thing, though it’s no big issue.”

“What’s that?” said Leah.

“The dope. The Quaaludes he gave her. They
were mine. Prescription for nerves. I was working mad hours at the foundry, my
biorhythms were off—”

“Bull,” I said into the mike.

“Just for sleep, huh?” said Milo, smiling
and shaking his head.

Graydon-Jones flinched. “All right, for
sex, too, the chicks loved it—no big crime. As I said, I had a prescription.”

“And you shared your prescription drugs
with Karen.”

“She didn’t protest—she
wanted
to
try—wanted to try everything
... except
doing Curt.
God,
he was
pissed. After he hit her, I said, “What the bloody hell did you do that for?’
and he said, “Don’t get all righteous with me,’ and started to unzip his
trousers. Then he... when she didn’t wake up, I panicked, tried to leave. He
said, “You’ve got a problem, Chris. She was in your lap when it happened, you
were holding her, she was stoned on your dope.’ Telling me if she was found,
they’d learn she was on ’ludes and it could be traced to me. He said as far as
the law was concerned, I was every bit as guilty as he.”

“And you believed that?” said Leah.

“I didn’t know American law. I was a
fucking starving limey just off the boat!”

“Did you consult an attorney?”

“Right,” said Graydon-Jones, “and expose
the whole thing—we
buried
her, for God’s sake. It was over.”

I said to the mike, “Ask him why he
stopped sculpting.”

Milo said, “How’d you get from art to the
business world?”

“Curt offered me a job at Enterprise. Get
paid to learn. As Marlon Brando would say, an offer too good to refuse.”

“He also offered you sculpting
commissions. Why didn’t you take them?”

Graydon-Jones looked away.

Stratton said, “I fail to see what—”

“It all goes to the heart of the matter,
Jeff,” said Leah. “Namely, your client’s credibility.”

Graydon-Jones said something
unintelligible.

“What’s that?” said Leah.

“I lost interest.”

“In what?”

“Art. All the pretentiousness. The
bullshit. Business is the ultimate art.”

Talking fast to conceal the real reason:
he’d blocked. And App had been ready to exploit it, just as he had with Lowell.

One night of deception rewarded by twenty
years of comfort and status.
Success
the ultimate dope. Just as it was
for Gwen and Tom Shea.

Uneasy alliances held together by sin and
guilt.

It had taken a dream to blow them down.

Graydon-Jones was talking to Leah’s stoic
face. “Don’t you see? Curt
reversed
the entire bloody thing in order to
shaft me. All
I
did was furnish the ’ludes.
He
hit her—take a closer look at those
bones, you’ll find something on her jaw—believe me, I was there. He’s the
killer, not me. He’s killed other people—”

“Hold on,” said Stratton sharply.

“I’ve got to
prove
myself, Jeff!”

“Just hold on, Chris.” To us: “Another
conference, please. And make sure there are no open mikes anywhere.”

Leah said, “I can’t promise I’ll be here
when you’re finished.”

She and Milo came out, as Stratton turned
his back on the mirror and directed Graydon-Jones to do the same.

“Time for the little girls’ room.”

She left. Milo chewed two wads of gum and
tried to blow bubbles. I counted my fingers several dozen times.

From the other side of the glass, Stratton
waved and mouthed, “Come back in.”

Milo switched on the mike and entered the
room.

“Where’s Lee?” said Stratton. “Come on,
this isn’t some shoplifting case.”

Milo shrugged. “Maybe she’s powdering her
nose, she didn’t tell me.”

“How professional.” Stratton looked at his
own watch. “We’ll give her a minute.”

“Big of him,” I said to his ear bug.

Milo smiled.

Leah returned.

I crooked a thumb toward the glass.
“Stratton’s getting antsy. I’d keep working the time bit.”

She grinned at me. “I need your little
voice in my ear to tell me how to do my job? No, seriously, it’s been useful.
We should probably do more in-house shrinking on the big cases. Problem is
you’d probably charge too much. And most of the other DA’s would feel
threatened.”

Pressing freshly glossed lips together,
she asked Lucy, “Still holding up?”

“Holding up fine. I just hope you crack
him.”

“Like an egg,” said Leah. “Over easy.”

She fluffed her hair; then she stepped
into the interrogation room.

Stratton said, “Hey, Lee, for a minute I
thought you’d given it all up for a life of joyful abandon.”

“Okay, let’s finish up,” she said. “If you
have something to say, Mr. Graydon-Jones, out with it. Otherwise we’ll just
work with what we’ve got.”

Stratton said, “Before we go any further,
I’d like some definite quid pro quo.”

“Pu
-leeze.”

“You don’t care about getting the big
fish, Lee?”

“This case, Jeff, they all seem pretty
big.”

Graydon-Jones cursed under his breath.

“What’s that, sir?” said Leah.

Silence.

“You have a comment, Mr. Graydon-Jones,
feel free to make it.” Glance at her watch.

Stratton said, “My client’s willing to
offer you information that could clear up two additional homicides. Bona fide
homicides, not involuntary manslaughter, which is the most you’ll get out of
the Best girl, and you know it. You don’t want to hear about it, fine.” Shrug.

“We’ll hear, Jeff. What we won’t do is put
a price tag on the merchandise until we’ve had a chance to examine it.”

“Believe me,” said Stratton, “this is
good.”

Leah smiled. “I always believe defense
attorneys.”

Milo said, “My mortgage is assumable, my
Porsche is paid for, and the check’s in the mail.”

Stratton shot him a hard look.

Leah’s smile got wider and she put her
hand over it. Another peek at her watch. Even though I’d suggested it, I found
it an annoying mannerism.

She sighed and got up.

Stratton said, “Fine. Listen and evaluate.
I’m sure you’re smart enough to see it for what it is.”

Leah said, “That’s me, Ms. Smart,” and clasped
her briefcase.

She sat down.

Graydon-Jones looked at Stratton the way a
baby looks at its mother just after it receives its first shot.

Stratton said, “Give me a commitment that
if the information’s good you’ll go to bat for my client.”

“Going to bat for your client’s
your
job, Jeff. If Mr. Graydon-Jones’s information proves useful, it will be taken
very seriously. Even in this day and age, we like to clear bona fide
homicides.”

“It’s more than useful,” said Stratton.
“Believe me. But I think it’s important you realize the scope of what we’re
talking about. Qualitatively. The information Mr. Graydon-Jones is in
possession of, in addition to being revelatory, is four-plus
exculpatory.
”

“Of whom?”

“Mr. Graydon-Jones. What he has to tell
you goes to the
crux
of the matter and relates to Karen Best, as well.
Motivation.
Two homicides that are the conceptual
fruit
of the Karen
Best incident and point a strong finger at original guilt in Karen Best’s
death. What we’re talking about is the fact that someone else, and not Mr.
Graydon-Jones, undertook to further these two—”

“Denton Mellors, aka Darnel Mullins, and
Felix Barnard,” said Milo, in a bored voice.

Graydon-Jones’s eyes bugged. Stratton
blinked very fast.

“Yeah, we know about those, counselor,”
said Milo. “Old Curt lays that on you too, Chris.”

“Oh, no,” said Graydon-Jones, holding out
his hands as if scooping air. “Oh, bloody fuck, no, no,
no,
this is—no
bloody
way,
bullshit
! I can
prove
I was out of town the day Denny
shot the private eye. Curt paid him thirty thousand dollars to do it. Recorded
it as payment for a screenplay Denny never wrote. Thirty grand—he
showed
me the money.”

“Mellors showed it to you?” said Milo.

“No, no!
Curt!
He showed it to me
and told me what it was for—said Denny was more than happy to do it, Denny was
a closet thug, always had been.”

“Where did this conversation take place?”
said Milo.

“At his house.”

“In Malibu?”

“No, no, his other one, Bel Air. He used
to have a place on St. Cloud. Now he’s in Holmby Hills, on Baroda.”

“Was anyone else present during this
conversation?”

“Of course not! He invited me for lunch.
Out by the pool, his fucking
terriers
pissing all over. Then he pulls out an envelope and
shows me the money. Has me
count
it. And tells me about some private eye
asking around about Karen, he’d been paying him off for a year, putting him on
the books to cover it and giving him odd jobs. Now the bastard has gotten
greedy and wants more so he can buy a house somewhere. So now Denny is going to
kill him at some motel Curt owns. He owns all sorts of things; he’s all over,
like an octopus—”

“Why did he tell you this?”

“So I’d be
part
of it! Just as he’d
made me part of Karen’s murd—death. And to frighten me—it worked, believe me.
Scared the shit out of me. I caught the first plane out of the country, back to
England. That’s how I can prove I wasn’t there when it happened—I have my old
passport. Look at the date on the bleeding thing and compare it to the date of
Barnard’s murder!”

“How long did you stay away?” said Milo.

“Two weeks.”

“Where’d you go?”

“To my mother’s, in Manchester. Curt found
me, sent me a newspaper clipping. About Barnard’s murder. Then he had
Denny
killed a few months later.”

“By whom?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then how do you know App was behind it?

“Because he sent me
another
clipping.
On Denny. Clear warning. He’s a monster, bestowing favors, then yanking them
away.”

“Sounds like he
kept
bestowing them
on you,” said Milo. “Career, and all that.”

“Yes, but I never knew why, never knew if
it would end. I knew I couldn’t escape him... so I stayed put, kept my mouth
shut, did my job—earned every bleeding penny of that salary. But now I see why
he really kept me around.”

“Why’s that?”

“Isn’t it obvious? As a scapegoat. If
things ever came to light, he’d have someone to dump it all on.”

“Scapegoat?” said Milo. “It was you drove
up there in that van with a hacksaw and plastic bags.”

Graydon-Jones froze. Then his body tilted
toward Milo.

Stratton reached out to restrain him.
Graydon-Jones waved him off.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “Twenty-one
years I’ve lived in terror of the man.
That’s
why I did the things I
did. I was
scared.”

Thirty hours left on the clock. We’d had
dim sum at a barnlike place on Hill Street, and it hadn’t settled well. I sat
alone in that same observation room. No one had cleaned the glass since
Graydon-Jones’s session, and it was fogged with a distillation of sweat and
fear.

Curtis App’s counsel was an older man
named MacIlhenny, fat and slovenly with the eyes of a sleepy snake and a
custom-tailored gray suit that looked cheap on him. He’d managed to get App out
of jail clothes. Despite the white cashmere V-neck and the black Swiss cotton
shirt, the producer looked weak and insubstantial. Just a few days in jail had
wiped out years of Malibu tan.

Leah was inside with them, along with her
boss, a grim deputy DA named Stan Bleichert.

MacIlhenny grunted, and App lifted a piece
of paper and began to read.

“My name is Curtis Roger App, and I am
about to offer into the record a statement prepared by myself, under no duress
or coercion, under the guidance of my attorney, Landis J. MacIlhenny, Esquire,
of the law firm of MacIlhenny, Bellows, Caville and Shrier. Mr. MacIlhenny is
present with me for moral support during these trying times.”