The Reporter (13 page)

“My God, Maxi,” she whispered, as soon as she had shooed Gia into the kitchen with Bessie, and they were out of earshot of
the deck. “She’s
crazy!
And she’s obsessed with my child!”

“I know; I know that,” Maxi said, “and I wanted you to hear it for yourself, or you wouldn’t believe me. I have it all on
tape,” she said, patting her bag. “I’m taking it to sheriff’s headquarters in the morning.”

“Fine,” Debra said tersely. “Now please get her the fuck out of here, Maxi—she’s giving me the creeps!”

C
arlotta Ricco was nervous, alone in the big house. She kept imagining that she heard sounds, whistling noises, creaks on the
stairs. Mr. Bronstein had taken Miss Orson to the hotel a few hours ago, and this was her first night here by herself. She’d
get used to it, she told herself. And it was only for a few weeks, until Miss Orson could find the right apartment, spacious
enough for her office and a gym, and a guest room, she’d said, plus a comfortable room for Carlotta with space for her ironing
and sewing. That would be perfect, Carlotta thought—then she would be moving out of this cavernous house, too.

Meanwhile, she had a lot of work to do. Joe Babajian, the famous Beverly Hills Realtor, was coming by in the morning to videotape,
and she intended to be up very early to get the place as presentable as possible.

Stopping short, she thought she heard a noise again. She was in her quarters upstairs, with the door locked and bolted; the
entire house and the gates were completely secured, the alarm system was armed—she shouldn’t be anxious, she knew. She would
get to sleep early, and tomorrow she’d finish straightening up the mess the auction people had left; then she’d start packing
up the
kitchen things, the cooking utensils, the good china, the linens, and the rest, to get organized for the move to a new apartment.

Wait—there it was again. This time she was sure she heard a noise downstairs. She strained to listen in the stillness. No,
she was being foolish. She would watch a little television to ease her anxiety and help her get to sleep. She got up from
her wicker sofa and started over to the TV set to pick up the clicker. And she heard it again.

Someone was in this house! There were definite footsteps, muffled sounds coming from downstairs. Maybe Miss Orson had come
back for something. She was sure she would overlook something or other, she’d said, a suit blouse, a pair of shoes. The Beverly
Hills Hotel was less than ten minutes away. Maybe she’d realized she needed more clothes before the workweek began tomorrow.

In bathrobe and slippers, Carlotta opened her door and padded noiselessly down the hall, stopping to peer over the banister
to the floor below, into the large, mostly barren living room that was dimly illuminated by an amber lamp on a table in the
foyer. She stood still. Then she heard it again. A shuffling noise, coming from somewhere below.

“Miss Orson?” she called. No answer. She turned the corner and started down the stairs. “Miss Orson!” she called out again.
She went on down the staircase and across the wide expanse of the living room, then through the hall toward the lower bedroom
wing, following the direction that the intermittent noise was coming from.

Abruptly, she stopped. In the dark corridor she could see a sliver of light coming from under the door to the master suite.
Had Miss Orson left the lights on? Or was she inside the room now, picking out some things she needed? Carlotta hadn’t heard
her come in. Maybe she had been especially quiet, thinking Carlotta might be asleep and not wanting to disturb her.

She knocked on the door. No answer. She tried the knob. It
opened. She stepped into the entry hall of the suite. At the archway to the bedroom, she froze. Someone, something, a figure
in voluminous black robes with a black hood, facing away from Carlotta, was pawing through the top drawer of the dresser on
the far side of the king-size bed.

“Who
are
you?” Carlotta cried out inadvertently, clamping her hand to her mouth as if to take back the sound, but before she could
respond to her instincts to turn and run, the figure whirled around, robes flowing, only eyes visible through the slitted
hood, and with black-gloved hands, held up a sinister-looking object, a knife of some kind, a cross!

“God forgive you,”
the person said in a low, guttural voice, raising the painted crucifix higher and toward Carlotta. In a gravelly, raspy cadence,
muffled by the hood, which had no opening for the mouth, the figure began reciting a chant of some kind.
“May corruption be rebuffed from the deepest reaches of your soul, may black magic be quelled by a host of angels, and your
spirit be lifted—”

Carlotta screamed out and ran from the room, stumbled down the bedroom hall, and was bolting through the door she’d left open
to the outer corridor and the living room beyond, when suddenly, violently, the dark figure pounced on her back and knocked
her to the floor.

“Please,” Carlotta sobbed hysterically, “take anything you want—” A hand pushed her head to the floor, and she felt a stab
of ferocious pain, felt the jagged cross gouging the flesh between her shoulder blades, again, and again, and again, the hand
shoving her face into the carpet, her own warm blood gushing across her back, until she felt nothing.

T
ell us again—under what circumstances did you make this tape?” Jonathan Johnson asked Maxi Poole. She sat with the two detectives
in a small cubicle at the Hall of Justice downtown.

“This woman sits on the beach outside Debra Angelo’s house almost every day,” she said. “She was there yesterday when I happened
to be visiting, so I went out and introduced myself, and I had this extraordinary conversation with her,” Maxi told the detectives,
indicating the audiocassette on the table between them.

“And your tape recorder just happened to be in your purse?” Johnson quizzed.

“Uh-huh.”

“And she didn’t know it was there?” he continued.

“No.”

“Well, it’s not admissible—you know that,” Cabello snapped.

“Of course I know that,” Maxi said, “and I can’t use it in a story, either, but I think you gentlemen should hear it, in view
of
the fact that Meg Davis was there, outside Debra Angelo’s house, at the time of the murder.”

“You also know that running a hidden tape on someone, unknown to them, is illegal, don’t you?” Cabello asked.

“I always carry a tape recorder, for my work. That’s
carry,
as
in thrown in my purse, not strapped to my body,” she emphasized. “And the ON button must have got accidentally pushed when
it was jostled in my bag.”

“Yeah, right,” Cabello sneered.

“Look, do you want to hear it or not? If not, no problem; I have things to do,” Maxi said, getting up and reaching for the
cassette.

Cabello looked at Johnson. “Tell ya what,” he said. “Why don’t you leave it for now, but we probably won’t have any reason
to listen to it, and you can have it back any time you want—does that work for you?”

“Sure,” she said. She expected something like that. She knew they wouldn’t listen to it in her presence. “By the way, is Meg
Davis a suspect?” she asked.

“No more than you are,” Mike Cabello said, watching her closely.

“I wondered when you were going to get around to that,” Maxi rejoined.

“Do you want to tell us something?”

“Do you want to
ask
me something? Because if you do, you can notify me properly, and I’ll notify my attorney,” she said with a smile.

“Do we want to ask the second ex–Mrs. Nathanson anything, Jon?” Cabello asked his partner.

“Well, we know
where
she was that Saturday. We might want to ask her
why,”
Johnson replied.

“Yeah, and how come she’s going out of her way to illegally record
other
people who might have been in the same place she was on the afternoon of October twelfth, at exactly two-fifteen.”

“Are you going to ask me to sign a Miranda waiver?” Maxi threw out.

“Not today,” Mike Cabello said. “We’ve got other fish in the pan.”

“Really! May I inquire about those fish?” she asked.

“Sure,” Cabello said. “The Nathansons’ housekeeper was murdered last night.”

Maxi’s hands flew to her face. “Oh my God… Carlotta? Please, not Carlotta…” She looked stunned.

“You knew her?” Johnson asked.

“Of course—she’d been with Jack for years. Oh God… what happened?”

“You’ll have it on the wires by the time you get back to the station,” he told her. “Beverly Hills P.D. got there about twenty
minutes ago.”

“Do you know anything at all—?” she started.

“No,” Cabello said. “They’re still securing the place.”

Maxi got up and hastily left. She had truly loved Carlotta. During the last year of her marriage to Jack, when she’d felt
like she was drowning, Carlotta sensed it. Though neither of them ever talked about it, Carlotta invariably made an effort
to cheer her up. Yet the woman was always loyal to Jack, would never utter a derogatory word about him. Maxi had great admiration
for Carlotta Ricco.

She raced to her car, turned on the ignition, then slumped back in the seat and cried. She thought about Carlotta’s son, a
sophomore at Arizona State. He was an honor student, and he was on the varsity baseball team. Carlotta had been so proud of
him. He probably didn’t even know about his mother yet.

“She was pretty broken up about the Ricco woman,” Jon Johnson said.

“Maybe she was
acting
broken up,” Cabello mused.

“Jesus, Mike, you give cynicism a bad name,” Johnson told his partner.

“Hey, buddy,” Mike shot back, “bring me a suspect that maybe
did
this murder and I promise I won’t be cynical, okay? Right now we got nothing solid, except for another damn dead body. Maybe
Ms. Poole
did
off her ex. Can you prove she didn’t?”

“You think the housekeeper’s murder is connected to Nathanson’s?” Johnson asked. “Frank Rey says it looks like a burglary.
They’re getting the widow over there now. She’ll establish whether anything was taken, but Frank says the place looks ransacked
pretty good; most of the furniture’s gone.”

“Janet Orson—where was
she
when all this went down?”

“Frank says her office referred them to the Beverly Hills Hotel,” Jon said. “She spent the night there.”

“Really!” Mike was interested. “With who?”

“In a bungalow registered in her own name. She’ll be at the house in about thirty minutes. We should let Beverly Hills Homicide
have first crack, see if she tells us the same story.”

“Yeah,” Cabello said, picking up the cassette that Maxi had left on the table. “Meantime, let’s see what’s on this sucker
for our listening and dancing pleasure.”

The two men were astonished at the conversation on the tape between Maxi Poole and Meg Davis. It was evident that the actress
was seriously disturbed, and was obsessing over Jack Nathanson’s child. And according to both Maxi Poole and Mrs. Burke, the
Davis woman was spending most of her time these days, in full view of the family, loitering outside the girl’s house in Malibu.
Cabello played the tape twice.

“You think it’s authentic?” he asked his partner.

“Has to be,” Jon said. “Nobody would dummy-up something like this, least of all Maxi Poole. But why would she bring it to
us?”

“They can’t use it on the air over there,” Mike answered. “It’s got ‘lawsuit’ written all over it. In my opinion, she brought
it to us because she knows she’s not off the hook on this rap herself, won’t be till we get our man. Maybe she’d like this
woman to be our man,” he said, gesturing with the tape.

“By the way,” Johnson said, “I guess she thinks we believe she’s on the story, huh?”

Cabello shrugged. The department subscribed to a service
that provided tapes of all radio and TV coverage of their cases. Not once had Maxi Poole reported on the Nathanson murder—the
story was always handled by Richard Winningham, the new Channel Six crime reporter. So Cabello had called Pete Capra, the
station’s managing editor, and asked what was the deal, was Poole on the Nathanson story, or was she just
talking
about working it? Capra had told him she wasn’t assigned to the story, and when Mike asked him what did that mean, he’d growled,
“What that means, Cabello, is she ain’t on the fucking story!” Pete Capra blustered a lot, but he would protect his people
even if they locked him up.

“So what about this Meg Davis?” Cabello asked Johnson now. “Besides the fact that she’s a raving ding-dong who hangs out at
Jack Nathanson’s ex-wife’s house so she can lay some voodoo on his kid? Do we have a murderer, d’ya think?”

“I think we have to bring her in, don’t you?”

“Yah, I do,” Mike said. “Let’s talk to her tomorrow. We got a full slate today.”

“Okay,” Jon said. “I guess we can wait a day. It’s not like we don’t know where to find her.”

“Yeah.” Cabello laughed. “We’ll just call Tim Randall out at the Malibu station—the guy works out every day. Tell him to pin
his badge on his Speedo and oil up for the TV news, we need him to go out on the beach and pick us up a movie star.”

W
hen Johnson and Cabello ducked under the yellow crime-scene tape at the big house on Benedict Canyon Drive, they found Dave
Billings examining the body. Billings had seen a lot of stabbing victims in his seventeen years in the coroner’s office, he
told them, but this one looked like she was carved up with a railroad spike. The lab boys would be able to shed some light
on what the weapon might have been after they ran their tests, he said.

The detectives had swapped notes with Frank Rey and his partner Ed Mallory from Beverly Hills Homicide. The uniformed officers
had secured the house. A photographer from the mobile crime lab was taking pictures; other personnel were gathering evidence.
Cabello and Johnson walked around, observing, getting the feel, and waiting for the woman who owned the place to show up.
She was late. Meantime, the two were mentally weighing everything they saw in relation to the big question: Was there a connection
between this killing and Jack Nathanson’s murder?