The Reporter (25 page)

There was a knock on the office door, and Alison’s assistant came in with the phone records. Maxi looked at the printout—
thirty-four calls made from bungalow 16 on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday.

“Thanks, Ali,” she said. “And call me if you think of anything that might help—anything at all.”

As Maxi drove the short distance to Century City, she pondered how to approach Meg Davis’s mother to coax from her any clues
that would point the way to the macabre
Black Sabbat
cross. Of course it was logical to assume that with all the publicity surrounding these crimes, anyone with information about
the cross would contact authorities, but Maxi well knew that very often people, for their own reasons, were afraid to get
involved.

It had occurred to her that perhaps more than one of those crosses had been made for
Black Sabbat.
Sometimes a film company will order an item in quantity for different purposes, like the seven pairs of ruby shoes made for
Judy Garland in
The Wizard of Oz,
or the dozen identical pairs of sunglasses bought for Arnold Schwarzenegger for the
Terminator
movies. Consulting the
Black Sabbat
crew list that Richard was working from, Maxi reached
Tyler Scheibel, the property master on the film, who told her that only one cross was made for
Black Sabbat,
a one-of-a-kind art piece. He said the director had been specific about what he wanted the cross to look like and to feel
like, and the prop master knew they’d never find such an item for sale. One of his assistants located an artist in Boston
who worked in hammered metals, and the film company commissioned the cross—the artist was told to make it look solid, glitzy,
and lethal. He fabricated the piece of silver-plated tempered steel, with luminous, multiple colors forged to the alloy. Because
it was so distinctive, that cross made a very strong statement in
Black Sabbat.
Scheibel told Maxi that he was shocked to see the prop resurface in such horrendous circumstances.

At Sally Shine’s apartment building, notorious now as the site where actress Meg Davis had committed suicide the day before,
a moving van was parked at the curb, and a few curiosity seekers stood outside, looking up to the terrace on the nineteenth
floor, some snapping pictures.
Poor Mrs. Shine,
Maxi thought.
How heartbroken she must be.

Upstairs, the door to the apartment was ajar, and Maxi saw moving men busily packing dishes, sealing and marking boxes, hoisting
furniture. Mrs. Shine came to the door and led her inside. “We’ll go into Meggie’s room where we can talk,” she said. “The
detectives won’t allow us to move anything out of there yet.” She closed the door behind them, and they settled on a white
wicker settee.

“It’s a beautiful room,” Maxi said quietly, looking around at the queen-size bed with its pretty aqua comforter and multitude
of pillows, the matching drapes, the overstuffed flower-print chair and ottoman, and the waxed-pine dresser, topped with a
beautiful old Bible and a profusion of candles.

“I don’t know what to do with her things,” Sally said with a sigh.

“Mrs. Shine—”

“Please call me Sally,” she said. Maxi sensed that the woman almost welcomed the distraction she was providing.

“Sally… Did you see the cross they’re talking about, the one Meg bought at the auction?”

“Yes, I saw it on top of her dresser the morning after she bought it, and I think she took it with her when she went out that
day. But I know she didn’t—”

“I know that, too,” Maxi interrupted gently. “But the cross is the key. Do you have any idea what happened to it?”

“No,” she said. “I’ve been over and over that with the detectives. I just don’t know. Meggie was reclusive, especially since
that man’s funeral—” Sally seemed to remember then that Maxi had been married to Jack Nathanson. “I’m sorry if—”

“Don’t be,” Maxi said, putting a reassuring hand on the woman’s arm. “I’m more sorry for your pain. Can you tell me who some
of Meg’s friends were?”

“No. She never talked about any friends; no one ever called here for her….”

Maxi could see that Sally Shine was about to weep. “I’m going to let you get back to your work,” she said, “because the sooner
you’re out of here, the sooner you’ll begin to heal, I think. I’m so sorry you have to go through this.”

They walked out of the bedroom and through the living room, where Alex Shine was supervising the movers. He was a big man,
good-looking, with salt-and-pepper hair and strong hands. He looked competent, Maxi noted, and caring, and comforting. She
was glad that Meg’s mother had him to lean on. At the door, she handed Sally one of her cards and asked her to call if she
thought of anything that might be helpful.

“Ms. Poole… Maxi,” Sally half whispered, “I’d like to ask you something.”

“Of course,” Maxi said, hesitating in the doorway.

“Last night on the news, your reporter said he’d talked to
some of the people who had worked on
Black Sabbat,
and they suggested that Meggie was… was
abused
by Jack Nathanson.”

“Yes,” Maxi said.

“Is he going to be following up on that? Talking to other members of the company?” she asked tremulously.

“I don’t know,” Maxi replied. “If the detectives find that Meg is no longer a posthumous suspect, and I feel certain that
will happen as soon as their testing is completed, then there’ll be much less interest in her.”

“I hope so,” Sally said. “It would be horrible if all that were dug up.”

Maxi looked at her carefully. “Did you… know?”

The woman looked away. After a long moment, she directed her gaze back at Maxi. “No,” she said. “But I should have known.
I think if I’d wanted to, I
would
have known.”

N
o, I don’t need a Luminol… No, I don’t need a DNA on the blood on the bungalow floor,” Mike Cabello barked into the phone.
“Of course
it’s the victim’s blood!” He was talking to a serology technician at the crime lab. “Whatever happened to common sense?”
he muttered, slamming down the phone.

Jon Johnson sat at the desk next to Cabello’s in the noisy, cluttered, cavernous squad bay, scanning the latest report from
the lab. “Meg Davis’s shoes don’t match the prints around the Nathanson house or outside Maxi Poole’s house,” he said. “But
the prints show they were definitely
women’s
shoes. Guess a lot of women have black Reeboks—my wife has two pairs, black
and
white.”

“And none of the hairs or fibers from either house matched anything they swept up in the Davis woman’s room or car,” Cabello
put in. “Also, Meg Davis was left-handed—”

“Yup,” Johnson replied, “the dog was slashed in the left jugular and on the left side of the body. Maxi Poole said she’s sure
the intruder wielded the weapon in her right hand.
Can
we assume it was a she?”

“Not really—men committing crimes have been known to wear women’s shoes, and this perp is evidently big on disguises.”

“Well, can we rule out Meg Davis?” Johnson threw out.

“And release the body for burial? Let’s wait on that,” Cabello said. “Maybe we’ll get a lead on the damn cross.” He had found
out that only one cross had been made for the
Black Sabbat
shoot. Wonder of wonders, Maxi Poole had actually called that one in—her priority had changed from working on the station’s
coverage of the murders to saving her own skin, he figured.

“What about Meg Davis’s bedroom?” Johnson asked. “They’ve got movers there now, but we have an order in place that no one
can touch that room. Can we lift it?”

“Might as well,” Cabello mused. “Salinas and Brown raked that joint top to bottom. They defrosted the freezer. They pulled
the
stove
apart.”

“We’ll tell the mother if she happens to find that cross in the move, give us a shout, huh?” Johnson grinned.

“Very funny,” Cabello grunted. “If she finds the damn thing after our guys tore the place apart she can have my job.”

“Who’d want it?” Johnson scoffed, his gaze scanning the Homicide section with its ninety-plus desks laden with dirty coffee
mugs, stacks of newspapers, mountains of files, and the occasional picture of a spouse or kids whom the sweating men and women
who worked there rarely saw.

“Yah, she’d love the overtime deal, huh?” Cabello laughed. Detectives in the bureau worked two weeks straight, then got three
days off, which was a joke—most of the time they worked right through their scheduled days off. And their time sheets read
nine to five, which was another joke—they often worked all night. It was regulation to list overtime on their weekly time
sheets, along with the reasons why they felt the overtime was justified, but most of them didn’t bother because they never
got paid for it. Their overtime was routinely red-penciled, even if they wrote that they were working past five o’clock because
a killer
was holding them at gunpoint chained up in a cellar. Not good enough. The detectives would kid each other when they met in
the squad room or in the field at two, three, four in the morning. “Working
pretend
overtime, huh?” they’d say.

Mike Cabello and Jon Johnson were pretend-overtime kings. They had been in the Hall until after three o’clock that morning,
interrogating and processing Alan Bronstein and William James. They had both got home and logged a couple of hours’ sleep
when the calls came that Jack Nathanson’s widow had been murdered at the Beverly Hills Hotel. They met at the crime scene
to oversee the activity there, then came into the office to brainstorm the case. Over the department’s bad coffee, they were
trying to make sense out of what they knew, and how it fit together.

“So what have we got on the Orson woman?” Cabello asked.

“No struggle,” Johnson said. “Nothing under her nails. Perfect uptown manicure. Probably didn’t have a chance to put up a
fight.”

“And the key?”

“Her own fingerprints on it. Not even smudged. Looks like she opened the door herself, still had the key in her hand when
she was attacked, then dropped it—”

“And the killer dragged her inside, then pulled the door closed and locked on the way out, to buy some time to get away,”
Cabello finished. “What about footprints around the bungalow?”

“They’re photographing now, but Garcia says it’s a swamp. The sprinklers drenched the area overnight, and they don’t think
they’ll get anything useful. Some dust on the veranda. The techs are supergluing, but they’re not optimistic.”

“Our two lock-’n’-key boys are present and accounted for,” Cabello noted. “Bronstein was released on bail at seven-fourteen
this morning, and Billy-boy’s still in the tank.”

“If Bronstein was the mastermind behind these murders, Janet Orson would not have been on his kill sheet,” Johnson observed,
“He was in love with her. Boy, his whole world fell apart, big-time, in the space of a few hours.”

“Yah, couldn’t happen to a nicer guy,” Cabello groused. “Christ, I’m beat.”

“Well, get over it,” Jon said. “It’s gonna be a long day.”

“Okay, moving down the checklist: No robbery—it didn’t look like anything was disturbed in the bungalow, you agree?”

“Funny, the only one who would know for sure is Bronstein. The hotel people say he moved her into the place on Sunday; then
they had dinner in the hotel dining room. On Monday he took her to the Sonora Cafe, a tony restaurant on La Brea, and last
night they went to the movie premiere in Century City, then to Mortons for a nightcap,” Johnson intoned, reading from his
notes.

“And we know he slept with her in bungalow 16, at least on Sunday night,” he went on. “We couldn’t get any confirmation about
Monday. But we’re talking constant companion here. Do you want to haul him over to the bungalow to have a look?”

“Nah”—Cabello shook his head—“I don’t want to look at his ugly face again today. Besides, you saw the body. Diamonds
in her ears, diamonds in her hair, bracelet worth a zillion bucks—” The phone on his desk pealed, aggravating his throbbing
head.

“Yah!” he rumbled into the mouthpiece. “Uh-huh… Okay, thanks.” He put down the receiver.

“Big surprise,” he deadpanned to Johnson. “Same blade, same wounds, same bloody fucking cross. So what have we got?”

“Same killer,” Johnson said.

M
axi headed back toward Beverly Hills. Since she’d gotten no clues to the whereabouts of the cross from Sally Shine, she would
start at the place where it had resurfaced in the public eye twenty years after the movie was made. Maybe the Sotheby’s people
could tell her something. It was a remote possibility, she knew, but she had no leads, no other avenues to pursue.

She entered through the ornately carved double doors and stepped into Sotheby’s elegantly appointed lobby. A chic receptionist
looked up over a pair of black-rimmed glasses and smiled. Maxi introduced herself, told her she was from Channel Six News
and that she needed some information about the auction of Jack Nathanson’s effects that they’d held on Saturday.

“Maxi Poole! I saw you there, and I saw the report you did on the auction that night,” the woman said. “I’m Lenore Baines.
If you tell me what information you need, I’ll know who best to steer you to.”

Maxi told her she wanted to find out anything she could about the cross that was a prop in
Black Sabbat,
the item she’d featured in her news story, which was purchased by the actress Meg Davis.

Lenore Baines nodded solemnly. Most of the city, in fact most of the country, was aware of the shocking, brutal killings and
Meg Davis’s suicide in the few days since the auction, that Meg Davis was the suspected killer, and her
Black Sabbat
cross was the suspected weapon. “Let me try Gabby in Decorative Arts,” she said, picking up the phone and punching in a number.
Almost immediately a cheerful young woman, tending a bit toward plump, with curly red-orange hair and a spattering of freckles,
came through the inner door.