The Ticket Out (4 page)

I said, “Just the doors when I came in.”

The male cop said, “You lived here together?”

“No, I didn't know her. I live here alone.”

“All alone?” His tone meant: “In this palace?”

“Some businessmen own the property—I'm the caretaker.”

He nodded and pointed me into the front room. I backed away as the two cops came out of the bathroom. I tried to hear what they were whispering. The woman cop caught me and pointed outside. I walked outside and they escorted me to the back patio. The woman cop pointed at a lounge chair. I sat down.

The male cop said, “How can we reach the owners?”

“They have a lawyer who handles things here.” I told him the number from memory.

He nodded. “Where's a telephone?”

I pointed at the portable bar standing nearby. He walked over, found the cordless phone, and punched in a number. Turning his back, he spoke to someone in a low voice. I tried to hear but couldn't.

He finished his call and walked out to the gates to wait. The woman cop stationed herself on a chaise lounge next to me.

I ignored her and focused on the pool house.

My whole body started to shake. At first I thought it was the temperature—I must be cold because the patio was in shade. I leaned sideways, pulled a beach towel off the bar, and wrapped myself up. That didn't help: the shaking only got worse. My teeth started to chatter and I felt sick to my stomach again.

It hit me then. It had taken this long to kick in. The blond was dead—and she'd been murdered—

And it might have been me.

The woman cop was watching. I didn't want to come unglued in front of her. I bit down on the towel and clenched my muscles to stop the shaking. But the shaking wouldn't stop.

 

T
HE DETECTIVES
took half an hour to arrive. I heard footsteps in the driveway and saw a tall man turn the corner of the house. He wore a suit and tie, and he seemed familiar. At the sight of him the male cop saluted and the woman cop jumped to attention. I realized who the detective was. It was Douglas Lockwood, the cop from the Burger King siege.

I said without thinking, “Jesus, it's you.”

He said, “Ann Whitehead?”

I nodded.

“Ann Whitehead, the writer for the L.A.
Millennium?”

I nodded again, standing up. I stood too fast. I wobbled and had to steady myself against the chair. Lockwood saw it, reached for my elbow, and made me sit back down.

He looked me over for a minute. Bare feet, jeans, wrinkled shirt, uncombed hair—hair, shirt, jeans, feet. When he finished, he pulled a notebook and pen out of his jacket. I remembered that he'd been shot at the siege.

“I hope your newspaper's attitude won't prevent you from cooperating with this investigation.”

It was said in a perfectly neutral tone. I took the remark to be rhetorical and didn't answer. He went on, “You live in the pool house, is that correct?”

“I do.”

“And this property belongs to businessmen?”

“Yes, they rent it out.”

“And you say you don't know the victim.”

“There was a party last night. She was one of the guests, but I never formally met her.” My throat tightened. That wasn't good: I hadn't even lied to him yet.

“If you live in the pool house, how did she get there? Where were you?”

“I sleep in the main house when there's people—it's part of my caretaking deal.”

Lockwood jotted notes in his book. I glanced past him and watched three men walk down the driveway. They stopped beside the garage and set their briefcases on the cement. All three were drinking coffee from take-out cups. One guy yawned; one guy rubbed sleep out of his eyes. One had a greasy paper bag that he started to pass. They all took a doughnut and a napkin and started eating.

Lockwood waved his pen around the backyard. “Was this outdoor area used for the party?”

“The guests were inside, but the valets parked cars in the driveway, and the caterers had access to the kitchen door.”

Lockwood studied the layout. The woman cop hadn't left; she was watching every move—mine and his. Lockwood said, “Officer, would you accompany Miss Whitehead to your car and wait there, please?”

I said, “I'd like to stay here.”

Lockwood shook his head and walked off toward the pool house.

The woman cop gripped my arm and marched me up the driveway. I didn't appreciate being handled like that. I tried to shake her off, but she held on tight until we got to her car and she put me in the backseat. Shutting the door, she stationed herself at the curb.

Wire mesh separated the backseat from the front. I sat looking through it.

The street below the house had been blocked off by official cars. I counted two unmarked cars, two black-and-whites including mine, a hearselike station wagon, and an ambulance guarded by a guy in a jumpsuit. One cop stretched yellow tape across the front yard, and one was posted outside the tape. The nearest neighbors stood on their lawn, straining for a look at me.

I ducked down in the seat and started to lay things out.

If this killing was random, I owed my life to Barry and his party. I wouldn't have slept in the mansion otherwise.

But I didn't think it was random. Yes, the house was isolated at the end of the cul-de-sac, and it and the yard were wide open last night. Yes, the victim was gorgeous and vulnerable—a stray psychopath's ideal target, if you considered national statistics or the lessons of late-night cable movies.

The argument against randomness was stronger.

The wounds were too neat, for one thing. A random sex killing would be gorier. And there would probably be an assault or rape. But I saw no signs of a fight, and no sign that she was dragged to the tub from somewhere else. The crime was clean, cold, and intelligent in its simplicity. A blow to the head and slits in each wrist.

The killer didn't want me. I was sure of that now—now that I thought about it and the panic had passed. All the pool house lights were on, Stenholm and I didn't look anything alike, and the bathtub was clearly visible from the door.

He didn't want me: he wanted her. The whole context of the murder was unrandom. The party was Hollywood, she was Hollywood, and her address book was BIG Hollywood: corporate chairmen, studio heads, producers, managers, agents, lawyers, writers, directors, stars. And the Hollywood theme—with a Steven Spielberg subtheme—carried over to the picture of the old man getting spanked.
Jurassic Park
was a Spielberg franchise, and he was connected with all the movies featured in the dinosaur bedroom.

Her appointment calendar was Hollywood, too. She'd had lunches and dinners with Leonard Ziskind of PPA. There were drink dates with Callie Khouri, who wrote
Thelma & Louise.
And there were a string of Sunday brunches with Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz, Sandra Bullock, and Drew Barrymore. She must have been seeing actors about her screenplay.

The obvious motive for her death was the spanking picture. By all indications she was broke. Broke, and nutty, and overwrought—if her behavior at the party was anything to go by. Maybe she'd blackmailed an old pervert, and the pervert killed her, or had her killed.

But that theory didn't cover it all.

Why would she resort to blackmail? She'd sold her screenplay to a studio. Did the scheme predate the studio deal? Or did the studio fiddle around and delay the payment check?

And, the murder didn't appear premeditated. A prepared killer would bring his own weapon and not leave that picture for the cops to find.

I paused, and thought of her. Greta Maria Stenholm—

Oh, Christ!

I grabbed the wire mesh and sat up.
Wasn't I the number one suspect?

I'd been so busy, I hadn't stopped to think how this would look to the cops. My place, my knife, a woman my age who worked in movies. They would have to think I did it, or that I knew the person who did.

I burst out laughing.

It was only one more thing to scare me shitless—and I had a policy about fear. It came from my childhood and went like this: fight fear or else it will rule your life. Fear paralyzed action, and that would wreck all my plans.

 

T
HE CAR
door opened. The woman cop leaned in and said, “Detective Lockwood will speak with you now.”

I climbed out of the backseat and ducked under the yellow tape. Lockwood was waiting for me in the driveway. I followed him around to the back of the house.

He stopped and held out a sheet of paper. “I'd like you to sign this.”

“What is it?”

“Permission to search the buildings and grounds.”

He handed me a pen. I said, “But I'm not the owner.”

“We've spoken to the lawyer. You have control of the premises—that's all we require.”

I rested the paper on my knee, signed, and passed it back. Lockwood said, “The garage is empty. Where's your vehicle?”

“Down at the corner of Los Feliz—there was no place to park last night.”

He said, “I'd like the keys, please.”

I dug them out of my jeans and Lockwood took them. I checked the time on his watch. It was still early, but the sun had risen over the roof and it was getting hot. Some of the cops had removed their jackets and were working in their shirtsleeves. One guy squatted on top of the back wall; he surveyed the vacant lot and made notes on a clipboard. Another guy dusted the pool house door. The sounds of a vacuum cleaner and of splashing water came from inside. A third guy stood by the pool, drawing a diagram of the yard.

Lockwood said, “I want you to walk me through the party and tell me what you saw.”

The kitchen door had been propped open for dusting. He motioned me into the house. I led him through the pantry and watched him absorb the scale of the place. The way our steps echoed off the hardwood, it sounded like an empty gymnasium.

Lockwood stopped in the front hall. “Who gave the party?”

“Barry Melling. He's part owner of this place and he runs my newspaper."

Lockwood wrote
BARRY MELLING
in his notebook.

If he recognized my name, he'd have to recognize Barry's: Barry had written vicious anti-Lockwood editorials. I thought Lockwood might take another deadpan swipe at the paper, but he didn't. He looked around the bare rooms and said, “I see no evidence of a party.”

“The caterers cleaned up afterward.”

He nodded and asked for a guest list, and the names of the caterers and valet parkers. I said that Barry had made the arrangements. He asked me to describe the party. I told him the purpose, gave him the demographics of the guests, and mentioned the people I'd talked to.

He asked to see Scott Dolgin's business card. I got it out of my shirt and showed it to him. He wrote down Dolgin's address and phone number. Already I was finding this process tedious; I wanted to get to Greta Stenholm.

I said, “She arrived a little after 10
P.M.”

Lockwood knew who “she” was. He looked up from writing.

“With people or alone?”

“Alone—and she looked like she had the wrong party.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean she didn't fit with the crowd or the tone of the event. These were businesspeople in business attire. She was dressed wrong, she was dirty, and she acted weird. She was also very beautiful.”

Lockwood said, “‘She was very beautiful.'”

He made it sound too banal. I tried to clarify: “Yes, in an unself-conscious way. She seemed oblivious of herself and to the attention she got.”

“Who did she speak to?”

“Only three people that I saw. Scott Dolgin was one, and I couldn't see the other person.”

“Who was the third?”

“Me.”

Lockwood flipped to a new page and wrote. I described Greta Stenholm's weirdness and related our conversation word for word. When I finished, Lockwood said, “You talked to her about movies?”

I nodded. He said, “Nothing else—just movies?”

I nodded and walked down the back hall to the office. Lockwood followed me. I stopped at the threshold, showed him the perspective, and described the scene: Greta Stenholm sitting at the desk, talking to someone behind the door, thumbing the Rolodex as she talked.

Lockwood walked into the office. “You never asked the woman's name?”

“She didn't give me a chance, and I went to bed before the party was over.”

“What time was that?”

“About eleven.”

“How did she know the pool house would be unoccupied?”

“I have no idea.”

Lockwood pushed the door wide with his pen. On the floor under the door was a blank sheet of paper. It was from the xeroxing; I must have dropped it. I froze as Lockwood bent down and picked it up. He looked at it, then he looked at the Xerox machine. I saw his face change. He turned very carefully ... and looked at me.

 

H
E JERKED
me around for the next two hours. I wasn't prepared for the way he did it; I'd gotten too used to the average movie.

Movies either overplayed or underplayed. Movie cops cried, crashed cars, and fired shots into crowds of people. Or you had cold cops who showed nothing and became psychotic blanks. What you didn't have was Lockwood. You didn't have a civil servant with a suit and tie, and a total absence of drama. He didn't hate me or even want to know me; I only existed as a problem. If he hated the
Millennium,
or journalists in general, there was no way to tell. As I fended him off, I thought of an older generation of actor. Sterling Hayden and Dana Andrews made good cops. They weren't trying to display their range or express the masculine condition; they just did a job.

Lockwood never mentioned the Xerox machine. He lingered in the back office, repeated his initial questions, and asked new and more oblique ones. He ran me through the party five times and made a note of every discrepancy. He asked me about spatial relations and time frames—endless details about who was standing where and when. I acted out the dead woman's first appearance; I showed how she dumped her bag in the closet and paced off her path through the foyer. I repeated our conversation outside the library, complete with gestures and body language.