The Trials of Nikki Hill (27 page)

“The secret of my success is this, old son: I’m a stealth scumbag.”

F
IFTY-TWO

G
oodman drove the unmarked sedan down Melrose Avenue, checking the too-cute names of the boutiques and restaurants. Morales sat beside him, sipping coffee from a Winchell’s cup and staring at the morning paper. “You looking good, amigo,” he said, chuckling. Goodman’s photo, accompanying an article about the Lydon murder, shared the front page with a photo of Dyana Cooper and her attorney leaving the courthouse.

“Given the choice of me or you,” Goodman told his partner, “it’s no wonder whose picture they picked.”

“I guess I’m a little too ethnic for the
Times.
”

“Too ugly,” Goodman said. “Here we go.”

There was no place to park in front of Todo Viejo, the shop where the Palmers sold their Mexican artifacts and antiques, so he parked in the bus stop area at the end of the block.

Palmer was at the rear of the shop chatting with a plump woman in black slacks and shirt whose shaggy hair had been dyed the color of Mercurochrome. They were both seated at a nice polished wood table that Goodman thought might be cedar. The young man held up a just-one-minute finger and continued to listen as the woman explained, in a voice sharp enough to etch glass, that since her dog, Ramón, was a Chihuahua, it was only logical that he have a Mexican doghouse. Palmer said he knew an excellent craftsman in Hermosillo who could create one to her specifications.

There were about ten or twenty other things the detectives could be doing, but Goodman figured he’d let Palmer finish up with the doghouse customer if it didn’t take too long. He joined Morales, who was scowling at a display of skeleton figurines. One was in swim trunks on water skis. Another, wearing a policeman’s uniform, was pointing a gun at a skeleton with a handkerchief tied around its face, holding a little bag with a dollar sign on it.

“Day of the Dead,” Morales said. “
Dia de los Muertos.
Hell, that’s every day.”

His tone was so bitter, Goodman asked, “What’s eating you?”

“Nothing,” his partner replied sullenly. Then he added, “My mother believed in all this crap. Not the fucking waterskiers; tha’s some kind of Americano rip. But the skeletons. The family picnic. Sweet bread with the little plastic toy baked in. You bite down on the toy it’s supposed to be good luck, unless you break yo’ damn tooth.”

He waved his hand angrily as if to dismiss all the little statues. “Le’s wrap this up.”

The woman with the bright red hair was still describing, in minute detail, exactly what she wanted. “It should have a sort of pastel Santa Fe exterior. Tile roof of course.”

Morales looked at his partner, perplexed. Goodman whispered, “Doghouse.”

“Doghouse?” Morales replied, definitely not whispering. “Fuck that.” He moved to the desk and faced the woman.

“Sorry, lady, but we here on police business to talk with Mr. Palmer. You gonna have to cut this short.”

She looked him up and down. “I pay your salary,” she said. “You can wait until I’ve finished.”

Palmer stood up. “I think I’ve got the gist of it, Frieda,” he said to the woman as he circled the desk and stood beside her. “I could drop by your home this afternoon, check out the location, take some measurements, and get my guy working on this immediately.”

Frieda was clearly annoyed at being rushed, but Palmer had left her with no alternative but to leave. She made up for it by telling him, “Don’t come before three. I can give you fifteen minutes then and no more. And I may ask you to take back that pot you sold me last month. I’m not sure the glaze is exactly what I want.”

“I’ll look at it. I appreciate your coming in, Frieda. See you at three.”

Frieda took her time leaving the store. When she’d gone, Palmer said, “Sorry about that.”

“You might want to lock up,” Goodman said. “That way, we won’t be disturbed.”

Palmer frowned, obviously curious. He closed the front door, locked it, and hung the little cardboard “Back in an hour” card. He returned, pulled over another chair for Morales, and then retreated behind the desk. “What’s this all about?”

“What exactly was your relationship with Arthur Lydon, Mr. Palmer?” Goodman asked.

“Relationship? I suppose ‘friends’ would cover it. I was shocked to hear about the murder. Is it connected to Maddie’s death?”

“We don’t know,” Goodman said. “Could you explain your concept of ‘friends’?”

Palmer scowled. “I don’t understand. Are you accusing me of something?”

“You guilty of something?” Morales asked.

Palmer glared at him but elected not to even try to respond to the loaded question.

“We just want to know if you were close friends,” Goodman said.

“I wouldn’t say that. Not close. In point of fact, we had lunch together every so often. Talked about common interests.”

Morales snickered. Goodman reached into his inside pocket and withdrew a snapshot. He held it out so that Palmer could see it.

It was a picture of him and Lydon in Madeleine Gray’s black-sand pool, naked, doing their version of an arms-locked showgirl kick in front of the fake waterfall.

The shop owner raised his hand, but Goodman cautioned him not to touch the picture. “That’s you and the deceased, am I right?”

Palmer nodded.

“You guys forget your swimsuits?” Morales asked.

Palmer didn’t answer.

“Just friends, though,” Morales said. “When was the picture taken?”

“Two years ago.”

“Who took it? Your wife?”

Palmer mumbled something.

“Huh? What’s that?”

“Maddie took the picture,” Palmer said.

“She wearin’ her swimsuit at the time?”

Again, no reply.

Goodman took another photo from his pocket. Palmer blinked when he saw it.

“That’s you and Madeleine Gray, correct?” Goodman asked.

“Y-yes.”

“Way to go, Mr. Palmer,” Morales said. “In the short strokes, looks like.”

“I—I didn’t know—there was a picture...”

Goodman replaced that photo with a third snapshot. In this one, Palmer and Lydon were having sex in the sunshine. The store owner’s eyes were blinking rapidly in disbelief. “How could they have taken these without my knowledge?”

“You looked pretty busy,” Morales said.

Palmer continued to be captivated by the picture of himself and Arthur Lydon.

“We didn’t come here to embarrass you, Mr. Palmer,” Goodman said. “It’s obvious from these photos that you were intimate with both victims.” He paused to put the final photo away, then stared hard into Palmer’s now watery eyes. “Were you in business with them?”

“This is my business. Mine and my wife’s. Maddie and Art had nothing to do with it.”

“And you’ve never seen these pictures before. Or had them described to you?”

“No. I knew Maddie took the shot by the waterfall, because we posed for it. I thought she put the camera away after that.”

“Was this something you did all the time?” Morales asked.

“Of course not. I had lunch over there a few times and maybe we passed around a joint or a Thai stick. Maddie was always fun at lunch. Later, she’d get drunk and moody, but at lunch she was fine. I mean, always perverse, but fun.” He paused, then asked, “Is this just between us?”

Goodman looked at Morales, then back at Palmer. “I don’t know how to answer that,” he said. “Suppose for the sake of argument in the next five minutes you confess to a serious crime. Then it isn’t just between us anymore.”

“I haven’t committed any serious crime.”

“Then there’s nothing to worry about.”

Palmer nodded. “I’d like to explain how this happened. You have to understand, Art was a fag. Maddie knew he and I had gotten it on a few times and she assumed I was gay, too. So she’d walk around naked in front of us, fondling her-self—she did have a beautiful body—and joke about trying to bring us over to her team. Art knew I was bi, so while she was enjoying her little joke, he and I had our own going. It was like Tony Curtis telling Marilyn Monroe he was bored with women in that movie.

“Anyway, that day, the three of us got totally ripped at lunch. Art and I stripped down. Maddie was already naked. We got into the pool and she was really coming on to me. Tongue in my ear. Groping me. I couldn’t hide the fact that it was working, so I figured, what the hell. I pretended she’d changed my luck. I never dreamed Art was taking pictures of us.”

“How many more times did you get together?” Goodman asked.

“The three of us, like that? Once or twice, maybe.”

“What about you and Maddie without Art?” Morales asked.

Palmer blinked. “You have to understand. In point of fact, my wife and I—Oh, hell, Caitlin is an ice queen and Mad-die was like a fever dream. Straights believe gays spend every waking minute thinking about sex. That’s how Mad-die was. She wanted it anytime, any way.”

“So you two had a relationship?”

“It wasn’t really a relationship. We just fucked well together.”

“That was okay with Lydon?”

“Of course. Look. We weren’t conventional people. There was no pressure. No jealousy. Just sex.”

“I don’t know, Mr. Palmer,” Goodman said. “I’ve always found it’s a real bear to keep just one lover happy.”

“As I said, we weren’t conventional.”

“When was the last time you and Madeleine Gray made love?”

“A year ago, about.”

“That long ago?”

“In point of fact, Maddie got busy and wasn’t available.”

“What do you mean, she got busy?”

“She...Oh, hell, she shined me on. Said she had too much going on in her life.”

Goodman nodded sympathetically. “She was seeing somebody else,” he said.

Palmer nodded.

“Any idea who?”

“Art said it was some black guy.”

Morales’s eyes widened a bit. “Sure it was a
guy?
”

“Oh, yes. Maddie was into men. You must’ve discovered that by now.”

Their investigation had turned up a number of lovers in Madeleine Gray’s past, none of them recent, none considered a likely suspect. They were all men, but Morales persisted in hanging on to his lesbian theory. “Did Lydon give you the
guy
’s name by any chance?” he asked Palmer with heavy sarcasm.

“No. He didn’t know or he would have told me. You can bet he tried to find out.”

“How’d he know the guy was black?” Goodman asked.

“Maddie told him.” He smiled ruefully. “You see, for all her worldliness, she’d never made it with a black guy before. Art said she went on and on about how much she’d

been missing, how she didn’t know what fucking was before this guy came along.”

“How’d that make you feel?”

“How do you think? You get over it.”

“Some do,” Goodman said. “Some don’t.”

“I did. I can’t say I didn’t miss her, though.”

“What about you and Lydon? When did you see him last?”

“I had coffee with him just a few days before he died. We hadn’t had sex for a year and a half or longer.”

“What happened there?”

“A mutual friend died of AIDS and both Art and I swore off gay sex. I think he may have backslid—oops, I made a joke. I haven’t, because I can get off on women, too.”

“Did either Madeleine or Lydon ever give you something to keep for them?” Goodman asked. “Maybe a computer disk? Or a locker key?”

“No.”

The detective stood up. “Thanks for your cooperation, Mr. Palmer,” he said.

Morales got to his feet slowly. “So women are better?” he asked Palmer.

“For me. It’s something we each should try and find out for ourselves.”

“Yeah, right,” Morales said.

Goodman sat behind the wheel of the unmarked sedan and scribbled as much as he could remember about the interview on his pad. He’d purposely not taken notes in the shop, because he’d wanted to make the meeting seem as off-the-record as possible. Palmer had responded by providing them with an assortment of informative bits and pieces. He’d also proven once again what Goodman’s years as a detective had already told him—that people went icebergs one better, showing even less than 10 percent on the surface.

So Maddie Gray had been seeing a black guy for about a year. He’d probably been the one who gave her the trinket that was now missing, the bracelet with the tiny golden figurine.
Damn.
He’d convinced himself the murders were the result of blackmail. Now he was back to jealousy. He made a mental note to check the date of John Willins’s birth, just to see if his astrological sign might be the lion.

He turned to Morales. “What’s your gut tell you about Palmer? Believable?”

Morales shrugged. “I don’t know, amigo. Soon as the guy says he’s not gay, I figure he’s a lyin’ sonofabitch. In point of fucking fact.”

“What about the snapshot of him and Maddie going at it?”

“You know the old song about the woman so fine she gives eyesight to the blind? Maddie Gray paradin’ around her pool in her birthday suit musta been finer than that.”

F
IFTY-THREE

T
he two petite Hispanic women were just part of the crowd of reporters, gawkers, and protesters baking in the midday sun in front of the Criminal Courts Building. They wore identical sweaters—bright yellow with red lettering that read “Alien Power.” Returning from lunch, Nikki passed them by, wondering what their grievance, real or imagined, was. In less than thirty seconds, she found out.

On several morning newscasts, a former housekeeper of Ray Wise had accused him of forcing her, a formerly illegal alien, to work for starvation wages. As he limped toward the front doors of the CCB, the two women descended on him, flailing at him with their tiny fists and shouting at him in their native tongue. Blood spurted from his nose.

Far from trying to assist in any way, the crowd seemed to delight in this spectacle. Video cameras clicked on. “Go, aliens,” someone cried, and the crowd took it up like a chant. Nikki rushed to grab an arm of one of the attackers, spinning her away from Wise, who struggled free from the other to hop into the lobby.

Nikki followed him in. A guard rushed past them, heading for the two women, who were running away through the crowd. Wise was dabbing at his bleeding nose with a handkerchief. “Those morons wanted them to kill me,” he shrieked. “What a world!”