The Trials of Nikki Hill (31 page)

“Tell me about that,” Goodman said.

“She said they were just annoyances. Not ‘life-threatening.’ That’s the exact word she used.”

“Maybe she was wrong. No. It had to be an accident. Why would Cooper’s people have gone after her? She’d resigned from the case.”

“I don’t know,” Nikki said.

“Jesus,” he said. “I just realized...it was my phone call to you that made you late to your meeting with her.”

She’d forgotten his call. “What was it you were trying to tell me? Something about my father?”

“A vice cop named Lattimer has been asking about homicide cases involving William Hill.”

“Were there any?”

He nodded. “Rudy Martinez, the son of a Latin movie star.”

The name meant nothing to her. “Why would he check up on my father?”

“The dirty trickster theory,” Goodman replied. “Carlos is being bothered by repo men. People are asking my neighbors questions about me.”

“Ray and I have been having our problems, too. Who do you suppose the trickster is? Doyle?”

“He gets my vote.” Goodman felt a strange tingle vibrate through him. It took a few seconds for him to realize it was anger.

“If Lattimer’s on Doyle’s payroll,” Nikki said, “it would explain how the fake Internal Affairs guys found out that Nita Morgan accused you of blackmail. Lattimer could have picked that up in your squadroom.”

Goodman nodded, his mind making a slight detour. If Lattimer was working for Doyle, where did Gwen fit in? His heart started beating double time. His anxiety must have shown because Nikki reached out and pressed her fingertips against the back of his hand, as if to calm him.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, fine.” He wanted a crack at Doyle, wanted to see the guy up close. See if he could make the fat boy sweat. Maybe even bleed.

Nikki read him like a book. “I just shook you loose of one sticky situation, detective. Don’t get yourself in another. Not with the trial starting in two days.”

“Right,” he said. “It’s just that I know how guys like Doyle work. They think they don’t have to play by the rules. There’s only one way to deal with ’em.”

“This Doyle asshole isn’t very high on my love meter, either,” she said. “But breaking rules now will only make Anna Marie Dayne’s job easier when she gets you on the stand.”

Relaxing just a little, he said, “Dayne’s tough, huh?”

“Tough? You can bet she’ll be going for your throat,” Nikki said. “But if you do anything boneheaded that messes up our case, like starting some bullshit vendetta against Doyle, I’ll tear out your heart.”

S
IXTY-ONE

T
he Culver City branch of the Bank of California was jammed with customers, but William Hill stood a head taller than most. Stiff of back and firm of jaw, with his neatly barbered hair and his dark suit immaculately pressed, he looked more like a vice president of the bank than a part-time security guard.

He spotted Nikki as soon as she entered. His eyes seemed to dull as she approached him. “Hello, Nicolette,” he said. “You doin’ your banking here now?”

“We have to talk.”

“I’m working, case you didn’t notice.”

She saw him shift his weight, ready to move away, to leave her once more. “Rudy Martinez,” she said.

His eyes widened at the name. “W-who?”

“One of your old cases,” she said. “I looked it up before coming here. Rudy was the son of a movie star. Got himself shot. You were the first policeman on the scene.”

His eyes went to the clock at the rear of the bank. “I go on my break in seventeen minutes. There’s a coffee shop in the middle of the block.”

He was there in exactly eighteen minutes by Nikki’s watch.

He barely had time to sit down across from her when the waitress put a cup of coffee before him.

“Come here a lot, huh?” Nikki asked.

“It’s convenient,” he said. “What’s your interest in the Martinez case?”

“Tell me about it.”

“Why should I?”

She realized once again that he would never play the father’s role for her. The only reason he was sitting there having coffee was because something about the death of Rudy Martinez was important enough for him to tolerate her presence.

“This was a mistake,” she said, rising.

“No. Wait,” he said. “What do you wanna know?”

“Anything you can tell me,” she said, sitting down again.

“Not much to tell. Me and Fred Dugan got there minutes after the shooting. This was maybe two years before old Fred dropped dead with a coronary.”

“Who shot the boy?”

“Young Martinez was acting as middleman, buying guns for kids at his private school. The sellers were three army men who’d stolen the weapons from the Fort Collins armory. They said the boy tried to shortchange ’em. So they blew him away and took the money and the guns.”

“That’s all there was to it?”

He didn’t reply.

“Well?”

“Why you asking these questions?”

“Meeting like this isn’t any easier for me than it is for you,” Nikki said. “That should give you an idea of how important it is for me to find out what you know.”

He took a sip of coffee and slumped a little in his chair. “The boy was lying in his own blood on the dirty warehouse floor. I had to shift him to get at a pulse, to see if he was still alive, which he wasn’t. A stack of bills poked out of his shirt. I guess it was the money he was holding out on those soldiers.”

He lowered his voice until it became almost a bass rumble. “Fred saw the money and he took it. Just reached down and grabbed it off that dead boy’s body.”

“What’d you do?”

“My partner had just stolen money, evidence in a murder. What could I do? It was tough enough being a black cop back in those days. If I’d turned on Fred, that would have been the end for me.”

“Fred do anything like that before?” Nikki asked.

“Not before. Not after. The one time was enough for the both of us.”

She wanted to ask a question, but couldn’t. He must have seen it on her face. “No, Nicolette,” he said. “I didn’t take a penny. Thirty hundred-dollar bills. Fred wanted me to take half. Not exactly a fortune, but Tricia was in the hospital having your sister—”

“Half sister.”

“Anyway, the insurance wasn’t covering it all. Expenses were mounting up. Still, I’ve never been a thief. I couldn’t take that boy’s blood money.”

“Was there an inquiry?”

Her father shook his head. “No. Nobody said anything about money, except the soldiers who shot him. They didn’t know the boy was carrying it or they’d have taken it along with the rest. The other schoolboys in on the deal didn’t say anything about it, if they knew. They were too busy talking to their daddies’ lawyers.”

“What if somebody was looking for a way of making trouble? ” Nikki asked. “Could they find out about the missing money?”

“It was so long ago, and it isn’t anybody’s lost millions we’re talking about. Dugan is six feet under. So’s Nestor Martinez. What’s to find out? Anyway, why would anybody want to make trouble for me?” His eyes met hers. “Oh. Of course, it’s not me. I’m not the one in the newspaper every day.”

“Sins of the father,” she said.

“I knew the moment Fred picked up that money I should have grabbed it out of his fist and stuck it back in the dead boy’s shirt. I just stood by and pretended it didn’t happen.”

“Like you pretended I didn’t happen.”

He sat frozen for a few seconds. “I have to get back to work,” he said, starting to rise.

“Please.” She reached out to him, placed a hand on his arm. “I know what it’s like when somebody you love dies. After Blackie was killed I was full of sorrow and self-pity and anger. I wanted somebody to blame. Not the little punk who stuck a gun to his head. That was too easy. I started thinking: Why was Blackie in that tavern at that very moment when he could have been with me? I blamed him. Then I blamed myself. It took me a while to get past that, to see the situation as it was. Dumb bad luck. No rhyme, no reason. Mama died bringing me into the world. I’m thirty-three years old. That’s how long Mama’s been gone. You can’t still blame me.”

He slumped against the seat, suddenly showing his age. “You never knew her,” he said. “Never knew how good . . .” He waved a hand as if to dismiss the thought. “I never blamed you.”

“What was it, then? Where have you been my whole life?”

“I lost the woman I loved,” he said, shifting on his chair. “I couldn’t hardly take care of myself, much less this little... creature I couldn’t even stop from crying. You were better off with your grandma. I thought so then and, seeing the way you turned out, I know I did the right thing.”

“That’s bullshit. You dumped me on Grandma and that was that. A dinky little toy at Christmas and on my birthday, most of ’em dropped off when I wasn’t home.”

“It was the best I could do,” he said. “I worked nights, Christmas, Easter, whatever shifts my white police brothers didn’t want.”

“You believe what you’re saying?”

“If I didn’t, I’d have to admit to myself I was a coward who screwed up my daughter’s life and my own.”

“Funny,” she said, “I don’t recall you ever calling me your daughter before.”

“My failing. My most-grievous failing.” He grabbed her hand and squeezed it. “I really do have to get back to work now,” he said. He stood, removing a thin, creased wallet from his pocket.

“Let me take care of it,” she said.

He gave her a rueful smile and dropped a few dollars on the table. “Least a man can do is treat his daughter to a cup of coffee every thirty years or so.”

S
IXTY-TWO

R
ay Wise was throwing a fit. “Where the hell have you

been?” he demanded, standing in the doorway to her office.

“Had some errands that couldn’t wait.”

“We’re starting a trial in two days with the eyes of the whole damned world on us and you’re off running around doing bullshit errands.”

She flashed on her father calling her his daughter for the first time in known history. “Let’s get this straight, Ray,” she said. “I don’t have to justify to you how I spend my time. At least I don’t waste it running around whining like a baby with a chafed butt. Calm down. You’re right about the eyes of the world being on us, and you’re looking like a loser.”

He wrinkled his face as if he were tasting her words, then the fight went out of him, like air escaping a tire. He nodded meekly and eased onto a chair. “I made the deadbeat dad list today. I’m supposed to owe forty-two thousand dollars in back child support.”

“Forty-two thousand? You got that kind of money?”

“I don’t owe any money. Even that penny-pinching witch I married says she’s up to date. It’s a glitch in the computers.”

“We’d better go talk to Joe.”

“About my child support, for Christ’s sake?”

“That and a few other similar matters,” she said.

Walden and Wise listened in silence as Nikki presented a somewhat abridged list of the annoyances, minor and major, that recently had beset those connected with the prosecution of Dyana Cooper Willins. When she’d finished, she could see that Wise was a true believer, while the D.A. was withholding judgment.

“I’ve heard of dirty tricks,” Wise said, “but this is bullshit.”

“Just relax a minute, Ray,” Walden said. “Nikki, nothing you’ve told us here has any solid substance. Not the comment poor Dimitra made to you, nor the fake IAD detectives looking for dirt at Detective Goodman’s apartment, nor the computers giving you and Ray a hard time. There’s no proof it all stems from one source.”

“We might ask Ray’s ex-housemaid what convinced her to go public.”

“A waste of time,” Walden said. “She’s not going to admit anybody paid her off. I’d be very surprised if anyone did. She’s an opportunist taking advantage of Ray’s celebrity. It happens to everybody who winds up in the public eye.”

“If I’m right, the tricks are going to get dirtier.”

Walden nodded. “The upside of that is, whoever’s playing them will have to show more of his hand.”

S
IXTY-THREE

F
ive hours later, Nikki sat on the steps just outside Virgil’s open front door, observing the large moon floating over the darkened patio and trying to shove the day’s events from her thoughts. She sipped her drink, a delicious rum concoction, and listened to Pharoah Sanders’s version of Coltrane’s “After the Rain” on the stereo. Soon the pungent smells of garlic and tomato sauce drifted through the door. Virgil harmonized with Marvin Gaye on “Feel All My Love Inside.” A cat pranced across the patio, chasing something tiny in the shadows. Just as the steel clamps of tension completely relaxed their grip, a neighbor turned on a television. The measured speech of a news anchor began describing the “shifting attitudes toward Dyana Cooper as the trial date approaches.”

She took a final deep breath of honeysuckle mixed with simmering dinner spices, stood and went inside the apartment.

Virgil was busy in the kitchenette. He grinned at her. “Come sample the wares.”

She sat down on a leather barstool at the kitchenette counter. He dipped a toe of French bread into tomato sauce for her. “Courtboullion sauce,” he said.

It was delicious, tangy with spices she couldn’t begin to identify.

“My mama’s Creole recipe.”

“Lots of garlic,” she said.

“Lovers’ clove.” He moved around the counter and embraced her. “We’re not about to go kissing anybody else.” He put that thought into action.

They’d just finished the redfish courtboullion. Virgil was doing something in the kitchen with ice cream and an orange liqueur when her cellular phone rang.

Lulled by the food and the company, she answered without a second’s thought. The voice was tinny, vaguely masculine. “Nikki Hill?”

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“Do the right thing about Dyana Cooper, Nikki, or there could be consequences. You could even wind up back in Compton. Or worse.”

“Who is this?” The caller had hung up.

Virgil was placing a dish of ice cream in front of her. “What’s up, Red?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Some weird-sounding guy. Threatening me.”

He grabbed the instrument from her hand and pressed star-six-nine. She watched as he listened for a beat, then, annoyed, clicked off the phone. “Call was made from a cellular. Can’t trace it back. What’d he tell you, exactly?”