The Trials of Nikki Hill (5 page)

She’d flashed him a wry smile. “Well, your man Kehoe is long gone and I’m back. And if you try fucking with this foolish and naive young woman, you’re going to wind up limping a lot more than you do now.”

The memory of that moment brought a smile to her lips as she looked up at Wise, standing before her in the drab room at Robbery-Homicide. “I’ll take over now,” he repeated. “You can go.”

“Joe Walden wants me here,” she said.

“What Joe wants,” Wise replied sharply, “is for that dirt-bag to be put away for the rest of his antisocial life. The only way that’s going to happen is for you to hand over the earphones and let me start making my notes.”

“I was given an assignment, Ray. If you want to hear what’s going on in the interrogation room, I suggest—”

She was going to suggest that Wise try to talk Wasson into parting with another headset. But she was interrupted by the arrival of the district attorney.

He looked particularly formidable in a double-breasted dark blue suit that accentuated his broad shoulders. He raised a curious eyebrow at Wise and said, “Ray, what are you doing here?”

“Nikki’s been at it for several hours,” Wise replied almost sheepishly. “I thought I’d spell her. Let her get some of her own casework done.”

“That was thoughtful of you,” Walden said wryly. He turned to Nikki and asked, “Anything new?”

“Jamal Deschamps told the detectives that he’s suffered from blackouts for a number of years. Possibly the result of drug use in his teens.”

“A fugue-state defense?” Wise said, shaking his head. “That’s pathetic enough to make my day. This’ll be like catching fish in a bathtub.”

Nikki was reminded of another seemingly absurd defense. She said, “There are a few... problem areas.”

“Such as?” the D.A. asked.

“Deschamps is supposed to have brutally murdered one woman, dumped her body in a trash bin, then moved on to a nearby club where he proceeded to pick up another woman and have sex with her.”

“Well, you know what Mick Jagger says,” Wise smirked. “Some guys can’t get no satisfaction.”

“Mick say anything about why a man would do a dump job in an alley, then come back later and stick around for the cops to show up?”

“He returned for the ring,” Wise said.

Nikki wondered how Wise had found out about the ring.

Had Walden already brought him up to speed? If so, why had her boss expressed surprise at finding him there? More likely Wise had his own private source in Homicide; one member of the good ol’ boys’ club helping out another. She supposed she could learn a trick or two from the man, if she could stand being around him for longer than a few minutes at a time.

“Then there’s the anonymous caller who sent the police to the alley,” she said. “Why didn’t he leave a name?”

“Please,” Wise said impatiently. “You live in that part of town, look out of the window and see a body, maybe you call nine-one-one. But you sure as hell don’t give ’em your name, because in that neighborhood it doesn’t pay to get mixed up with the cops.”

“Call wasn’t made from a private phone,” Walden said. “It came from a pay phone at a service station about a mile away.”

“Sure would be nice if the police could locate the caller,” Nikki said. “Maybe he even saw who put the body in the Dumpster.”

“The investigators are doing their best to find him,” Walden said. “Meanwhile, if we’re going to arraign Mr. Deschamps, we’ve only”—he consulted his wristwatch— “thirty-nine hours left. Opinions?”

“Is there any doubt?” Wise said. “Full court press.”

“Nikki?” Walden asked.

She sighed. “He’s what we got. But unless some really solid evidence turns up—hair, fiber, eyewitness—I wouldn’t want to prosecute him.”

“No chance of that,” Wise said.

“You’re forgetting, Ray, you’re only the head deputy D.A.,” Walden said. “If you’d like to make that kind of call, maybe you should think about challenging me next election. Until then I’ll be the one deciding who prosecutes whom.

Now why don’t we leave and let my new special assistant get back to work?”

Walden turned to her. “By the way, Meg’s arranging an interview for you with the
L.A. Times.
” Meg Fisher was the office’s public relations manager. “She’ll let you know when.” He smiled and added, “I like the bare leg look.” Then he made his exit.

“Nice to know what it takes to get ahead,” Wise said, looking at her legs.

Her first inclination was to tug down her skirt. But the hell with that. “I suppose this means you’re not going to be wearing your socks tomorrow, huh, Ray?”

Wise grimaced and limped from the room. Nikki replaced the headset and went back to work.

F
IVE

D
etective Edward Goodman didn’t much care for his partner, Carlos Morales, but he didn’t dislike him enough to do anything about it. He figured that if he requested a new partner, he might just draw one he’d hate. Carlos was okay, so long as you didn’t pay any attention to the bullshit that came out of his mouth all day long or you didn’t try to buck him when he had his mind set on something.

Presently, Carlos’s mind was set on building a case against Jamal Deschamps. This was fine with Goodman, because it would keep Carlos out of his gray hair while he looked into other possibilities. At the moment, his partner was rooting for clues at Deschamps’s apartment, allowing Goodman to join his cohorts and the crime lab team as they searched for truth at Madeleine Gray’s Laurel Canyon home. They had their job cut out for them. The building was a wanna-be mansion, a seven-thousand-square-foot, three-story collection of nooks and crannies perched high up along the canyon wall.

Goodman huffed and puffed up and down three sets of stairs and counted fourteen rooms, at least three of them of fices. The largest office, at the rear of the ground floor, looked out on a slab of rock that surrounded a black-sand pool constructed to resemble a natural pond beneath a fake waterfall.

Maddie must have needed a map to get around the place,
Goodman thought. Assuming she spent time there. He knew the kinds of hours TV people put in on the job. In the long ago, he’d been a technical assistant on a horseshit cop show, a thankless task since none of the information he provided was ever used. But it had helped send one of his kids—was it the one from his first marriage, or from his second, he could never remember—to college.

He paused at the threshold to a tiny study that the lab people had yet to invade. He was perfectly happy to wait for them to do their thing before he did his, but the messiness of the room intrigued him. Someone, possibly Maddie Gray but more likely her killer, had torn through it, opening drawers, scattering papers on the carpet, and yes, best of all, popping the lock on a filing cabinet. Definitely the killer.

Goodman squinted at the distant cabinet, hoping it wasn’t just a trick of the light that the metal around the lock appeared buckled. He was about to enter the room for a closer look when Detective Gwen Harriman joined him, a lopsided grin on her suntanned face.

“Hey, pops,” she said, “some pad, huh?”

Though he was approaching retirement age, Goodman was more amused than offended by the “pops” business. The previous year, when Harriman first joined Robbery-Homicide, they’d had a short romance. It had ended with him telling her to go out and find somebody her own age. Looking at her, with her red hair cut short now, curling around her sweet face, he was sorry she’d taken his advice. “The floor plans are a mite confusing,” Goodman told her, “but this sure beats my little apartment all to hell.”

“I sorta like your little apartment,” Gwen said.

“At least you could tell right away if it was a primary crime scene,” he said. The team had been going over the Gray house for nearly two hours without turning up enough evidence to indicate that its owner definitely had been murdered there.

“This room saw some action sure enough,” Gwen said, scanning the study. “But no rough stuff. Furniture’s too neat. Chairs are in place. No blood.”

“It’s a likely theft scene,” Goodman said, moving toward the violated cabinet.

“Now, pops, you’re old enough to know the techs haven’t dusted in here yet.”

“Never could resist a busted-open drawer,” he said.

“Well, let me tempt you with something even more irresistible.”

Goodman rewarded her with a suggestive Groucho Marx eyebrow wiggle.

“That’s cute,” she said. “Like Tom Selleck in the TV show about the private eye.”

He sighed at the gap between their points of reference.

“Anyway, we got a room downstairs shows signs of a struggle. Wanna see?”

“Lead the way,” he said.

The room was just off of a formal dining area. It was surprisingly bright, considering there was only one window and the walls were a deep dark green, broken by paintings of flowers in white frames. The polished wooden floor was bare. There were two stuffed chairs and a sofa, all covered with the same white material. A butler’s table near the window contained various bottles of booze, a small ice chest, and an assortment of cocktail glasses. A middle-aged woman from the crime lab whose name he thought was Marcella sat on the wooden floor collecting scrapings.

“Blood drop,” the woman told him. “More over there on that thing.” She pointed to a metal sculpture, an orb, resting on the floor.

Goodman hunkered down and studied the brown smear on the orb’s surface.

“Not much,” the crime lab woman said. “But we’re so good we don’t need much.”

“The vic’s body says she really got knocked around,” Gwen said. “I don’t see it happening here. Floor’s too unmarked.”

Goodman studied the floor, which was surprisingly glossy and unscratched except for a worn area near the entryway. “I think we got a missing rug,” he said.

Marcella agreed. “We’ll check fibers, come up with a description for you.”

“Body could’ve been rolled up in the rug,” Gwen said.

“Maybe,” Goodman said. “Yeah, I’m beginning to like this room.”

“Was there a rug in that Dumpster with the body, Marcy?” Gwen asked.

“I didn’t root through the garbage myself,” the lab lady replied. “Seniority counts for something, thank God. But there wasn’t any rug on the list.”

Goodman looked at the table with the booze collection. “How many cocktail glasses come in a set?” he asked.

“Six, maybe eight,” Gwen said.

“We got five here,” he said, indicating the square faceted tumblers resting on their rims. “Water in an ice bucket suggests drinks were served. But no dirty glasses.”

“They’re not in the kitchen, either,” Marcella informed them. She rose with a nearly polite grunt and placed her baggie with blood scrapings into a metal box. “Here’s something,” she said, plucking another baggie from the box. “Found it under the couch.”

Gwen lifted the plastic container with latex-covered thumb and finger, studied it for a few seconds, then held it out for Goodman’s inspection. He squinted at a dainty gold bracelet with a tiny gold charm in the shape of some kind of animal.

“That a dog?” he asked.

“A lion,” Gwen said. “Dogs are the little critters, pops. Lions are... bigger.”

“And the inscription on the bracelet’s plate?” he asked.

Gwen squinted. “It says, ‘Dear M. We’ll always have Paris. Love, J.’ ”

“Hmmm. Find anything to suggest who ‘J.’ might be?” Goodman asked.

“Not yet,” Gwen said. “We’ve still got about a dozen more rooms to check.”

“Don’t waste your time here, then.”

“Right,” she said, “but remember, Eddie.”

“Remember what?”

“We’ll always have the Buena Vista Motel in Hollywood.”

S
IX

O
ne of several unpleasant consequences of Nikki being party to the destruction of evidence in the Mason Durant case had been an insomnia that neither prescription drugs nor whiskey was able to medicate successfully. As time passed, however, the feelings of frustration and guilt that were keeping her awake had begun to fade.

Then, nearly four months into her Compton exile, she had received her first phone call from Durant. “Do you accept the charge?” a disinterested operator had asked.

Nikki knew she should have said no. The man was a murderer and the world was better off with him behind bars. And yet...

“Hey, lady D.A.” The voice was hoarse and phlegmy, barely resembling what she remembered of Durant’s gruff bark. “How’s it goin’ in Compton? Guess you get to put away more brothers and sisters than Downtown, huh?”

“What can I do for you, Mr. Durant?”

His laugh ended in a racking cough. “I think you done enough, don’t you?” he wheezed.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked, a bit more sympathetically than she’d intended.

“This place don’t agree with me at all. Had a little trouble, uh, adjustin’. Lots of big white boys here in Fo’som. Got my arm broke. Some ribs. Restin’ up from that in the hospital, I
con
tracted this lung problem.”

He was a convict, she told herself, and cons, even the most brutish of them, had the uncanny ability to sense weakness and focus on it. “I’m sorry to hear you’re not well,” she said, back on guard now.

“Cough keeps the fags off my ass.”

“Why’d you phone me, Mr. Durant?”

“Heard you put two more brothers in the joint yesterday. Was wonderin’ why you do that, why you wanna play the white man’s game like that.”

“Those brothers killed a baby in a drive-by shooting, Mr. Durant. A little boy. He was a brother, too. Those two gangsta punks got what they deserve. They belong in the joint. Just like you.”

“I don’t belong here, lady.”

“A jury believed otherwise.” This conversation was useless, she thought. It was painful but it didn’t qualify as penance. “I’m hanging up now.”

“You took away my life,” he croaked.

“Don’t try calling me anymore,” she said, her voice starting to shake. As she replaced the receiver, she could hear the echo of his wracking cough.

The sleepless nights started again. She considered sending Durant’s public defender an anonymous note about the hot dog. Particles of it probably still rested in the pocket of the coat in the evidence box. The problem with that idea was that the public defender wasn’t the sort of guy who’d put himself out because of an anonymous note. She doubted the judge would, either.