The Middle Sister Read online

  He said, “You mean your new BMW M4 isn’t good enough?”

  “The torpedoes who work for the owner of the party house have been trying to tail me. I don’t want them to recognize me the moment I arrive. And it’s a very exclusive party. I need to show up in something that automatically gets me in the front door. What kind of cars do you have this week?”

  “What have you done for me lately?”

  “I busted that fake lawsuit against your shop. The dentist who totaled his Audi after you worked on the brakes.”

  “That was two years ago. I said lately.”

  “What an ungrateful bastard.”

  “I am so touched by your plea, I will allow you to use my personal Porsche 911 Turbo.”

  “I didn’t know you had one.”

  “I just got it last month. Some flake had me do forty thousand dollars of work on the car, then he vanished. In fact, he left the country with the law hot on his trail. I took possession on a mechanic’s lien.”

  We agreed to switch cars at his shop the next afternoon.

  16

  4

  On Saturday morning, I fell back into my normal routine and went to the gym. On the way home, I ran errands: car wash, gas, shoe repair, dry cleaner, and groceries. After the events of the previous three days, the daily grind felt like a trip to Disneyland.

  In the afternoon, I took the freeway over Sepulveda Pass to Franz’s shop and left my BMW with him. He helped me switch my supply bag from my trunk to the Turbo’s trunk and then briefed me on the car’s instruments and controls. The Porsche was painted red, which would be one of my last color choices, but it was a good party color.

  I went back over the hill on Sepulveda Boulevard, rather than the freeway. I was extra careful on the stretch of road entering the tunnel under Mulholland Drive. That particular left turn has a diabolical combination of features: a favorable banking levels off sharply at the same point where the turn’s radius tightens. Lillie Manning put her Bentley into the wall at this same location when she was racing with Rod Damian. If I bent Franz’s Turbo, I would never hear the end of it.

  During the afternoon, I watched football and laid out my clothes for the Blue Jay party. My outfit was intended to not make a statement: light-gray silk blazer, navy-blue shirt, black slacks, and black leather sneakers. I prefer rubber-soled shoes to leather, especially in situations where I might end up running for my life.

  17

  4

  At nine-forty, I rolled the Turbo to a stop in front of Marty Trask’s house. The parking valets were arranging the Ferraris and Lamborghinis up front, to boost the curb appeal. The BMW’s, Audi’s, and other clunkers were being shuttled up and down the hill. A young man wearing a white shirt and tie and a red vest squeezed forty dollars out of me, then graciously let me park the Turbo in front of a yellow Lamborghini, almost directly across the street.

  The character named Corey, who had been helping to terrorize Cal Lamont two nights before, was the bouncer. He stood at the open door, talking to a blonde wearing a beige lace dress. What the blonde was wearing or not wearing under the dress was a matter of conjecture. Every time she laughed, she rocked her head back and forth. They were probably discussing the connection between the galaxies’ rates of rotation and dark matter.

  When I was dealing with the parking valet, Corey had been watching me. As I approached the door, he said, “How do you like your Turbo?”

  The blonde turned and sized me up.

  I gave them my aw-shucks smile. “Gets me from point A to point B.”

  The blonde laughed and rocked her head. Corey waved me inside. I kept moving.

  In the living room, a sweeping expanse of city lights blazed through the glass walls. A knot of six or seven people stood in one corner, and smaller, uniformly attractive groups were elsewhere in the room. Many held a drink in their hand, but nobody was guzzling. There was merriment in all the chitchat, but no single voice stood out.

  There were fewer people at the next level, down by the pool. Their appearance and demeanor were more or less identical to the living room crew. If I had spent more time mingling with the guests at both levels, I probably would have heard identical conversations. Marty Trask was nowhere to be seen. I descended one level farther down the hillside.

  The lowest level was unoccupied. I leaned over the railing and looked down at a steep, chaparral-covered hillside falling a good hundred yards to the houses below. The canyon wall on the south blocked most of the jetliner view of the city. Aside from the well-mannered murmuring and laid-back laughter from above, it was quiet.

  A figure came down the shadowy stairs and into the dim light. It was the blonde in the lace dress, carefully holding a highball glass in each hand. She looked around and muttered, “Somebody was supposed to be here.”

  She looked back up the stairs, then at me. “You’ll do.” She approached me and held out the drinks. “They’re both the same, vodka rocks. Take your choice. My name is Electra.”

  I took a glass. “Thank you. My name is Bill Edwards. I’ve never been to this party.”

  I rested my drink on the railing, and a new voice sounded. “Your name is Jackson K. Salvo, and you are not an invited guest.” The voice belonged to Corey, who was trotting down the stairs.

  Behind him was the bearded man I had seen driving the white Chevy SS Thursday night and Friday morning. They were followed by an Asian man the size of a commercial refrigerator. Electra darted up the stairs.

  Corey said, “You really think we’re too stupid to recognize you?”

  “I’ve been interviewed on local TV a few times. Everyone knows me.”

  The guy with the beard swaggered forward. He was a solid-looking five-feet-six and spoke with a hollow nonchalance. “My name is June. You think that’s funny?”

  “No, but I’ll bet the guys in your high school did.”

  “You think it’s funny, don’t you?”

  “The Atlanta Falcons had a quarterback named June Jones. I never thought that was funny, but the fact that a shrimp like you is posing as hired muscle . . . now that’s funny.”

  He took one step forward, and I slowly shifted my feet.

  The Asian guy put an unusually large hand on June’s shoulder. “Let’s just do our job.”

  The torpedoes were dressed in slacks, unwrinkled long-sleeve shirts, and polished shoes. Everything fit perfectly. The colors varied, but the outfits had the look of uniforms. They patted me down, marched me up the stairs into a side door, then up an inside stairway. We emerged into a spotless, gleaming-white underground garage. Lighting was flush-mounted in the ceiling. The only ornamentation was a red neon sign on the wall that said FERRARI. A driveway ramp curved up toward the street. Marty’s black BMW 7-Series sedan, a dark-blue Ferrari convertible, and a silver 1950’s Porsche coupe were backed side-by-side against a wall.

  June led me to a long, narrow table and said, “Empty your pockets and empty the wallet.”

  I placed the following on the table: folded currency from my left-front pants pocket, four flat keys on a chain and the Porsche key from the right-front, card wallet from the right hip, penlight and iPhone from the left-inside jacket pocket, and a few three-by-five cards and a short ballpoint from the right.

  When I was pulling the ID cards from my wallet, footsteps sounded. I turned and faced Marty Trask. He was wearing a blue suit that fit him the way handmade bespoke suits are paid to fit. His pinstripe shirt was open at the neck.

  I slipped my folding knife from my waistband and set it on the table with a flourish, like a chef placing a cherry on top of an ice cream sundae.

  Marty looked around at the hired help. “Didn’t you search him?”

  Corey said, “We patted him down for a pistol.”

  I said, “Don’t be too tough on them, Marty. The knife is all black. It doesn’t show against the black slacks and the dark shirt.”

  Marty ignored me, stepped closer to the table, and regarded my possessions. “Benchmade combat kn
ife, pocket money, and the intrepid detective’s note-taking system.” He stepped closer and tested the penlight beam against his hand. ”Nice little light.”

  He set the light back on the table and looked at me. This was my first close look at Marty Trask. His dark, wide-set eyes did not point exactly the same direction. It was a small imperfection, nowhere near lopsided, but it put a trace of venom in his gaze.

  He said, “What happened to Lillie Manning?”

  “The autopsy results aren’t in yet, but the cops are calling it an overdose. The cocaine tested almost pure, and there was no evidence of injury.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “A friend of mine is an LAPD detective.”

  “On the news they said you were the one who found her.”

  “Her sister Zara was with me.”

  “How did you manage to find Lillie?”

  “One of her girlfriends told me she didn’t know where Lillie was hiding out. I didn’t believe her. Zara called the same girl from my office and sweet-talked the information out of her.”

  “Who was the girlfriend?”

  “Lillie’s oldest friend, from preschool. Totally wholesome, not a club-hopper or a party girl.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “You wouldn’t know her. She works with needy children and abused animals.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “I don’t burn my sources.”

  June said, “He could be persuaded.”

  Marty ignored him. “What was Zara Manning doing in your office?”

  I said, “Her mother asked her to help me. Zara knows a lot of people, and we went to Lillie’s hangouts and asked questions. Wherever Zara goes, she gets the royal treatment. Even with her help, I didn’t make much progress on the first day.”

  “What did you do after you found out where Lillie was staying?”

  “Zara and I drove straight there. Nobody answered the front door, and we went around to the back. We saw Lillie on the living room floor, through the glass doors.”

  “How did you get into the house?”

  “The sliding glass door in back was unlocked.”

  “When did you know she was dead?”

  “The odor was the first hint, then I got up close and saw the insects, and she was turning green and starting to bloat.”

  Marty paused for a moment. His eyes were still aimed at me, more or less, but they were no longer probing me.

  I continued. “I called my cop friend at the West LA station, and they came out and investigated, took me in for an interview. You know the rest.”

  “No, I do not know the rest. You might have had something to do with Lillie’s death. You might have found something interesting in the house and taken it with you. You might have some other angle. Why are you still working the case?”

  “I was hired by Greta Manning to bring back her daughter, and I didn’t do a clean job of it. I like to get to the bottom of things.”

  “Who’s paying you for the additional work?”

  “This one’s on the house.”

  “How noble.”

  “I’m being practical. In my line of work, I can’t afford to get a reputation for bringing back runaway children in a box. You said you heard my name on the news. That means you and a few million other people got the impression I fucked up. I need to find out exactly what happened, so I can polish my investigative technique.”

  Marty’s voice took on the same false-friendly tone as his threat to break Cal Lamont’s hand Thursday night. “Salvo, I think you’re feeding me an artfully constructed line of shit.”

  “I think you had a role in Lillie Manning’s death.”

  He stepped closer. “Keep talking.”

  “Lillie had a fight with her mother and got her allowance cut back. She thought it would be cute to run away and make some fast cash as a dope dealer. Her boyfriend Rod Damian was helping her, and he probably didn’t like the risk, but he had to keep on her good side. Lillie was scheduled to get her inheritance in less than a year, and Rod’s primary goal in life was to be on that gravy train when it arrived. Am I making sense so far?”

  Marty walked over to the Asian guy, spoke privately with him, then looked back at me. “Let’s go to my office.”

  He led me through a door and up a softly carpeted stairway. Corey and June tailed along behind, but Marty waved them off. He pointed me through a door, closed it behind us, and turned a dial on the wall. The lights came on low. By my reckoning, we were one level below the living room.

  He sat behind a piano-black desk and pointed me to a guest chair. I took a seat and looked around. In the low light, the carpet, walls, and furnishings were a grim mix of black, gray, brown, and tan. The room had the austere, expensive look of a high-powered executive office. The only bright spot was an antique floor-standing radio, probably from the 1930s. It looked new. I wondered if it was functional. I wondered if I was going to get out of this house in one piece.

  Marty’s desk was flanked by a pair of tall, narrow windows showing the view down toward West Hollywood and beyond. Marty was positioned squarely between the two pillars of light. The only items on the desk were a hardwired speakerphone, a pad of letter-size quadrille paper, and a half dozen felt-tip pens in various colors. No computer, no desk pad, no desk accessories.

  Marty pulled out his top-right drawer, produced a long- barrel Glock automatic pistol, and set it on the desk, aimed in my general direction. I knew the caliber couldn’t have been bigger than .45, but the hole in the muzzle reminded me of the main guns on a battleship.

  I said, “Isn’t that a target pistol?”

  “That’s what they tell me. I like this particular model because I can hit with it, but let’s get back to business. You were telling me I killed Lillie Manning. I’d like to hear more about that.”

  “Lillie was hiding out at a friend’s house in the Castellammare district, trying to be a coke dealer. You did her a favor and fronted the initial inventory, probably a kilo. She wasn’t accustomed to the high quality, and she got carried away and accidentally overdosed.”

  “That’s a fascinating tale. Tell me more.”

  “You said maybe I found something interesting in the house. What’s interesting is I didn’t find anything. A certain amount of cash and coke had to be changing hands, but when the cops found her, she only had seven hundred dollars in her purse and one 8-ball. That was consistent with what I saw, and it was well short of what her inventory and cash receipts should have been. I know it’s possible Lillie stashed the goods somewhere, but based on my cynical interpretation of human nature, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that someone came along and grabbed the goods. I’d like to know exactly what happened to Lillie, and I’d be interested to hear what you know.”

  Marty made notes on his quad pad. I couldn’t see what he wrote, but his small, neatly printed letters were what a graphologist would call a scientist’s handwriting. Marty must have suspected both Cal Lamont and Cinnamon Strauss of having been complicit in Lillie’s death. He had to suspect Lillie’s boyfriend, Rod. He also suspected me.

  While he wrote, I considered my exit options. Overpowering Marty and getting out of the house would be a long shot. The door through which we had entered the office would take me back down to Marty’s torpedoes. The doorway on the other side of the room might take me to an exit from the house or it might get me in worse trouble. Even if I escaped the house, Franz’s Turbo would be left behind, and I would have to walk—or more likely run—two miles down to Sunset Boulevard.

  Marty looked up at me. His eyes were still slightly out of alignment. “When the police interviewed you, did you mention my name?”

  “They never pushed me into a corner where I had to bring your name in.”

  “When did you first hear my name?”

  “When you opened your club ShangriLA, back about five or six years ago.”

  “When was it I became part of your investigation?”

  “When
I learned Lillie patronized your club.”

  “What did you tell the police?”

  “I told them how Zara and I went to Coucher Du Soleil, Katana, Chateau Marmont, other places on the Strip, and we asked about Lillie. I told about my interviewing Rod Damian, two of Lillie’s girlfriends, and the younger sister Arden Manning. I told how Zara called Lillie’s oldest friend and turned on the charm, and the friend spilled, and we found Lillie deceased. The cops didn’t lean on me very hard. They let me go in two hours.”

  Marty looked over his notes and said, “Friday morning you were driving through Brentwood, following Cinnamon Strauss. Why were you following her?”

  “She used to hang out with Lillie. She might have known something about her final hours.”

  “When you were following her, why did you peel off?”

  “She was looking at me in her rear-view, and I already had her plate. When I noticed your torpedoes were tailing me, I bailed.”

  “How did you know they were my boys?”

  “At that point in time I didn’t know who they were. I thought they might be cops. We were formally introduced just a few minutes ago, when they were escorting me to this meeting.” That wasn’t exactly true, but I didn’t want Marty to know I was staring through the window Thursday night when he and his helpers were socializing with Cal Lamont.

  “Where did the license plate on Cinnamon’s car lead you?”

  “To an apartment in Brentwood, on Darlington Avenue. The apartment was vacated, so I talked to a neighbor.”

  “What did the neighbor tell you?”

  “Cinnamon used to be a fitness star with her own TV show. She was living in that small apartment because she was on the skids. The neighbor had no idea where Cinnamon moved to.”

  If Marty or his people had talked to Myrna the nosy neighbor, and she had told them what she told me, Marty would know I was stringing him along. He didn’t react to my answer, so it looked like I skated on that one.