The Beverly Malibu, page 3
“I guess I screamed,” Aimee said. “The landlady and some other tenants came running down the hall, and I wanted someone to go in after Aunt Paula but then she came out—”
Kate asked, “Do you know if anybody else went in the apartment afterward, before police officers arrived?”
“No,” Paula answered. “I wouldn’t allow it. Not out of any sense of duty to the police. I couldn’t have anyone see what we saw. I closed the door and made everyone go down to the first floor until the officers arrived.”
Kate asked quietly of both women, “At that point you believed the victim was dead?”
Aimee looked stricken. “I never—”
Again Paula patted Aimee’s hand. “He indeed was dead. I checked. I—” She put her cigarette on the ashtray and picked up the drink from the coffee table and sipped from it. “I went to him, felt for a pulse in the neck.” Her slender shoulders were rigidly straight; the hand holding the drink was slightly tremulous.
Remembering the bloody-eyed apparition in the bedroom next door, Kate looked at Paula Grant with deepening respect. The strength in this woman was as much a matter of will as a natural attribute.
Paula said evenly, “I saw how he was handcuffed. I turned to pick up the phone to call the police right then, but I saw the cord was cut. I didn’t touch anything, do anything more—I simply left. By then I was very frightened.”
“Anyone would be,” Kate murmured. She asked, “What you saw—did you mention any details to the other tenants?”
“Only that he was dead, that someone had done something terrible to him. Nothing more.”
“Paula,” Taylor said, “while you were in the apartment, did you happen to look in any of the other rooms?”
“No,” she answered. Her eyes widened; there was an almost imperceptible shudder in the thin body. “Do you mean you think someone…could have…”
“Not likely,” Kate told her. “You found the door open. A criminal wouldn’t ordinarily draw attention to himself by leaving a door open while he was inside.” She asked, “Had you previously been in Mr. Sinclair’s apartment?”
“On rare occasions. He had a Fourth of July open house—I felt obliged to make an appearance. I believe that was the last time.”
As Kate made a note of this hint of animosity, she casually led Paula Grant with an open-ended question: “What can you tell us about Mr. Sinclair?”
“What do you need to know?”
Kate smothered a smile. So much for Paula Grant’s willingness to volunteer information. “How long have you known him?”
Paula sipped her drink, reflecting. Aimee, evidently deciding that her contribution to this interview was concluded, rose and moved around the room, hands stuffed in the pockets of her black pants.
Paula said, “I’ve lived here since early ’sixty-three. Owen moved in after me—I’m not sure, perhaps a year or two later. After this length of time it’s difficult to remember exactly.”
Taylor asked, “You lived next to him all this time?”
“I had an apartment on the first floor briefly. Then Alice Goldstein and I shared this larger apartment for the next nineteen years. Until Alice’s death five years ago.” She had addressed her answer to Kate, in flat expressionless tones that proscribed further inquiry.
Thinking that Taylor had surely noticed Paula Grant’s closed face, her distant tone, and her shunning of such euphemisms as friend or roommate with respect to Alice Goldstein, Kate edged the interview away from this topic. “You talked about the walla created by Mr. Sinclair’s music. Did it not bother you enough to complain?”
Paula stiffened, clearly provoked by the question. “Of course it bothered me enough to complain. Do you think I spend my days comatose? Complaining was useless—either to him or Hazel. Hazel Turner,” she clarified icily, “the landlady.”
Taylor asked incredulously, “You’re saying you put up with the victim’s loud music for twenty-four years?”
“Of course not. Only since the advent of rent control. That’s when Owen realized he could safely abandon any sort of consideration for anyone.” Paula’s voice was caustic. “Myself, Maxine across the hall, Mildred in the apartment below—he knew moving from here would cause any one of us great financial hardship. And as for Hazel—she knows she can charge much higher rents for our apartments if we move.”
Another bully, Kate thought. Sinclair was just another bully abusing whatever petty power he managed to get his hands on. She asked, “Did you ever think of calling the police?”
“Mildred did. Once. They as much as said we were a collection of old crocks.”
Kate was too occupied with her fury to speak. Taylor said, “You say you left for dinner at five minutes to six—”
“Not precisely for dinner. We were going over first to pay a visit to some relatives.”
Calm again, Kate asked, “Whenever you leave this apartment, which staircase do you ordinarily use, the front or the rear?”
“The front, of course. I use the back stairs only to go down to the laundry room.”
“When you went into Mr. Sinclair’s apartment, did you perhaps smell anything?”
She reflected. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”
Aimee interjected, “Only his putrid cigar smoke.”
“Paula,” Kate said, “do you know anything about Mr. Sinclair that may help us find who is responsible for his death?”
“I assume you mean any enemies of his.” She shrugged. “He’d acquired plenty of those—just from the kind of man he was.” She shrugged again. “I’ve fervently wished him dead myself. But I don’t know anyone who would do something like…that. I think all of us at times wish certain people dead. But we don’t do anything about it.”
“Some of us do,” Taylor said, writing in his notebook.
“I’ve never been able to imagine anyone who can,” Paula told him. “But obviously someone he knew well did that to him.”
“Why do you think so?” Taylor asked the question almost idly, but Kate knew better, knew he was following his own scents in this interview.
“Someone had to fasten that handcuff to him. Someone cut the phone cord. But no one broke in. So Owen had to open his door to someone he knew.”
Taylor did not respond, nor did Kate. There were methods of entering that did not involve breaking in, but all such possibilities had to remain between herself and Taylor at this early stage of the investigation. Kate asked, “Did you hear anyone knock on his door?”
“No, but he has a doorbell. And my television was on, Aimee was watching a very noisy football game for part of the afternoon.”
Taylor asked, “When did you last see Mr. Sinclair alive?”
“The same as everyone else—at the party.”
“Party?” Kate inquired, remembering evidence of a gathering in the community room on the first floor.
“Hazel’s Thanksgiving get-together. Most of us who were home dropped in for some time at least. Owen did, too.”
“How long did you stay?” Taylor inquired.
“I’m not sure. I talked for a time to Dorothy Brennan—she’s lived here less than a year.” Paula looked over at Aimee. “How long do you think we were downstairs, dear?”
Aimee was leaning against the wall adjacent to them, her arms crossed. “I watched most of the first half of the Dallas game on the TV down there. I’d say maybe an hour and a half.”
Kate asked, “Was Mr. Sinclair there as well during that time?”
“I don’t remember,” Aimee said. “I tried to ignore him.”
Paula closed her eyes to concentrate. “He came in after we arrived. He left before we did. I do remember now—he wasn’t feeling well again.”
Kate exchanged glances with Taylor. There were even more compelling reasons now to collect the debris from that party downstairs. She turned to a fresh page in her notebook. “Could you tell us who was at the party?”
Paula said with a trace of tartness, “I was a script supervisor, remember? Memory like an elephant.” She gave Kate and Taylor eight names in addition to herself and Aimee.
Paula Grant’s face suddenly looked gaunt with tiredness, and Kate decided to conclude the interview. She said, “We appreciate your cooperation.”
Paula said wearily, “This is only the beginning, isn’t it.”
“I’m sorry,” Kate said softly. “But yes, I’m sure we’ll have other questions as the investigation develops. We’ll need to prepare a statement for you to sign.”
Paula nodded, and Kate said, “It’s very important that you keep to yourselves every detail of what you saw in Mr. Sinclair’s apartment, everything you’ve discussed with us. That will really help.”
Again Paula Grant nodded. She rose as the two detectives got to their feet. Aimee Grant, leaning against the wall near the poster of The Children’s Hour, was staring intently at Kate.
Chapter Three
Two attendants in brown jumpsuits, CORONER stitched in yellow letters across their backs, waited placidly beside a stretcher outside Owen Sinclair’s apartment. Kate and Taylor again entered the living room of the apartment, Kate glimpsing strobe flashes in the dining alcove, visual echoes from where Shapiro photographed the kitchen. Baker, she assumed, was still fingerprinting the bedroom at the end of the hall.
She inquired of Taylor, “Any ideas so far?”
“Gonna be a walk through,” he said.
Surprised by this confident assertion, she turned to him. “How so?”
“Paula just gave it to us.” His broad face hardening, Taylor surveyed the stereo and tape equipment crowding the room. “His goddam music making that goddam racket day and night—” He jabbed a hand toward the murder scene in the back bedroom. “The son of a bitch ever did that to me I’d decorate this whole damn apartment with his face. He figured three old ladies couldn’t do one damn thing to him. But one of ’em figured out how to air-mail his ass.”
Kate nodded, not in agreement with Taylor’s hypothesis but in support of his angry contempt for the bully Owen Sinclair had been in life. She said, “I’d like to know which of our people answered Mildred’s five-eighty-six.”
Taylor shrugged. “Loud noise complaints are a royal pain, Kate. I used to hate those calls. Mostly people so tanked up they’d just as soon shoot you as not. I see how our people figured these old ladies for cranks. But I gotta say Paula’s blowing smoke about not killing somebody over loud music.” Taylor tapped the spine of his notebook against a tall dust-coated speaker in loud, arrhythmic demonstration as he continued, “You can like dogs, but let one bark long enough and by God you’ll poison it to shut it up.”
Kate nodded somberly, remembering child abuse cases she had seen in Juvenile—the perpetrators—mothers under stress, whose emotional control had snapped over the incessant crying of their babies. But premeditated murder was something else, and sitting down to watch the grisly, ghastly manner in which Owen Sinclair had died was something else again.
“Ed,” she said, “the handcuffs, the chair beside the bed—”
“Yeah. I know, Kate. I figure he let one of those women in before he got real sick, and when he had his bad convulsions he’d be easy enough for anybody to cuff and leave to croak. I figure we’re as likely wrong as right about why the chair was there.”
“Maybe.” But every instinct in her proclaimed the grim purpose of that chair beside that bed. Let Taylor nurse his improbable theory, she would not argue with him—not for some time yet. She knew too well how he would withdraw his attention from a case for which he had lost his eagerness, to go through only the bureaucratic motions required of him. Allowing him to follow his own scents would keep his nose on the trail.
“Paula said Sinclair started all this business when rent control came in,” she mused. “That was when, around nineteen-eighty or so—” She broke off, appalled. “Ed, that’s eight years ago.”
Taylor was pushing his fleshy lips in and out. “Eight years of the Chinese water torture, Kate. We’re gonna end up collaring one of these three old ladies I guarantee you.” In a tone that held something like concession he offered, “But Paula, that’s one classy lady.”
Too classy to be a vicious killer, she was about to suggest, but took back the words. Women seldom killed, but they did indeed kill. And the unlikeliest people could be the most rabid killers.
“And that niece of hers,” Taylor continued. “That one’s a real barn burner.”
Kate looked at him.
“A ten.” As Kate sifted in puzzlement through her images of Aimee Grant, Taylor stared at her in open surprise. “For chrissakes,” he said in exasperation, “good-looking.”
“I see,” she said. But she had not seen. Her perceptions of Paula Grant had been so dominant that she had not absorbed more than a nebulous physical impression of the younger woman.
Taylor, his blond eyebrows raised, was shaking his head, and she looked at him in smothered amusement. How could she, of all people, fail to notice what he deemed an unusually beautiful woman? Of course it was all part of his unspoken awareness that she was a lesbian. And if he could not deal with his discomfort over her sexual nature, he could not possibly understand that of the two women, Paula Grant was the one she found unusually beautiful.
Turning away from him, she took time to review the last details she had recorded of the death scene surroundings. Drapes drawn and no windows open; no appliances in use save the refrigerator; lights on only in the living room and at the death scene itself. Ashtrays had been emptied but not wiped clean. The kitchen showed no evidence of a meal having been eaten nor one in any phase of preparation. Sinclair had been handcuffed to his bed, but there was no sign anywhere of a struggle.
Shapiro now crouched in the dining room, his camera flashing, and Kate moved past him into the small kitchen. She had already noted a small formica table, its red plastic chair a match of the one in the bedroom. She now examined an assortment of liquor bottles on the counter next to the refrigerator. An unopened and dusty fifth of Cutty Sark Scotch, two quarts of Jim Beam, one of them 100 proof and three-quarters empty, an unopened Harper’s, a half-empty half gallon of Ten High. So Sinclair had been a bourbon drinker, the Ten High apparently his customary brand. And judging by the efficient and unabashed proximity of his liquor to glasses and ice cubes, and the assortment of glasses at the death scene, he had been a steady if not hard drinker. But a drinker seemingly with sense enough not to smoke in bed: there were neither smoking materials nor an ashtray in his bedroom.
As Taylor joined her, Kate wedged open the cabinet below the chipped and brown-stained sink with her pen. Along with cleaning materials and sponges was a plastic-lined trash can, empty. Apparently Sinclair—or someone—had very recently taken out the garbage. She said to Taylor, “Let’s check with Hansen, be sure he’s taped off the building’s trash.”
She opened other cabinets with the pen, and glanced over glasses and coffee mugs, a set of orangish Melmac dishes so old the flower pattern was scratched and faded. A few battered pots and pans, and canned food, mostly soup, spaghetti, beans, and Dinty Moore stew, and cereal and Ritz crackers and Folger’s instant coffee. And three more half gallons of Ten High.
Taylor used his own pen to pry open a yellowing Coldspot refrigerator. A half-full plastic gallon of water, a loaf of rye bread and three packages of lunch meat, bottles of ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise and pickles, four cans of Budweiser. The freezer section held four Swanson TV dinners and a plastic sack of ice cubes.
She was depressed by this room, so typical of a person living alone and indifferent to diet. The kitchen in her own apartment was shiny and modern and much better equipped, but the bleak neatness of this room was too much like it in spirit.
“Get outta here,” growled Baker, placing his large case of fingerprinting apparatus on the kitchen floor.
“We didn’t touch a thing,” Taylor answered.
“Get outta here,” he repeated, turning his narrow, black-shirted back to them.
Taylor went off to consult with Hansen about the building’s trash, and Kate walked into the back bedroom where Everson was closing up his medical bag.
The arched, bloody-eyed corpse on the bed was outlined in tape in preparation for its removal. The handcuffs which had fastened Owen Sinclair to his death bed lay beside him in a plastic evidence bag, and Kate picked up the bag by its top, to heft it. The cuffs were lighter than her own, and black. Very possibly they could be traced by lot number through their manufacturer…
She glanced over the room. Gray fingerprint powder covered every surface. The red plastic chair and the phone were gone, presumably packed and loaded in Baker’s van for transport to the lab. Elimination points from the tenants would be necessary…
Everson, arms crossed, was watching her. She gestured to the bed. “All yours.”
“Fresh meat for our friendly sausage shop,” he said cheerily. “The autopsy figures to be Saturday.” And he left the room to summon the attendants with the stretcher.
Notification of next of kin was now a priority, and Kate asked Baker to dust the ancient leather address book in the living room so that she could examine it. But Sinclair’s entries on the dog-eared pages were cryptic—mostly first names and sometimes simply initials with a phone number and only occasionally an address. The “S” section where she had expected to see Sinclair relatives listed had been ripped out, and some time ago, judging by the yellowed jagged remains of the page. She bagged the address book in plastic and marked it as evidence.
In the bedroom with its empty mattress taped in the stark curve of Owen Sinclair’s corpse, she assigned Taylor to examine Sinclair’s clothing. She made a preliminary inspection of three cardboard file boxes behind the sliding door of the room’s wall-to-wall closet.
The boxes were stuffed with artifacts of Sinclair’s life. Hundreds of photographs, letters and postcards; scrapbooks of yellowed newspaper and magazine clippings all apparently related to movies Sinclair had been involved with; three bound copies of plays, their author Owen Charles Sinclair; escrow papers on property sold decades ago; a crumpled manila envelope holding four sets of divorce papers from four different women.
