The Beverly Malibu, page 5
“They still couldn’t get in. I’m just as careful about that back door as the front one. When Owen lost his keys I had that lock changed right along with the front door even though he yelled his head off about it.”
Kate looked at her with acute interest. “When did all this happen?”
“That very same July the Fourth party. He swore his keys must of got swept up and tossed out with the party trash, but I couldn’t take a chance believing him, I had to get the front and back door locks changed the very next day and I had him pay the bill for that and everybody’s new keys, it was his fault after all.”
Kate asked, “Since the key to Mr. Sinclair’s apartment was also lost, I assume you changed that lock as well?”
She shook her head. “He was mad as the devil, claimed it didn’t matter at all.” She shrugged. “If he wanted to take a chance on somebody stealing his things, it was up to him.”
Kate took some time over her notes, and looked up to find Hazel Turner slumped down in the sofa and completing a yawn. Kate glanced at her watch: eleven-thirty. Catching Taylor’s eye she pantomimed holding a phone to her ear.
He got up with alacrity to make the necessary phone call to Vivian Sinclair. “Excuse me, Hazel,” he said, brushing more white hairs from his trousers. “Kate, I’ll see you upstairs.”
Ignoring him, Hazel carefully knocked a full length ash from the cigarette she had lit, and crushed it out. Kate had not seen her smoke this cigarette, nor the one before it.
As the door closed behind Taylor, the overstuffed apartment seemed somehow less crowded. Kate asked bluntly, “Is there a particular reason why you dislike my partner, Hazel?”
“He’s got big feet,” she said, lighting another cigarette. “Can’t abide men with great big feet. Never fails, the bigger the feet, the smaller the brain. Lyndon Johnson had big feet. Look what a pea brain he was.” She put the cigarette in the ashtray.
Kate smiled, thinking of the theory she had always heard about men with big hands and feet. “I guess I’ve heard stranger beliefs. But I can tell you it doesn’t apply to Detective Taylor.” Except sometimes, she added in inward amusement.
“Detective, you’re a real good-looking woman when you smile. But then I guess you don’t have much cause to smile in your line of work.”
The white Persian cat sauntered into the room, cautiously sniffed the armchair she had been ousted from, and leaped onto the sofa beside Hazel. Hazel stroked her, the liver-spotted hand moving firmly through the long white fur. “Jerome now, he had such lovely feet, I used to buy him velvet maroon slippers…” The watery voice drifted off.
Sorry that she had to disturb Hazel’s reverie, Kate said softly, “We understand Mr. Sinclair hadn’t been feeling too well. Do you know anything about that?”
“He’d come down with some stomach miseries.”
“Indigestion, you mean?”
“Worse, from what he said.”
“Do you remember what he said?”
She lifted her hand from the cat’s fur to gesture vaguely. “It was an uproar in his stomach, that’s all. Nausea, he said. Sometimes he threw up, sometimes his nose and his skin felt funny to him. Sounded like allergy to me, probably to that stinking bourbon he drank—and that’s what I told him.”
“Do you know if he went to a doctor?”
“He started to lose some weight, and that’s when I told him to quit his whining and do something. Don’t know if he did or not.”
“Hazel, you mentioned that Mr. Sinclair didn’t get on well with Mr. Parker or Mr. Crane. Can you tell me the nature of the disagreement?”
“Politics,” Hazel said succinctly.
Using the tactic of silence, Kate continued to write in her notebook.
Hazel finally offered, “A lot of people in this building had trouble with Owen’s politics.”
“Why? What were his politics?”
She shrugged. “I don’t pay attention to any of that business. Jerome got way deep into all that, but I never did. I don’t like politics or politicians. The Democrats, they want to take from the useful people and give to the useless ones. The Republicans, they want to take what little bit poor folks manage to get and give it to people that are already so rich it’s hideous. Now Reagan, he doesn’t have big feet, so he came by his pea brain all by himself. Now Reagan—”
“Most people agree to disagree on politics,” Kate interrupted, entertained but needing to conclude this interview. “Why did Mr. Sinclair’s politics create animosity in the people here?”
“You’ll just have to ask them, won’t you,” Hazel declared, and Kate knew that for the moment further questions in this area were useless.
Looking at the cigarette burning untouched in the ashtray, Kate said, “I have one more question, Hazel. It’s just curiosity. Why do you light cigarettes and not smoke them?”
“I can’t abide smoking, even lighting one of those things is like putting burnt feathers in my mouth. Jerome was a chain-smoker, it’s what killed him. Even so I missed the smell of it when he was gone. When people smoked in here it was like Jerome was back. So I went out and got some cigarettes for myself.”
Kate nodded. “I understand perfectly,” she said, and with effort said no more, did not—could not—share with Hazel that after Anne’s death she had felt an almost crushing need to again take up smoking, but had resisted because of Anne’s dislike of her old habit, the need to please Anne no different after her death than before.
Hazel seemed to shrink against the sofa. “I guess this…awful thing about Owen is partly on me, isn’t it?”
“How so, Hazel?” Kate asked gently.
“I didn’t do nothing about Owen and the people here that hated him, just let things fester. And I knew…I knew, you see. The first time I set eyes on him there was something in him I didn’t like.” She sat up and pointed an accusing finger at the urns. “You knew too, Jerome. You knew all about what I thought. It’s your doing too, Jerome—”
Kate got up from the loveseat. “It’s the doing of the person who took Mr. Sinclair’s life from him. It’s none of your doing at all, Hazel. Or Jerome’s.”
Hazel walked with Kate to the door. She took Kate’s arm, pulled Kate down to her and kissed her cheek. “You’re a dear good woman,” she said.
Chapter Four
As Kate emerged from the second floor staircase, she saw Aimee Grant in the hallway talking with Felix Knapp, the patrol officer assigned to safeguard the hallway and crime scene.
Aimee leaned against the wall near Paula Grant’s apartment, her arms crossed, facing toward Kate. She looked somewhat disheveled: the white silk shirt had been pulled out to hang over the black pants, and the heavy dark hair had lost its smoothness, had separated into streams as if she had been running her fingers through it. She watched Kate come down the hall toward her.
Knapp, engrossed in Aimee Grant, finally noticed her diverted attention and turned around. Kate nodded to him. He straightened his broad young shoulders, then his gunbelt, and self-consciously strode off to again take up his post near the back stairway.
Kate said to Aimee, “You’re free to leave if you wish. We’ll have a statement for you to sign, maybe a few more questions—but we know where to reach you.” The young woman seemed well recovered from her shock: the blue-violet eyes were alert and curious in their scrutiny of Kate’s face.
“I’ll be right here,” Aimee said crisply. “My aunt’s asleep but I’m staying with her. At least for the weekend.”
Pleased that Aimee felt such strong protectiveness for Paula, Kate nodded and smiled. Taylor was right, she conceded; Aimee Grant was remarkably attractive. Aside from her youthful resilience and the fine eyes and glossy hair, there was vitality here, and intelligence, and a strong sensual presence.
“Good night, then,” Kate said.
About to enter Owen Sinclair’s apartment, Kate turned at the bidding of some instinct; Aimee Grant stood where Kate had left her, staring at her.
* * *
Taylor sat in Owen Sinclair’s recliner making notes from the Field Investigation cards completed by Hansen’s officers. Kate picked up the FI cards he had discarded, and took the armchair opposite him.
“Vivian Sinclair,” he said, and heaved a sigh. “So stoned she talked like she had a shoe in her mouth. Pretty much said what Hazel told us, except she put it a little different to me.”
Taylor flipped back several pages of his notebook, seeking a particular note. “‘I don’t care a feeble fuck about the chickenshit asshole’—that’s what the lady said. I asked her why, she says, ‘Fuck off, I’m tired,’ and drops the phone on the floor.” He touched his ear, wincing. “What a night. A landlady from cloud cuckooland hauls out four jugs of her husband’s ashes, then a foul-mouthed old bat breaks my eardrum with her phone.”
Chuckling, Kate said mischievously, “Hazel Turner’s nuts about your feet.”
“Yeah?” He stretched out his legs and admired his brown wingtip shoes. “Really likes ’em, huh?”
“I didn’t say she liked them, I said she was nuts about them.”
Taylor laughed. “Good old Hazel. Kate, isn’t there some kind of law in this state about proper ways you have to handle ashes after cremation?”
“Indeed there is,” Kate said. “You want to do something about Jerome?”
Taylor held up both hands. “Who, me? I was just asking. Poor bastard, he can’t rest in peace even when he’s dead.”
Grinning, Kate riffled through the FIs. “Anything stand out in these?”
“Not that I see, Kate.” He handed her the rest of the cards. “It’s late and a lot of people we want to talk to aren’t kids.”
Kate smiled at him. “You mean you don’t want to pack up your three old lady suspects and haul them in? It’s only midnight after all, the station’s only clear on the other side of the division.”
He looked wounded. “Our killer is right here, Kate. What Hazel says about the keys, you gotta admit that. We got a lock on this case.” She winced at the pun, and he grinned. “It’s plain as the shoes on my feet how our killer just unlocked Sinclair’s door and walked right in. Whoever did this ain’t going nowhere, she’ll be waiting for us tomorrow. So I say we button up and let everybody else in the place calm down and get some sleep; we can finish up that part of it tomorrow.”
Some elements in the case were indeed clear, Kate reflected. From Paula Grant’s statements about when Owen Sinclair arrived at the party and when he had left, and what Everson had disclosed about the delayed reaction of strychnine, the poison must have been administered at the party. If the killer had a key to Sinclair’s apartment, the phone cord could have been cut beforehand, the poison might have been placed beforehand in Sinclair’s bourbon. But that meant the killer had prior knowledge that Sinclair would bring his own bottle to the party…
She glanced at her watch, impatient to put more detail of this case together. But they had to finish processing the crime scene; it was imperative that they collect everything of any possible value to establish a continuity of evidence. If or when this case went to trial they could then prove conclusively that no outside tampering with the crime scene had been possible. And it was late—most of the tenants had undoubtedly gone to bed, whatever their age.
“I made a list,” Taylor said. “There’s the two other old ladies, Maxine Marlowe and Mildred Coates. Cyril Crane and this Parker Thomas fellow, they argued with the victim at the party, maybe there’s something there. We got Dudley Kincaid and Dorothy Brennan. Everybody else was outta here for the day, so they’re low priority.”
“So it appears,” Kate said. She picked up the FIs. “I want to get my notes and my head in order.” She glanced again at her watch: 11:58. She smiled. “Happy Thanksgiving.”
He pulled his bulky body out of the recliner. “Yeah, sure,” he said.
Chapter Five
At five-thirty in the morning Kate picked up the Los Angeles Times outside her doorway and walked into her apartment. She turned on the lights, illuminating immaculate neatness except for a stack of magazines and six books scattered across the teak coffee table—bright, welcoming richness. Just last week she had borrowed the books, along with copies of The Advocate, from Joe D’Amico. Joe and Salvatore, his lover, were her source for information about the community of gay men she had come to regard as her brothers.
She had read through her latest lesbian books and passed them on to Maggie Schaeffer. While she waited for more, this collection would fill the void quite nicely.
Knowing she must give herself a break from the events of the past hours, she plugged in the coffee pot, then stripped off her clothing and walked into the shower, thinking about Maggie and Maggie’s Nightwood Bar, and the lesbians she had come to know during her homicide investigation there. Afterward, she had quickly, eagerly read her way through the dilapidated collection of lesbian books on the bar’s bookshelves, grumbling to Maggie about the old copyright dates as well as the considerable variation in literary quality.
“There’s lots more books out there, damn good ones,” Maggie had growled. “Every time I walk into Sisterhood Bookstore to pick up The Lesbian News I leave drool marks all over the shelves. Books are expensive, Kate. You can afford them, lots of us can’t. Why don’t you march in there and buy some for yourself and then donate them to the bar?”
Kate had risked becoming a regular at the Nightwood Bar, risked attending the annual Gay Pride Parade in West Hollywood—but at least these were somewhat circumscribed hazards because she was mainly within her own community. Maggie, who had been openly a lesbian since the age of thirteen, did not and could not understand that Kate’s career dictated limits to her freedom: “So what if somebody sees you, finds out about you? You’re better off than most of us—you’re protected by city ordinance.”
“That doesn’t matter, Maggie,” Kate had tried to explain. “We have over seven thousand police officers and nobody’s out, not a soul. You can’t begin to fathom the homophobia. My life would be hell, I wouldn’t be able to function.”
“There has to be an end to it, Kate,” Maggie had answered her with quiet emphasis. “All of you staying in the closet will never ever put an end to it.”
If Maggie challenged the necessity for caution and discretion, Joe D’Amico surely did not; he worked in the LAPD crime lab, and knew the same stories she did. Last month Mitch Grobeson, a former sergeant at Pacific Division who had compiled a superb performance record, had filed the first-ever lawsuit, claiming extreme harassment because he was homosexual, claiming endangerment to his life in the performance of his job—that he had been persecuted and tormented into resigning. Joe D’Amico understood as well as she did that LAPD’s queer-hating fraternity of macho cops would turn a gay officer’s existence into a nightmare. She did not want to become a Mitch Grobeson. Without a permanent relationship in her life, her work was more important to her now than ever.
And so she regularly gave Maggie money to buy lesbian books and periodicals which Maggie placed in the bar library after Kate had read them. Kate would have liked to keep some of the books on her own bookshelves for the warmth and close comfort of their company, but she had made an agreement with Maggie.
Toweling her hair, Kate walked into her living room and switched on the TV, needing to fill the silence that echoed through her rooms at this sepulchral hour of the morning. She was jolted by a panning shot of the exterior of the Beverly Malibu, a brief clip of Lieutenant Bodwin. Then the newscaster jovially said to stay tuned for a weather forecast and more news at sunrise.
She flipped open the Times and found two short paragraphs headlined WESTSIDE MURDER on page four of the Metro section. Life in the big city, Taylor would say. The death of another ant in the anthill. Well, she would uncover the ant who had turned into a killer ant and remove it from the hill.
Coffee in hand, she went to her closet, inspected her wardrobe. Today Paula Grant would see that she could wear clothing much more professional than a windbreaker and pants.
Paula Grant…
Why was this woman, so many years her senior, so very attractive to her? She was drawn by Paula Grant’s strength qualities—and there was no precedent for it. She had always been attracted to a very different sort of woman, a woman with softer, more responsive attributes, like Anne, like Ellen O’Neill, like Andrea Ross…
Kate shrugged at herself in the mirror. What did it matter? At this point, since she did not seem emotionally equipped for casual sex, close platonic friendship with other lesbian women seemed a more likely future for her than the complete marriage she had shared with Anne.
She was recovering from Anne, but sexually she had been somehow spun into a cocoon. She had had two serious affairs, both unsuccessful, and since then had met women who interested her, but none who had awakened her. Until Paula Grant…
* * *
Instead of heading as usual toward the Santa Monica Freeway and Wilshire Division, Kate drove east on Montana Avenue. Traffic in the city of Santa Monica was almost nonexistent on this Friday after Thanksgiving, especially at the gray hour of six-thirty a.m.
She did not travel this direction on Montana that often; her customary path to and from home was limited to the western end of the street with its pricey cafes and upscale boutiques. She looked pleasurably through the gloom at neatly kept apartment buildings, and as the wide tree-lined street curved along the edge of Brentwood Country Club she rolled down her window and inhaled the cool moist green of the heavy foliage concealing the golf course. She remembered noting a Brentwood address on an FI: Aimee Grant lived near here.
She sped down Wilshire Boulevard beside the vast, impeccable greenery of the Veteran’s Administration Hospital, and slowed at the Federal Building. Through the gray it looked like a tall white tombstone circled by flags. To her left, down quiet, eucalyptus-lined Veteran Avenue, lay real tombstones, cold gray-white and precisely aligned, row upon row and acre upon acre, some of the graves containing young men she had served with during her tour in Vietnam. She nodded in somber salute.
Kate looked at her with acute interest. “When did all this happen?”
“That very same July the Fourth party. He swore his keys must of got swept up and tossed out with the party trash, but I couldn’t take a chance believing him, I had to get the front and back door locks changed the very next day and I had him pay the bill for that and everybody’s new keys, it was his fault after all.”
Kate asked, “Since the key to Mr. Sinclair’s apartment was also lost, I assume you changed that lock as well?”
She shook her head. “He was mad as the devil, claimed it didn’t matter at all.” She shrugged. “If he wanted to take a chance on somebody stealing his things, it was up to him.”
Kate took some time over her notes, and looked up to find Hazel Turner slumped down in the sofa and completing a yawn. Kate glanced at her watch: eleven-thirty. Catching Taylor’s eye she pantomimed holding a phone to her ear.
He got up with alacrity to make the necessary phone call to Vivian Sinclair. “Excuse me, Hazel,” he said, brushing more white hairs from his trousers. “Kate, I’ll see you upstairs.”
Ignoring him, Hazel carefully knocked a full length ash from the cigarette she had lit, and crushed it out. Kate had not seen her smoke this cigarette, nor the one before it.
As the door closed behind Taylor, the overstuffed apartment seemed somehow less crowded. Kate asked bluntly, “Is there a particular reason why you dislike my partner, Hazel?”
“He’s got big feet,” she said, lighting another cigarette. “Can’t abide men with great big feet. Never fails, the bigger the feet, the smaller the brain. Lyndon Johnson had big feet. Look what a pea brain he was.” She put the cigarette in the ashtray.
Kate smiled, thinking of the theory she had always heard about men with big hands and feet. “I guess I’ve heard stranger beliefs. But I can tell you it doesn’t apply to Detective Taylor.” Except sometimes, she added in inward amusement.
“Detective, you’re a real good-looking woman when you smile. But then I guess you don’t have much cause to smile in your line of work.”
The white Persian cat sauntered into the room, cautiously sniffed the armchair she had been ousted from, and leaped onto the sofa beside Hazel. Hazel stroked her, the liver-spotted hand moving firmly through the long white fur. “Jerome now, he had such lovely feet, I used to buy him velvet maroon slippers…” The watery voice drifted off.
Sorry that she had to disturb Hazel’s reverie, Kate said softly, “We understand Mr. Sinclair hadn’t been feeling too well. Do you know anything about that?”
“He’d come down with some stomach miseries.”
“Indigestion, you mean?”
“Worse, from what he said.”
“Do you remember what he said?”
She lifted her hand from the cat’s fur to gesture vaguely. “It was an uproar in his stomach, that’s all. Nausea, he said. Sometimes he threw up, sometimes his nose and his skin felt funny to him. Sounded like allergy to me, probably to that stinking bourbon he drank—and that’s what I told him.”
“Do you know if he went to a doctor?”
“He started to lose some weight, and that’s when I told him to quit his whining and do something. Don’t know if he did or not.”
“Hazel, you mentioned that Mr. Sinclair didn’t get on well with Mr. Parker or Mr. Crane. Can you tell me the nature of the disagreement?”
“Politics,” Hazel said succinctly.
Using the tactic of silence, Kate continued to write in her notebook.
Hazel finally offered, “A lot of people in this building had trouble with Owen’s politics.”
“Why? What were his politics?”
She shrugged. “I don’t pay attention to any of that business. Jerome got way deep into all that, but I never did. I don’t like politics or politicians. The Democrats, they want to take from the useful people and give to the useless ones. The Republicans, they want to take what little bit poor folks manage to get and give it to people that are already so rich it’s hideous. Now Reagan, he doesn’t have big feet, so he came by his pea brain all by himself. Now Reagan—”
“Most people agree to disagree on politics,” Kate interrupted, entertained but needing to conclude this interview. “Why did Mr. Sinclair’s politics create animosity in the people here?”
“You’ll just have to ask them, won’t you,” Hazel declared, and Kate knew that for the moment further questions in this area were useless.
Looking at the cigarette burning untouched in the ashtray, Kate said, “I have one more question, Hazel. It’s just curiosity. Why do you light cigarettes and not smoke them?”
“I can’t abide smoking, even lighting one of those things is like putting burnt feathers in my mouth. Jerome was a chain-smoker, it’s what killed him. Even so I missed the smell of it when he was gone. When people smoked in here it was like Jerome was back. So I went out and got some cigarettes for myself.”
Kate nodded. “I understand perfectly,” she said, and with effort said no more, did not—could not—share with Hazel that after Anne’s death she had felt an almost crushing need to again take up smoking, but had resisted because of Anne’s dislike of her old habit, the need to please Anne no different after her death than before.
Hazel seemed to shrink against the sofa. “I guess this…awful thing about Owen is partly on me, isn’t it?”
“How so, Hazel?” Kate asked gently.
“I didn’t do nothing about Owen and the people here that hated him, just let things fester. And I knew…I knew, you see. The first time I set eyes on him there was something in him I didn’t like.” She sat up and pointed an accusing finger at the urns. “You knew too, Jerome. You knew all about what I thought. It’s your doing too, Jerome—”
Kate got up from the loveseat. “It’s the doing of the person who took Mr. Sinclair’s life from him. It’s none of your doing at all, Hazel. Or Jerome’s.”
Hazel walked with Kate to the door. She took Kate’s arm, pulled Kate down to her and kissed her cheek. “You’re a dear good woman,” she said.
Chapter Four
As Kate emerged from the second floor staircase, she saw Aimee Grant in the hallway talking with Felix Knapp, the patrol officer assigned to safeguard the hallway and crime scene.
Aimee leaned against the wall near Paula Grant’s apartment, her arms crossed, facing toward Kate. She looked somewhat disheveled: the white silk shirt had been pulled out to hang over the black pants, and the heavy dark hair had lost its smoothness, had separated into streams as if she had been running her fingers through it. She watched Kate come down the hall toward her.
Knapp, engrossed in Aimee Grant, finally noticed her diverted attention and turned around. Kate nodded to him. He straightened his broad young shoulders, then his gunbelt, and self-consciously strode off to again take up his post near the back stairway.
Kate said to Aimee, “You’re free to leave if you wish. We’ll have a statement for you to sign, maybe a few more questions—but we know where to reach you.” The young woman seemed well recovered from her shock: the blue-violet eyes were alert and curious in their scrutiny of Kate’s face.
“I’ll be right here,” Aimee said crisply. “My aunt’s asleep but I’m staying with her. At least for the weekend.”
Pleased that Aimee felt such strong protectiveness for Paula, Kate nodded and smiled. Taylor was right, she conceded; Aimee Grant was remarkably attractive. Aside from her youthful resilience and the fine eyes and glossy hair, there was vitality here, and intelligence, and a strong sensual presence.
“Good night, then,” Kate said.
About to enter Owen Sinclair’s apartment, Kate turned at the bidding of some instinct; Aimee Grant stood where Kate had left her, staring at her.
* * *
Taylor sat in Owen Sinclair’s recliner making notes from the Field Investigation cards completed by Hansen’s officers. Kate picked up the FI cards he had discarded, and took the armchair opposite him.
“Vivian Sinclair,” he said, and heaved a sigh. “So stoned she talked like she had a shoe in her mouth. Pretty much said what Hazel told us, except she put it a little different to me.”
Taylor flipped back several pages of his notebook, seeking a particular note. “‘I don’t care a feeble fuck about the chickenshit asshole’—that’s what the lady said. I asked her why, she says, ‘Fuck off, I’m tired,’ and drops the phone on the floor.” He touched his ear, wincing. “What a night. A landlady from cloud cuckooland hauls out four jugs of her husband’s ashes, then a foul-mouthed old bat breaks my eardrum with her phone.”
Chuckling, Kate said mischievously, “Hazel Turner’s nuts about your feet.”
“Yeah?” He stretched out his legs and admired his brown wingtip shoes. “Really likes ’em, huh?”
“I didn’t say she liked them, I said she was nuts about them.”
Taylor laughed. “Good old Hazel. Kate, isn’t there some kind of law in this state about proper ways you have to handle ashes after cremation?”
“Indeed there is,” Kate said. “You want to do something about Jerome?”
Taylor held up both hands. “Who, me? I was just asking. Poor bastard, he can’t rest in peace even when he’s dead.”
Grinning, Kate riffled through the FIs. “Anything stand out in these?”
“Not that I see, Kate.” He handed her the rest of the cards. “It’s late and a lot of people we want to talk to aren’t kids.”
Kate smiled at him. “You mean you don’t want to pack up your three old lady suspects and haul them in? It’s only midnight after all, the station’s only clear on the other side of the division.”
He looked wounded. “Our killer is right here, Kate. What Hazel says about the keys, you gotta admit that. We got a lock on this case.” She winced at the pun, and he grinned. “It’s plain as the shoes on my feet how our killer just unlocked Sinclair’s door and walked right in. Whoever did this ain’t going nowhere, she’ll be waiting for us tomorrow. So I say we button up and let everybody else in the place calm down and get some sleep; we can finish up that part of it tomorrow.”
Some elements in the case were indeed clear, Kate reflected. From Paula Grant’s statements about when Owen Sinclair arrived at the party and when he had left, and what Everson had disclosed about the delayed reaction of strychnine, the poison must have been administered at the party. If the killer had a key to Sinclair’s apartment, the phone cord could have been cut beforehand, the poison might have been placed beforehand in Sinclair’s bourbon. But that meant the killer had prior knowledge that Sinclair would bring his own bottle to the party…
She glanced at her watch, impatient to put more detail of this case together. But they had to finish processing the crime scene; it was imperative that they collect everything of any possible value to establish a continuity of evidence. If or when this case went to trial they could then prove conclusively that no outside tampering with the crime scene had been possible. And it was late—most of the tenants had undoubtedly gone to bed, whatever their age.
“I made a list,” Taylor said. “There’s the two other old ladies, Maxine Marlowe and Mildred Coates. Cyril Crane and this Parker Thomas fellow, they argued with the victim at the party, maybe there’s something there. We got Dudley Kincaid and Dorothy Brennan. Everybody else was outta here for the day, so they’re low priority.”
“So it appears,” Kate said. She picked up the FIs. “I want to get my notes and my head in order.” She glanced again at her watch: 11:58. She smiled. “Happy Thanksgiving.”
He pulled his bulky body out of the recliner. “Yeah, sure,” he said.
Chapter Five
At five-thirty in the morning Kate picked up the Los Angeles Times outside her doorway and walked into her apartment. She turned on the lights, illuminating immaculate neatness except for a stack of magazines and six books scattered across the teak coffee table—bright, welcoming richness. Just last week she had borrowed the books, along with copies of The Advocate, from Joe D’Amico. Joe and Salvatore, his lover, were her source for information about the community of gay men she had come to regard as her brothers.
She had read through her latest lesbian books and passed them on to Maggie Schaeffer. While she waited for more, this collection would fill the void quite nicely.
Knowing she must give herself a break from the events of the past hours, she plugged in the coffee pot, then stripped off her clothing and walked into the shower, thinking about Maggie and Maggie’s Nightwood Bar, and the lesbians she had come to know during her homicide investigation there. Afterward, she had quickly, eagerly read her way through the dilapidated collection of lesbian books on the bar’s bookshelves, grumbling to Maggie about the old copyright dates as well as the considerable variation in literary quality.
“There’s lots more books out there, damn good ones,” Maggie had growled. “Every time I walk into Sisterhood Bookstore to pick up The Lesbian News I leave drool marks all over the shelves. Books are expensive, Kate. You can afford them, lots of us can’t. Why don’t you march in there and buy some for yourself and then donate them to the bar?”
Kate had risked becoming a regular at the Nightwood Bar, risked attending the annual Gay Pride Parade in West Hollywood—but at least these were somewhat circumscribed hazards because she was mainly within her own community. Maggie, who had been openly a lesbian since the age of thirteen, did not and could not understand that Kate’s career dictated limits to her freedom: “So what if somebody sees you, finds out about you? You’re better off than most of us—you’re protected by city ordinance.”
“That doesn’t matter, Maggie,” Kate had tried to explain. “We have over seven thousand police officers and nobody’s out, not a soul. You can’t begin to fathom the homophobia. My life would be hell, I wouldn’t be able to function.”
“There has to be an end to it, Kate,” Maggie had answered her with quiet emphasis. “All of you staying in the closet will never ever put an end to it.”
If Maggie challenged the necessity for caution and discretion, Joe D’Amico surely did not; he worked in the LAPD crime lab, and knew the same stories she did. Last month Mitch Grobeson, a former sergeant at Pacific Division who had compiled a superb performance record, had filed the first-ever lawsuit, claiming extreme harassment because he was homosexual, claiming endangerment to his life in the performance of his job—that he had been persecuted and tormented into resigning. Joe D’Amico understood as well as she did that LAPD’s queer-hating fraternity of macho cops would turn a gay officer’s existence into a nightmare. She did not want to become a Mitch Grobeson. Without a permanent relationship in her life, her work was more important to her now than ever.
And so she regularly gave Maggie money to buy lesbian books and periodicals which Maggie placed in the bar library after Kate had read them. Kate would have liked to keep some of the books on her own bookshelves for the warmth and close comfort of their company, but she had made an agreement with Maggie.
Toweling her hair, Kate walked into her living room and switched on the TV, needing to fill the silence that echoed through her rooms at this sepulchral hour of the morning. She was jolted by a panning shot of the exterior of the Beverly Malibu, a brief clip of Lieutenant Bodwin. Then the newscaster jovially said to stay tuned for a weather forecast and more news at sunrise.
She flipped open the Times and found two short paragraphs headlined WESTSIDE MURDER on page four of the Metro section. Life in the big city, Taylor would say. The death of another ant in the anthill. Well, she would uncover the ant who had turned into a killer ant and remove it from the hill.
Coffee in hand, she went to her closet, inspected her wardrobe. Today Paula Grant would see that she could wear clothing much more professional than a windbreaker and pants.
Paula Grant…
Why was this woman, so many years her senior, so very attractive to her? She was drawn by Paula Grant’s strength qualities—and there was no precedent for it. She had always been attracted to a very different sort of woman, a woman with softer, more responsive attributes, like Anne, like Ellen O’Neill, like Andrea Ross…
Kate shrugged at herself in the mirror. What did it matter? At this point, since she did not seem emotionally equipped for casual sex, close platonic friendship with other lesbian women seemed a more likely future for her than the complete marriage she had shared with Anne.
She was recovering from Anne, but sexually she had been somehow spun into a cocoon. She had had two serious affairs, both unsuccessful, and since then had met women who interested her, but none who had awakened her. Until Paula Grant…
* * *
Instead of heading as usual toward the Santa Monica Freeway and Wilshire Division, Kate drove east on Montana Avenue. Traffic in the city of Santa Monica was almost nonexistent on this Friday after Thanksgiving, especially at the gray hour of six-thirty a.m.
She did not travel this direction on Montana that often; her customary path to and from home was limited to the western end of the street with its pricey cafes and upscale boutiques. She looked pleasurably through the gloom at neatly kept apartment buildings, and as the wide tree-lined street curved along the edge of Brentwood Country Club she rolled down her window and inhaled the cool moist green of the heavy foliage concealing the golf course. She remembered noting a Brentwood address on an FI: Aimee Grant lived near here.
She sped down Wilshire Boulevard beside the vast, impeccable greenery of the Veteran’s Administration Hospital, and slowed at the Federal Building. Through the gray it looked like a tall white tombstone circled by flags. To her left, down quiet, eucalyptus-lined Veteran Avenue, lay real tombstones, cold gray-white and precisely aligned, row upon row and acre upon acre, some of the graves containing young men she had served with during her tour in Vietnam. She nodded in somber salute.
