“Yep. He’s special. Look, how about if we meet tomorrow and get him out for a ride.” I dug into my purse for my card case. I was still carrying the one that had been dented by a killer’s bullet. It was a good reminder. Of what I wasn’t exactly sure, but I just felt I needed to keep it, and not replace the case. I gave Natalie my card. “My cell phone number and email address are on there. We’ll coordinate a time.”
“Good.” She checked her watch. “Well, off to the club.”
“Well, back to bed,” I said and we exchanged smiles.
I wasn’t meeting Maslin until ten a.m. Plenty of time to catch another few hours of sleep. Back in the car I checked the time. Five thirty. Which put it at—I did sleep-deprived calculation—eight thirty in New York. Jolly would want to know his horse had arrived safely. I dug out my phone and called. He answered on the first ring.
“Hi, Jolly, the boy arrived. Looking calm and collected and fresh as a daisy. I fixed him up with a bran mash, and I’ll give him today to rest.”
“Excellent. I’ve been following the news reports about this shooting. Bound to make your situation more complicated.” He had one of those teeth-aching, upper-class English accents that made you think of PBS and Masterpiece Theater. Politicians with that accent seem intrinsically more trustworthy, and men more attractive.
“Yes, you can definitely say that … especially since I was there for the gunfest.”
Joylon audibly gasped. “Were you hurt?”
“No. Well, I got cut by a piece of broken glass, but I avoided being a bullet magnet.” My hand was slick with sweat and I realized I was shaking. “It was really scary.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Not really, no.”
But he didn’t back off. Instead he asked, “Did you hide? Is that how you avoided getting shot?”
“No. I … was an idiot. She was about to shoot this girl and I ran … look, I really don’t want to talk about it.”
“Right. Sorry.”
“Look, Jolyon, it’s five thirty, and I got the call at four. I want to try and catch a few more winks of sleep before I have to go to work.”
“Oh, right. Yes. Sorry. Check in with me now and then. Let me know how you and Vento are doing.”
“Will do.”
With all the obligations met, I headed back to the apartment through a watery dawn.
13
The knock on the door came twenty minutes late. Maslin had said he would pick me up at ten, and I’d begun twitching once we hit ten after. I have a quirk about being late—I hate it, and I didn’t like it in others. Probably something I had learned from my vampire foster father. Meredith had a thing about being on time, and he often quoted King Louis XVIII of France: Punctuality is the courtesy of kings.
As I snatched up my tweed jacket—the rains had decided to stay and it was quite chilly—a flip folder with pad and pen, and hurried to the door, I wondered if Maslin might have traded in his Indiana Jones look, but he was dressed the same as the evening before—jeans, turtleneck, hiking boots. The only addition was a black leather bomber jacket.
“Sorry I’m late.”
“Okay, just don’t make a habit of it,” I said and then blushed at his startled expression. “Sorry. Internal editor didn’t get enough sleep last night. I have this thing about being on time.”
“It’s okay, I deserved the hit, I’m bad about it. Merl gets on me all the time.”
We hurried down the stairs and ran through the rain to an old-model canvas-topped jeep, which seemed in character with a crusading journalist in hiking boots.
“So, where do we start?” I asked loudly over the drumming of the rain as a rivulet of water found its way through a thin place in the canvas.
“I thought we’d retrace Kerrinan’s steps that day.”
“Sounds good.” I flipped open my case and checked my notes. “The day started at a restaurant—Mary’s Lamb.”
“Okay, here we go.” He put the jeep in gear and we headed out.
He opted to avoid the freeways, so I had plenty of time to stifle yawns and watch the storefronts roll past. Tanning salons, sushi, nail salons, Chinese food, hair salons, Thai food, waxing salons, Mexican food, twenty-four-hour gyms, vegetarian cuisine. I wasn’t feeling terribly generous this day, and it seemed like a metaphor for Los Angeles. It was all about what you put in the body, and then how you maintained and pampered the body.
Mary’s Lamb was on a shaded street nestled among single-story Spanish-style houses, and in fact it was located in a converted house. We found a place to park, fed the meter, and walked back to the restaurant. Maslin held the door for me, and we walked into the rich, yeasty smell of freshly baked bread and muffins, topped off by the aroma of brewing coffee. The odors wove around me like dancing food dervishes, and my bowl of Cheerios suddenly seemed inadequate. The room was painted a bright yellow with one accent wall in Tuscan red. There were flowers on every table, and the furnishings were rustic wood.
A bright-faced and very pretty girl hurried over. “Table for you?”
“I may get a muffin to go,” Maslin said. “But actually I wondered if there was anybody working today who was here when Kerrinan and his wife came in. It would have been about a month ago.”
“Why?” the girl asked, and her faced closed down with suspicion.
I played a hunch and quickly said, “We’re working with his attorney to try and help him.”
Her face cleared. “Oh. Well. Okay. Actually, I was. They come … came in a lot. In fact, I waited on them that morning. I assume you want to know about the day of the murder, right?”
“Yeah.” Maslin sucked in a deep breath. “Would you tell us what you remember about that morning?”
“You’re really working for his attorney?”
I held out my cell phone. “We can call her, and you can check.”
That seemed to convince her. She gave an emphatic nod and began. “They came in early, a few minutes after we opened.”
“What time would that have been?” Maslin asked.
“Ten, maybe fifteen minutes after seven.”
“And how long did they stay?” I asked.
“We weren’t very busy that early, so they were done by eight or a little after.”
A stone seemed to settle with a thud into the pit of my stomach. “Really, you’re sure about that?” Maslin seemed to hear the hollow note in my voice because he cast me a quick, questioning glance.
“Yeah. Pretty sure. I know it was before eight thirty because I got a call from my roommate that the plumbing had started leaking, but she had an audition, so I had to go home to take care of it.”
“Okay, thanks,” I said, and headed for the door.
Maslin hurried after me. “Hey, what about my muffin?” he asked once we were on the sidewalk.
“Kerrinan told me he dropped off Michelle at home around eleven a.m., and went straight to the GQ shoot.”
I had a feeling Maslin’s face reflected mine—wan and worried. He shook his head. “That’s not credible. They live not that far from here. Even if they walked they’d have been home by nine at the latest.”
“And he said ‘dropped off.’ Which implies car.” We stared at each other for a few minutes, then Maslin pulled out his phone, and made a call.
“The photography studio says he arrived at the shoot at eleven thirty.”
I gave voice to the question. “So where the hell was he between eight thirty and eleven thirty that morning?”
We headed for the county jail. As Maslin negotiated the traffic he asked, “I don’t get it. How come his lawyer didn’t find out about this?”
“Defense attorneys don’t ask questions beyond the ones necessary to build their defense. They don’t want to know. The one question you never ask your client is: Did you do it? Valada’s looking for some other explanation for what happened at nine that night other than Kerrinan butchered his wife. She could care less what happened at eight a.m.”