“Does not charging mean freedom from financial worry?”
“Money’s an attitude,” said Nora Dowd brightly.
Milo pulled out the photo of Tori Giacomo and held it in front of her face. Her pace didn’t falter and he had to speed up to keep it in her line of vision.
“Not bad looking in a Saturday Night Fever kind of way.” Dowd fended off the photo and Milo dropped his arm.
“You don’t know her?”
“I really can’t say. Why?”
“Her name is Tori Giacomo. She came to L.A. to be an actress, took lessons, disappeared.”
Nora Dowd said, “Disappeared? As in poof?”
“Did she ever avail herself at the PlayHouse?”
“Tori Giacomo…the name doesn’t ring a bell but I can’t give you a yes or no because we don’t take attendance.”
“You don’t recognize her but you can’t say no?”
“All sorts of people show up, especially on nights when we do group exercises. The room’s dark and I certainly can’t be expected to remember every face. There is a sameness, you know.”
“Young and eager?”
“Young and oh-so hungry.”
“Could you take another look, ma’am?”
Dowd sighed, grabbed the photo, stared for a second. “I simply can’t say yes or no.”
Milo said, “Big crowds show up but you did know Michaela.”
“Michaela was a regular. Made sure to introduce herself to me.”
“Ambitious?”
“High level of hunger, I’ll give her that. Without serious want there’s no chance of reaching the bottom of the funnel.”
“What funnel is that?”
Dowd stopped, faltered again, regained her balance, and shaped a cone with her hands. “At the top are all the strivers. Most of them give up right away, which allows those who remain to sink down a little more.” Her hands dropped. “But there are still far too many and they bump against each other, collide, everyone hungry for the spout. Some tumble out, others get crushed.”
Milo said, “More room in the funnel for those with balls.”
Dowd looked up at him. “You’ve got a Charles Laughton thing going on. Ever think of performing?”
He smiled. “So who gets to the bottom of the funnel?”
“Those who are karmically destined.”
“For celebrity.”
“That’s not a disease, Lieutenant. Or should I call you Charles?”
“What’s not?”
“Celebrity,” said Dowd. “Anyone who makes it is a gifted winner. Even if it doesn’t last long. The funnel’s always shifting. Like a star on its axis.”
Stars didn’t have axes. I kept that nugget to myself.
Milo said, “Did Michaela have the potential to make it all the way to the spout?”
“As I said, I don’t want to diss the dead.”
“Did you get along with her, Ms. Dowd?”
Dowd squinted. Her eyes looked raw and inflamed. “That’s a strange question.”
“Maybe I’m missing something, ma’am, but you don’t seem too shaken up by her murder.”
Dowd exhaled. “Of course I’m sad. I see no reason to reveal myself to you. Now if you’ll let me complete my- ”
“In a sec, ma’am. When’s the last time you saw Dylan Meserve?”
“Saw him?”
“At the PlayHouse,” said Milo. “Or anywhere else.”
“Hmm,” said Dowd. “Hmm, the last time…a week or so? Ten days? He helps out from time to time.”
“Helps how?”
“Arranging chairs, that sort of thing. Now I need to get some cleansing exercise, Charles. All this talk has polluted the good air.”
She jogged away from us, moving fast, but with a choppy, knock-kneed stride. The quicker she ran, the more pronounced was her clumsiness. When she was half a block away, she began shadowboxing. Swung her head from side to side.
Clumsy but loose. Oblivious to any notion of imperfection.
CHAPTER 14
Milo said, “Don’t need you for a diagnosis. She’s loony. Even without the dope.”
“What dope?”
“You didn’t smell it on her? She stinks of devil weed, dude. Those eyes?”
Red rims, lack of coordination, answers that seemed just a bit off-time. “I must be slipping.”
“You didn’t get close enough to smell it. When I handed her my business card, she reeked. Must’ve just finished toking.”
“Probably why she didn’t answer the door.”
He gazed down the block. The speck that was Nora Dowd had vanished. “Nuts and stoned and doesn’t keep records. Wonder if she married money or inherited it. Or maybe she had her time at the bottom of the funnel and invested well.”
“Never heard of her.”
“Like she said, the axis shifts.”
“Planets have axes, stars don’t.”
“Whatever. Not very sympathetic to Michaela, was she?”
“Not even faking it. When Dylan Meserve came up she bolted. Maybe because he avails himself in all sorts of ways.”
“Creative consultant,” he said. “Yeah, they’re doing the nasty.”
“Situation like that,” I said, “a gorgeous young woman could be a threat to a woman of her age.”
“Couple of good-looking kids, up in the hills, naked…Dowd’s gotta be what, forty-five, fifty?”
“That would be my guess.”
“Rich lady gets her strokes playing guru to the lean and hungry and pretty…she picks Dylan out of the fold, he goes and fools with Michaela. Yeah, it’s a motive, ain’t it? Maybe she told Dylan to clean things up. For all we know, he’s right there, holed up in that big house of hers, got his wheels stashed in her garage.”
I glanced back at the big, cream house. “It would also be a nice quiet place to keep Michaela while they figured out what to do with her.”
“Load her in the Range Rover and dump her near her apartment to distance themselves.” He crammed his hands in his pockets. “Wouldn’t that be ugger-ly. Okay, let’s see what the neighbors have to say about Ms. Stoner.”
Three bell rings brought three cleaning ladies to the door, each one intoning, “Senora no esta en la casa.”
At the well-kept brick Tudor three doors north of Nora Dowd’s house, an elderly man wearing a bright green cardigan, a red wool shirt, gray plaid pants, and burgundy house slippers studied us over the rim of his old-fashioned. The toes of his slippers were embroidered with black wolves’ heads. The dim marble entry behind him gave off a whiff of eau de codger.
He took a long time to examine Milo’s business card. Reacted to Milo’s inquiry about Nora Dowd with, “That one? Why?” A voice like gravel under heavy footsteps.
“Routine questions, sir.”
“Don’t give me that malarkey.” Tall but bent, he had foxed-paper skin, coarse white hair, and clouded blue eyes. Stiff fingers bent the card in half and palmed it. A fleshy, open-pored nose dipped toward a lopsided twig of an upper lip. “Albert Beamish, formerly of Martin, Crutch, and Melvyn and ninety-three other partners until the mandatory out-to-pasture clause kicked in and they sentenced me to ‘emeritus.’ That was eighteen years ago so do the arithmetic and choose your words efficiently. I could drop dead right in front of you and you’d have to lie to someone else.”
“Till a hundred and twenty, sir.”
Albert Beamish said, “Get on with it, kiddo. What’d that one do?”
“One of her students was murdered and we’re getting background information from people who knew the victim.”
“And you spoke to her and you saw what a lunatic she is.”
Milo chuckled.
Albert Beamish said, “Students? They let her teach? When did that start?”
“She runs her own acting school.”
Beamish’s laughter was jagged. It took a while for his cocktail to reach his lips. “Acting. That’s just more of the same.”
“The same what?”
“Being the indolent, spoiled brat she’s always been.”