Freeman covered a yawn. “I tracked him for a week,” he said. “Three times he went out to pick up a hustler. I didn’t think I had to go make sure he got what he paid for, so I just hung around Santa Monica waiting for him to finish.” He sipped his beer. “Third night I noticed that he always came back by himself. I got curious, so I drove around looking for the kid he’d picked up that night. I found him. He was holding up a wall, spitting out pieces of his mouth. He split when he saw me. Can’t say that I blame him.” He smiled wanly at his bottle.
“Everybody needs a hobby,” Cresly said in a flat voice. The cold eyes were thawing — from exhaustion, I thought.
“When Freeman told me,” I said, picking up the story, “it got me to thinking about Zane and Blenheim. They both liked boys.” I glanced at Cresly, who frowned. “But everyone knew about Blenheim,” I said, echoing what Larry Ross had told me. “If it had been Blenheim who picked Jim Pears up, the fact that Fox saw them wouldn’t have been that serious. Probably not serious enough to make Blenheim a target for blackmail, much less to give him a motive to murder. But Zane, if it had been Zane in the parking lot that night…”
“In Blenheim’s car,” Cresly said, and reached for another beer. “That what you’re thinking?”
I nodded. “The rented cars, the disguises. It all fits. Zane took Blenheim’s car that night to go cruising. He got lucky at dinner with Pears, and took him to the car. Then Fox found them, got the license plate and traced it to Blenheim.”
“That’s how Blenheim found out,” Freeman said. “When the Fox kid came to the theater looking for Goldenboy. He musta known it wasn’t Blenheim-”
“No confusing Sandy Blenheim and Tom Zane,” I added, picking up the cup of cold coffee.
“Blenheim figured it was Zane,” Freeman said. “Talked to Zane about it. Zane told him to arrange the meeting with Fox.”
“Fox met him at the restaurant,” I said. “Let him in through the back. They went down to the cellar. That smell tonight, ether, you said. In the transcript of Pear’s prelim the waitress who found Jim with Fox’s body said the room they were in smelled like someone had broken a bottle of booze. It was ether. Zane knocked Fox out, then killed him.
“Jim Pears, meanwhile,” I continued, my exhaustion gone, “thought that Fox was there to see him.”
“Why?” Cresly growled.
“That’s another story,” I replied. “Just listen to me. I’ve been in that cellar. You can hear footsteps when someone is walking in the kitchen overhead. Zane heard the footsteps, knew someone was coming. He hid himself. When Jim Pears came down, he knocked him out like he knocked out Fox and the kid tonight.”
“With the ether,” Cresly said, sounding interested in spite of himself.
“Right. Then he saw it was Pears,” I said. “He dragged Pears into the room where he had killed Fox, smeared Pears with blood, put the knife in his hand, and let himself out through the back door.” I paused, remembering another detail of Andrea Lew’s testimony. She’d said she’d looked for Jim out back. That meant the door had been left unlocked — by Zane. In that detail was the whole story, if only I’d paid attention. “Jim came to and then the waitress found him,” I continued. “Jim claimed he didn’t remember anything. The reason was because there was nothing for him to remember. But that didn’t occur to anyone, so we all wrote it off as traumatic amnesia.”
From his silent corner, Josh whispered, “He was innocent.”
We all turned to look at him. “That’s right,” I said. “Innocent but with no way of explaining why.”
“So that’s Pears,” Cresly said. “What about Good and Blenheim?”
“Blenheim first,” I said. “Blenheim knew everything. Irene Gentry — Zane’s wife — told me that Blenheim was acting crazy toward Zane just before Good’s murder. She was lying, mostly.” I stopped and the implications of what Rennie knew sank in for the first time. I pushed it aside for now. There would be time to think it all out later, but there was no denying that it hurt. “But there was some truth in it — Blenheim was probably pushing Zane around, a kind of blackmail, to get Zane to do things that would line Blenheim’s pockets.”
Cresly squinted. “What, taking money from him?”
I shook my head. “No, working him. Milking Zane for all he was worth because Blenheim got his cut, and it was probably more than ten percent.”
“So Blenheim had to go,” Freeman said. “But first Zane set it up so that it looked like it was Blenheim who killed Fox and who killed Good.”
“Zane and his wife,” I corrected. “She came to me the night Good was killed, saying Zane was in terrible danger. I chased through Hollywood looking for Zane while he was taking care of
Blenheim and Good. I was part of the alibi.”
Cresly smiled, nastily. “Zane’s wife, huh? You bi, or what?”
I let it pass.
“Zane had the motive to kill,” I said, “and when Freeman told me that he liked to beat up his pick-ups, well, then it seemed like he had the capacity, too.”
Cresly belched, softly. “No way to prove any of this unless Zane or his wife start talking. They won’t,” he added with dead certainty. “Even if we bust him for what he did tonight. Why should he?”
By the look on Freeman’s face, I could see that Cresly’s questions had stumped him, too.
“Nope,” Cresly continued, picking up his beer. “Old Zane’ll hire someone like you, Rios, to cut a deal with the D.A. If he pleads to anything, he’ll walk with probation. Or maybe just continue the case until our victim there,” he jutted his chin in the direction of the bedroom, “disappears.”
He drained his beer and set the bottle down with a thud.
After Freeman and Cresly left, Josh and I made up the couch in the living room and got into it. We lay there in the dark. I thought of Jim Pears who said he was innocent, and was, and Irene Gentry who pretended to be, and wasn’t. Depending on what she knew she was an accomplice to at least two of the murders.
Now I let myself think about Rennie. She had played me for a fool with consummate skill. It was a flawless performance. Her task had been formidable: the seduction of a gay man. Since sex, the most direct avenue, was closed to her, she had had to resort to other methods. But she was a brilliant actress, keenly observant of the emotional states of those around her and capable of seemingly profound empathy. She understood me immediately from our first meeting when she told me I had the face of a man who felt too much. A born do-gooder. A rescuer. All she had to do was play a lady in distress.
Her role jibed with what she and Zane had planned from the outset, to divert the suspicion to Blenheim. They must have worked it all out months earlier, when I first came to town to defend Jim Pears. When Blenheim approached me about buying the rights to Jim’s story, what he really wanted was to find out how much Jim remembered and what I knew. The three of them had conspired together at first.
Then, later, Rennie and Zane saw their chance to get rid of Blenheim and close the book on the Fox murder once and for all. So Rennie made Blenheim out to be the bad guy. Fortunately for her I disliked Blenheim enough to be an easy convert. After that, it was just a matter of timing.
But now things had unraveled. Why? Rennie was fearless but Zane proved to be the weak link. Another fragment of remembered conversation passed through my head, the actress at the cocktail party who referred to the Zanes as the Macbeths. There was a crucial distinction, though. Lady Macbeth goaded on her husband out of her own ambition. Irene Gentry acted from love. The only time I had ever seen her break character was the day she told me she loved Zane. What a terrifying love that must be to lead her into such darkness.
“You’re thinking,” Josh said.
“I know. I can’t sleep.”
“Me neither,” he replied. There was a pause. “Do you want to make love?”
I kissed his forehead. “I don’t really feel like it.”
“Okay,” he said. “What are you thinking about?”
I couldn’t think of a way to tell him about the darkness, not yet, anyway, so I said, “Tom Zane told me he skipped out on a court appearance fifteen years ago. There’s a warrant for his arrest out somewhere. I’ll have to tell Cresly about it.”
There was a long silence and then Josh said, “Is that all you were thinking about?”
“No.” I turned and faced him, trying to make his face out.
“It’s about Jim, isn’t it?” he asked. “You feel bad because you didn’t believe him.”
I held him close, not answering.
“I feel the same way,” he whispered. “I feel terrible about him.”
