I said, 'I got it.'
The door handle jangled, and Valentine and I looked tensely to see which detective would reenter.
Sally leaned in, one hand riding the lever. 'Better get the handcuffs on. We need 'em for the cameras.'
Light-headed, I stood. Static dotted my vision, then cleared. Valentine cinched metal around my wrists and steered me forward. My feet felt dead, like blocks of wood.
Sally took a deep breath, and I could see, beneath her unflappable facade, that she was rattled. As I approached, those flat eyes appraised me. 'Ready for your close-up, Mr. DeMille?'
Chapter 34
'Let's start putting this thing together,' Sally said.
After being assailed by news crews and camera flashes, I'd had the relative calm of the sedan ride to try to settle down and focus. The helicopters tracked us, compounding my headache until the bullet-proof door of the station sucked closed behind us, silencing the thumping. I never thought I'd be relieved to be taken into custody. I was now backstage in a tiny office overlooking the interrogation room, on the cop side of the two-way mirror. It was private, unoccupied, and--aside from the various recording decks and closed-circuit units--as sparse as my shared Northridge office. Swivel chair, cup of coffee, TV on a mount--a casual, just-friends approach to keep the information flowing. The view into the interrogation room with its foreboding wooden chair, sporting rings for handcuffs, was a reminder of where I would wind up the minute I stopped being useful.
Pay It Forward was a distant memory; I'd wound up playing the wrong role in Body Heat.
Sally clicked on a digital camera and swung it from its usual angle through the two-way so it pointed at the three of us, sitting like colleagues spitballing a case.
I was still winded from being hustled upstairs, past the too-long stares of the other cops. 'Has someone reached Ari?'
'We believe so,' Valentine said.
'Where is she? What'd they tell her? Is she all right?'
'I don't know,' Sally said, 'and you have other concerns at the moment.'
'I need to know that my wife is--'
'You don't have that luxury,' she said sharply. 'The captain of Robbery-Homicide is bending the chief's ear as we speak, and unless we find a crack in this case and turn it into a fissure, Detective Sweetheart will be back to arrest your skinny ass and throw it in Men's Central. So fucking focus.'
Valentine caught me numbly staring at the news crawl beneath the live helicopter footage of Hotel Angeleno, and he reached up and slapped the muted TV, which clicked over to a soap. 'Where were you at nine P.M. on February fifteenth?' he asked.
I closed my eyes, fought for clarity. Monday, two days ago . . . 'Driving out to Indio to meet Elisabeta. Why?'
'Do you have anyone who can corroborate that?'
'Of course not. They told me not to . . .' Dread formed a lump in my throat to match the one in my gut. 'Why? What happened?'
'We responded to a vandalism report at Keith Conner's house. Someone spray-painted 'LIAR' across his fence, then scaled the gates and left a dead rat on the windshield of one of his cars. A security camera picked up some footage of the intruder on the grounds, in the shadows. The guy was about your build, but his face was obscured because he was wearing--'
I said quietly, 'A Red Sox cap.'
'Right. It's not our jurisdiction, but we got pulled in because--'
'Conner assumed it was me. Of course. I'd gone to see him a few days before.'
'Not a friendly visit, we heard.' Valentine flipped through his notepad. 'Left a bad taste in Conner's mouth. He filed a complaint the morning before the break-in at his house.'
'So he and I did exactly the dance they hoped we would. Me charging over there, him documenting my erratic, aggressive behavior.'
'Yeah, and his counsel advised him to start a paper trail.'
'That's why you came to see me at work. To follow up on the complaint.'
Sally said, 'Given your and Conner's grudge, we had to do some prying, see if you were keeping both oars in the water. At first we considered that Conner had invented your visit just to smear you, but then we found a paparazzi guy who confirmed you were there. Pictures, even.'
Joe Vente.
'And afterward we spoke to the head of security at Summit, your boy Jerry Donovan, who told us how you were trying to get Keith Conner's address. The bartender at the Formosa has you drinking the brown stuff at breakfast time.'
'Great,' I said. 'Unstable, drinking, obsessive.' I drew in a breath. 'Here's what's gonna come out next. The murder weapon? It belongs to me. It'll be the same club I threw at the intruder in my backyard. Also, I've been having problems at school--missing classes, conflicts with students. I have a paranoid view of government agents, as evidenced by my screenplay. I even tore my house apart in a delusional fit, looking for imaginary planted bugs.'
'Your wife can confirm that they were there,' Sally said. 'The bugs.'
'Right,' I said, 'an unbiased witness.'
'After we filled Jerry Donovan in about the break-in at Conner's, he told us about the surveillance equipment he inspected at your place and about the transmitters he found in some of your clothes. So there's one independent confirmation.'
Jerry must've really thought I'd posed a threat to Conner if he'd come clean about his clandestine visit to our house. I said, 'But for all he knows, I could've planted all that stuff myself as part of some elaborate cover story.'
'Okay . . .' Sally's cheeks were flushed. 'If you clubbed Keith Conner to death, why was there no spatter on your hands or clothes?'
'That's angle-dependent, and two out of four expert witnesses will get the math right. Or wrong. Plus, did the crime-scene guys check the U-pipe under the hotel-room sink?'
Sally and Valentine looked at each other. 'Yes,' she said slowly. 'Traces of blood.'
'Which will prove to be Keith's. Which shows I washed off what spatter there was after killing him.'
'Which side are you arguing here?' Valentine asked.
'I'm arguing the facts. I've got no copies of the discs or e-mails, and the Web sites have vanished, leaving me with only ten-second cell-phone-recorded bursts of secondary footage I could've generated myself. Then I steal out of bed late at night, having lied to my wife, to break in to Hotel Angeleno. I even ducked past a staff member, making sure to look conspicuously furtive.'
'You build a convincing case,' Valentine said.
'I'm the perfect fall guy. Angry, discontented. All they had to do was push the blinking buttons and I charged right down that road.'
A news flash cut in over the soap opera, a picture of Keith Conner with the dates bookending his life, then footage of me being led from the hotel, anguish written across my gray features, my teeth bared like a chimpanzee simulating a human grin. I didn't remember anything of that walk but flashbulbs and photographers shouting my name to draw my focus. My name, my face, out over the morning airwaves. The East Coast was already reading about the whole sordid affair. My parents, over their Maxwell House. I was now one of those creepy, unhinged assassins, men with vacant stares and odd fixations and grievances lovingly nursed to bloody fruition. It hit me powerfully, devastatingly, that nothing in my life could ever get back to normal again.
But Valentine gave me scant room for self-pity. 'Since you have all the answers, why don't you tell us why anyone would bother to frame you.'
'This isn't about me. It was about killing Keith.'
'Or having you go down,' Valentine said.
'There are easier ways to take down someone like me than killing a movie star.'
'Yes,' Sally said, 'but maybe none this nasty.'
Valentine said to me, 'Explain.'
