Imitation of Death (6 page)

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Authors: Cheryl Crane

BOOK: Imitation of Death
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Nikki’s BlackBerry on the coffee table vibrated.
“I’m not interested in the rapper, Mother. The bulletin on the bottom.”
Victoria changed the station back. The ticker now read something about the surrogate birth of some TV celebrity’s daughter.
Nikki picked up her phone, saw who was calling, and answered.
“You just see that? On
Entertainment Tonight
? O-M-G, Nikki.”
“Marshall, I thought you had that fundraiser to go to.”
“I’m going,” he groaned. “My
date
is running late. Some French supermodel. My agent made the arrangements. Did they really arrest Jorge? Nikki, what’s going on over there? Eddie was killed in your mother’s backyard? That’s not possible. I was just there last night.”
“Eddie wasn’t killed in Mother’s yard.” She exhaled. “He was found dead in the alley.”
“And I have to hear about this on TV? And they’ve got it wrong, as usual?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t have time to call you.” Nikki got up to pace. So they’d done it. The police had arrested Jorge. She had to do something. But what could she do? “Things have been crazy here.”
“Is that Jeremy?” Victoria asked. “It’s about time. I left him two messages today.”
Nikki glanced at her mother. “You called Jeremy?”
“No, I didn’t call Jeremy,” Marshall said. “I’m supposed to be your best friend. Your next-door neighbor is murdered by your gardener and you can’t bother to ring me?”
“Jorge didn’t do it,” she insisted.
“Tell him I think he should come over.” Victoria pointed at Nikki with a toast point.
“Mother, it’s
not
Jeremy. It’s Marshall.”
“Victoria called Jeremy and not me?” Marshall sounded hurt.
Nikki rubbed her forehead. She could smell the caviar on her fingertips and she wished she hadn’t eaten it. “I’m not sure what to do,” she said into the phone, closing her eyes.
“You should stay out of it, this time.” Victoria flipped through channels. “
Diners, Drive-ins and Dives
is coming on. Shall we?”
Nikki walked to the far side of the luxurious bedroom suite that, despite all the pink, was decorated in good taste. “Mother offered to pay for an attorney. Jorge said no. I shouldn’t have left him there alone at the police station,” she fretted. “I should be there.”
“You were right to go home,” Marshall insisted. All the silliness was gone from his tone; he was someone Nikki could always count on when she really needed him.
“That would have made him look guilty, being there with him,” Marshall continued.
“How would my being at the police station make Jorge look guilty?” Nikki asked, exasperated, not so much with him, but with the situation.
“It just does,” Victoria said.
Nikki almost tripped over Ollie as she turned to pace in the other direction. “I can’t just sit here and let this happen.”
“Stay out of it!” Marshall and Victoria spoke simultaneously.
“Marshall, go to your fundraiser,” Nikki said into the phone.
“What are you going to do? Ah, hell’s bells,” Marshall muttered. “She’s here.”
“Who’s there?”
“Who’s where?” Victoria asked. “Lobster rolls.” She pointed to the TV with the remote. “You see this, Nicolette? It’s a little place in Massachusetts. I do enjoy a good lobster roll.”
Nikki felt as if she were going to explode. She couldn’t imagine what Jorge was going through right now, and her mother was talking about lobster rolls. “Please go to your dinner, Marshall. Go looking handsome and straight with your supermodel date on your arm and I’ll talk with you tomorrow.”
“Nikki, I know that tone,” Marshall said. “What are you going to do?”
“Good night.” Nikki hung up and marched over to the coffee table. She swept up an unopened jar of caviar. She grabbed the delft china plate of toast points. “I’ll be back.”
“Where are you going with the caviar?”
Nikki headed for the door. “To offer my condolences.”
“To the Bernards? Nikki, I’m not sure that’s a—”
“I won’t be long, Mother. I just have to see what’s going on over there. I have to try and find out what they know about Eddie’s murder. What’s being said about Jorge.”
Victoria came up off the couch. “You’re not going to the—”
“Yes, I am. Stay,” she ordered the dogs as she opened the door.
Stanley and Oliver dropped their bottoms to the floor.
“You most certainly are not.” Victoria tossed the remote on the couch as she followed Nikki. “Not without me, you’re not.”
Chapter 6
V
ictoria and Nikki walked out the French doors from the kitchen, across the well-lit side lawn, toward the side gate between their house and the Bernards’. They didn’t dare go in through the front gates. When Nikki had returned from the police station, Roxbury Drive had been mobbed with news vans and paparazzi.
“I think you need to consider adding video cameras around the property, Mother,” Nikki said at the gate.
Victoria sighed. “I hate the cameras. We’ve already got them at the front gate, at the front door. It’s not the way we did things in the old days.”
“In the old days, your neighbors weren’t being murdered and left in the alley. Didn’t your friend Lola just have to take some nut to court because he was stalking her?”
“He wanted to marry her and live in Cuba in a commune.” As Victoria opened the wrought-iron gate, she lifted her nose into the air. “Ridiculous. She claims to be seventy-five, but she’s eighty if she’s a day . . . and she’s a Republican! What on earth would that young man have thought they would have in common?”
Nikki smiled to herself. She loved the way her mother looked at the world. “I think we’ll go around to the front door,” she said over her shoulder.
“Mourning is not for a kitchen entrance. I’m glad I taught you good manners. Even if you don’t always choose to exercise them,” Victoria added. She just couldn’t resist.
Nikki didn’t take the bait.
As they walked past the pool, Nikki noticed that nothing had been cleaned up in the aftermath of Eddie’s party . . . his last party, it turned out. There were still paper cups and napkins and trash everywhere, but there were bud vases on the tables with a pink rose in each. They looked sadly out of place. She felt badly for the Bernards, for all of them. They were nice people, too nice to be going through a tragedy like this.
As they walked along the fence, a security light with a motion detector on the rear of the house came on. Nikki saw a young man wearing black pants and a white shirt slip out the rear door of the breakfast room and pull a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.
From the side yard, Nikki and Victoria entered the motor court where there were several parked cars. Beyond the double gates, Nikki saw the bright lights of news vans and assorted media campers parked on Roxbury Drive. She and her mother walked between the house and the fountain at the center of the motor court, which featured a six-foot-high sculpture of a dolphin with a girl on its back. Lit with bright white lights, water cascaded out of the dolphin’s mouth and into the massive marble bowl below.
Victoria always liked to say that having money didn’t guarantee having good taste. Nikki had thought that Abe Bernard’s taste was proof of where he had been and where he was now: an eclectic mix of Hollywood multimillionaire and the boy who had lived in a Brooklyn flat with his grandmother in the forties. The dolphin fountain definitely belonged to the boy.
The three-story white stone French Regency Abe had built, however, was the epitome of good taste, with elegant arched windows and doors and a scale that was breathtaking. Nikki, real estate agent to the stars, thought it was one of the finest examples of French Regency architecture in L.A.
“Let me do the talking,” Victoria instructed, cutting in front of Nikki as they approached the front door.
Somewhere between her boudoir and the gate, Victoria had located a tube of pink lipstick and managed to apply it perfectly. Nikki considered asking to borrow it, but her mother wasn’t in the mood to acquiesce, even an inch.
“We’re just going to offer our condolences,” Nikki explained. “And see if there’s anything we can do.” She hurried to catch up as her mother reached the glass-and-iron door. “We’ll only stay twenty minutes.”
“Right.” Victoria rang the doorbell, which played Mozart’s
Eine kleine Nachtmusik
. “I’ll make nice, you snoop around.”
“
Mother
,” Nikki warned as the video monitor mounted to the right of the door blinked on.
A young blond woman’s face appeared on the screen. Her eyes were red from crying. “May I help you?”
“Hi,” Nikki said, feeling awkward. She leaned closer to the camera and monitor, balancing the plate and jar of caviar. “I’m Nikki—”
“Nikki Harper,” the woman said. “From next door.”
Victoria shouldered her way in front of her daughter. “We’ve come to offer our condolences to the family and bring a little something.” She smiled into the camera.
“Ms. Bordeaux!” The young woman’s face lit up. “Oh my God, I can’t believe you’re here. Can you hang on just a minute? I’ll be right there.”
It wasn’t more than a minute before the door opened and the young woman appeared in person. She was tall and skinny and looked like every other young woman in L.A.—bleached blond, flat-ironed hair, and double-D enhancement.
“Thank you so much for coming,” the woman gushed. “I know they’ll be glad to see you.” She moved a crumpled tissue from one hand to the other and offered her hand. “I’m Ashley Carter, Ms. Bernard’s assistant.
Ginny’s
,” she qualified. Melinda had kept her last name after Abe had divorced her, Marshall had once told Nikki, which annoyed the hell out of Ginny.
With the caviar in one hand and the plate of toast points in the other, Nikki had no free hand to shake with the assistant.
Victoria thrust out her hand; she was wearing a ring with an emerald the size of a robin’s egg. It had been a gift from husband number three . . . or perhaps four. Nikki couldn’t recall.
“A real pleasure to meet you,” Victoria said. Without waiting to be asked in, she entered the foyer, which was tiled in limestone with slate insets. “How are they doing?” she asked quietly.
“As well as can be expected.” The assistant patted her eyes with the tissue, obviously impressed by Victoria Bordeaux’s presence, but trying not to appear so. “It’s such a shock to Mr. Bernard, his only son. . . . And Mrs. Bernard, of course. Both Ms. Bernards, of course,” she added awkwardly.
“Of course.” Victoria offered her million-dollar smile. It was that smile that had taken her from an ordinary teenager on a stool in a soda shop on Sunset, to an Oscar-nominated actress living in Beverly Hills. The smile, and the curvaceous figure, which was still pretty darned curvaceous, considering her age. “We brought a little something to nibble on.”
Ashley accepted the plate and jar of caviar from Nikki. “They’re right this way. We’ve been fielding phone calls all day, Mr. Bernard’s assistant, Jason, and I, but he went home with a migraine. I’m supposed to be turning everyone away. Just family and friends allowed tonight. I know Mr. Bernard will want to see you.” She halted in front of closed French doors that led to one of the two formal rooms built off the grand, paneled hallway. “Could you?” she asked, realizing she couldn’t hold on to the snack and open the door.
“Thank you, dear,” Victoria said kindly, patting the assistant on the arm. “Why don’t you find a nice little silver bowl for that caviar and we’ll show ourselves in?”
The assistant beamed at the attention and stepped back.
Victoria met Nikki’s gaze as she opened the doors.
I’ll chat, you snoop,
she mouthed.
Nikki rolled her eyes.
“Abe, oh dear heavens,” Victoria cried, sweeping into the French-paneled room with its patterned wood floors and twelve-foot ceilings.
The room was smartly decorated with French antique furniture, Turkish carpets, and modern artwork. A large gold-gilded mirror on the wall, which Nikki had always admired, was draped in black fabric, a sign of mourning.
Abe Bernard and his ex-wife, Melinda, rose from a settee where they had been sitting, heads together in a private conversation. Abe extended his hands as he crossed the room. “Victoria, how kind of you to come.” He was a short man, with a paunch, white hair, and heavy black-framed glasses. A Martin Scorsese look-alike. Unlike most in Hollywood, he looked his age: seventy. His eyes were a pale blue, almost gray . . . and red from tears.
Nikki’s chest felt tight at the thought of Abe crying for the son he had just lost. Even if Eddie was a jerk, he was still Abe’s child.
Victoria ignored the hand Abe offered and lifted up on her kitten heels and hugged him, her emotion genuine. “I’m so sorry,” she said, looking up at him. “Let’s face it, we all feared something like this might happen to Eddie, but—”
“Mother,” Nikki intoned.
“What?” Victoria glanced over her shoulder at Nikki, then back at Abe. “Abe and I have been friends too long and we’re too old for dancing around issues, any issue, no matter how touchy it might be.” She grasped both his hands in her tiny ones, looking up into his eyes. “I’m sorry about Eddie and I’m sorry that our gardener is a suspect. He didn’t do it, but that’s neither here nor there right now, is it?” She gave his hands a squeeze before releasing them.
Abe bowed his head. “This is my fault. It’s my fault. If only I’d dealt with Eddie differently. If only I’d—”
“Now, now,” Victoria interrupted. “You mustn’t do this to yourself.”
“Abe.” Nikki gave him a quick hug. He smelled of Old Spice cologne and cigars. She looked into his kind eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
“So are we, for all of us,” he agreed. “Your mother’s right. Such a tragedy. And such a mess. I know Ina must be beside herself.” That was Abe. He probably knew the names of all the housekeepers on the street. The gardeners, too.
Victoria was hugging Melinda, the two speaking quietly. Victoria asked her if her daughter would be arriving soon. Emily, Eddie’s younger sister, was traveling out of the country, with her rock star boyfriend. Apparently, Emily was trying to make arrangements to return to the States.
Next, Nikki hugged Melinda, whose appearance reflected that her only son had just been murdered. Her clothes were uncharacteristically rumpled, her face red, and there was mascara smudged beneath her eyes.
Ginny stood, dry eyed, on the far side of the room, near the fireplace with the white marble mantel, nursing a drink. She seemed to be hanging back, which Nikki thought was appropriate, in this situation. After all, Eddie had been Abe and Melinda’s son, not hers. Nikki nodded in her direction. Ginny nodded back, lifted her glass, and took a sip.
Ginny’s twenty-year-old daughter, Lissa, dressed in a short, red knit skirt, body-skimming tank, and spike heels, stood behind her mother, texting on her cell phone.
Abe introduced Nikki and Victoria to several people in the room: two male friends from the studios and their wives, a producer Nikki knew, a female cousin of Ginny’s, and a few others. A writer immediately started talking to Victoria about a guest spot on a new series he was developing.
Nikki made her way across the room, feeling totally awkward. The mourners had broken up into groups, the largest one now gathering around Victoria. Lissa was still in her own little world, texting. Nikki walked over to near where Ginny stood; Ginny didn’t say anything.
Ginny seemed to be standing on the outside looking in, as if she was somewhat a part of the family, but not completely. Which was sort of true. She was married to Abe, the wife of the famous writer/producer and got invitations to all the movie premières and awards shows, but she was a second wife and, therefore, very possibly a temporary entity, and everyone knew it. She lived in the big, new house, had an assistant, housekeeper, and maid at her beck and call, but first wife, Melinda, who lived in the guesthouse, was still very much in charge. And, tonight, Abe was at Melinda’s side and there seemed to be no room in their place of grief for Ginny. Maybe Ginny didn’t want to be there.
“You never think something like this will happen to you,” Nikki said, trying to make conversation with Ginny since she was the only one in the room not engaged in conversation. Nikki was actually thinking about her father’s death and how numb she had felt in the days following his murder. The Bernards had to be feeling the same way.
“And then it does.” Ginny frowned. She was wearing slacks, high heels, and a silk blouse, all freshly pressed. Her makeup, hair, and nails were perfect. It didn’t appear as if she’d cried anytime lately.
Of course, Eddie wasn’t Ginny’s son, Nikki reminded herself. And they had not been the best of friends. Eddie had not made Ginny’s life, or her marriage to his father, easy. He had been very vocal against Abe divorcing his mother to marry Ginny, and he hadn’t attended the Palm Springs wedding three years ago. Eddie had embarrassed the family, including Ginny, time and time again, being in and out of jail, in and out of rehab. He’d appeared on the cover of the gossip magazines regularly, never in a good light.
“I’d offer you a drink,” Ginny said to Nikki, raising her empty glass.
Nikki glanced at her. “Oh, no thank you. I don’t need a drink.”
Ginny turned to look her over. “You in AA, too? I swear, half of L.A. is a member.”
Nikki chuckled. “No. I just . . . I don’t need a drink. We don’t expect you to entertain us. Mother wanted to offer her condolences.” (It was only a tiny lie, barely more than a fib.)
“Well, I can tell you, I could use another gin and tonic. It’s been a hell of a day.”

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