The Bad Always Die Twice (11 page)

“She was here. In bed most of the day. Plain worn out. That, and she rubbed the skin right off her bunions in them too tight shoes she wore to her party Saturday night. But you know rich white folk. Not a lotta sense. Except you, Nikki. You got sense.”

Nikki grinned. Compliments from a woman like Chessy were few and far between and greatly appreciated. “So she was here and you saw her . . . all day.”

“Yup. Now, that man of hers.” Chessy did her pointing thing again. “I can’t vouch for him. He left early that morning. The missus said he had casting calls.”

“And when did he get home?” Nikki tossed another clean shrimp in the bowl. She was on a roll.

“Late.
Dancin’ with the Stars
was already on.”

“And that comes on, when? Eight?”

“Eight o’clock,” Chessy agreed. “That’s right. I remember ’cause I was annoyed. I like to be home to see the beginning and it was already on by the time I went out that door.” She indicated the service entrance.

“Ma, I TiVo it for you every week. You can watch it whenever you like.”

Chessy frowned. “I like to see it live.”

“It’s not live, Ma.”

Chessy glanced at her gorgeous daughter. “You got more toenails to sweep up?”

Nikki smiled into her bowl of shrimp. “So Thompson was on casting calls.” She nodded. “Tricky, but not impossible to track down.”

“You might be wastin’ your time there,” Shondra said. “I’m thinking that hunky monkey’s not going to matter around here much longer.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because I think Mrs. March is about to kick him out on his pretty tail.”

“Thompson? Really?” Nikki stared at Shondra. “But I thought things were good with them. They seemed happy together Saturday night and when I came by Wednesday,” she thought about how’d they’d been together, “everything seemed good.”

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that how rich people act in front of people like you and how they act in front of people like me, it isn’t always the same.” Shondra sipped her Coke. “It’s like they don’t acknowledge our existence, if they don’t have to.”

Nikki had to stop deveining for a second to take in what Shondra was saying. “So you think Edith and Thompson are having problems?”

“Sure sounded like it Saturday. I couldn’t hear what was being said, but there was a lot of hollering going on in her suite, then door slamming, and next thing I know, he’s taking off on his motorcycle.”

“Thompson left here Saturday afternoon, before the party?”

“Sure did. Didn’t come back until a few minutes before the guests started arriving.” Shondra leaned on the countertop beside her mother. “I heard her tell him just before she went downstairs that he better hurry up and get dressed if he was going to
her
party.”

“Interesting,” Nikki commented, as much to herself as to the two women. Plopping the last clean shrimp in the bowl, she went to the sink to rinse off her hands, checking her vintage Patek Philippe watch. Technically, it was a man’s watch, but one of her favorites. “I better get back to work, but I appreciate you talking to me. Not that you’ve done anything wrong.” She grabbed a hand towel. “But you know what I mean.”

“The help’s not supposed to tattle on the employer?”

“You’re
not
tattling,” Nikki insisted, heading for the door. She was going to be late to a meeting at the office and she was going to have to either show up without Jessica’s lunch or be beyond fashionably late. “Edith and Thompson didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Not that you know of,” Chessy called after her, her tone as sassy as ever.

Nikki skipped making a second stop at In & Out and was only fashionably late to the meeting at the Windsor offices on North Canon Drive in Beverly Hills. The agents spent more time fussing over Jessica and discussing what they’d heard on talk radio about Rex March’s murder than they did discussing the new properties coming on the market. Nikki tried to not let it bother her that Jessica seemed to like all the attention. It shouldn’t have surprised her; Jessica was a firm believer that there was no good publicity versus bad publicity. Just publicity.

After the meeting, Nikki went into the small office she and Jessica shared; actually, it was more like a cubicle with high walls and a door. While Jessica chatted in the break room, Nikki pulled the March file. She didn’t know what she was looking for, but she was hoping she’d know it when she found it. She studied the original listing sheet she and Jessica had created when the March home had gone up for sale in the pocket neighborhood of Outpost Estates in the eastern Hollywood Hills. The area had a great history dating back to the 1920s when the luxury neighborhood had been in the heart of old Hollywood.

Nikki knew the listing from memory; it had taken hours to write. The estate was such a white elephant, it had been difficult to play up: an old commercial kitchen that desperately needed renovating, an out-of-date tiled pool, mediocre landscaping, not to mention the
coup de grace
, the mural of Rex on the wall in the salon. After glancing at the listing, she set it aside and studied the notes in the file; most of them were in her own handwriting, but there were a couple of slips of paper in Jessica’s handwriting.

Jessica walked into the office. She was dressed as if ready to make a public appearance, which, in a way, she was. The press couldn’t get enough of her right now. This morning, Nikki had had to drop her off on the street behind their office in order to avoid the paparazzi. She was wearing a cute little orange Badgley Mischka number and her signature sky-high heels. Nikki tried not to feel frumpy in her merino wool skirt and sensible knee-high black boots.

Jessica glanced at the open file on Nikki’s semi-messy desk. “Whatcha doin’?”

“Going over the March file. Rex had really been eager to sell the place. You know why?”

“Tiny master bath with shoddy tile?”

Nikki glanced over the desk at her friend, giving her an
I’m trying to help you here
look. “I mean, did he ever say anything about why they decided to sell? He knew the state of the market. Everyone knew Scarlett Johansson lost millions on the sale of her Spanish villa just down the street from them.”

“Are you asking me if Rex and I discussed the sale of his house while we were making love?”

“No, oh gosh, no.” Nikki put up both hands. “I do
not
want any of those details. I’m just . . . I’m trying to piece things together, Jess. Why would Rex fake his death?”

Jessica pressed her lips together, her eyes growing moist. “I don’t know. I swear to God, I don’t.”

“Sorry,” Nikki murmured.

“It’s okay.” Jessica dropped into her chair behind her desk. “You really think you’re going to find the answer in there?” She exhaled and moved a stack of paperwork from one side of her desk to another. “I can go home whenever you want. Downy doesn’t want me showing houses until the police are done with their nonsense questioning me. He thinks it’s bad for business.” She threw up her hands. “I’m thinking I might get the opportunity to show some houses, just because people want to meet me, you know, me being a murder suspect.”

“Jess, that’s a terrible thing to say.”

She shrugged. “A girl’s got to pay her AmEx bill.” She glanced at the file again and frowned. “You’re not going to find anything in there.”

“No. I guess not.” But Nikki continued to flip through the papers. There were notes on potential buyers. Copies of some estimates Nikki had gotten for Rex with the idea of making some improvements that would move the house. There was also a copy of a contract that had fallen through, and a copy of the current contract. Nothing of interest. She was scooping the papers up to drop them back into the file when a pink W
HILE
Y
OU
W
ERE
O
UT
slip fell to her desk. She picked it up. It documented a call from Rex a month before he supposedly died in the plane crash. For some reason, he had called the main number instead of Nikki’s or Jess’s cell. There was a return phone number on it that Nikki didn’t recognize. This was not Rex’s or Edith’s cell phones or their home phone. She held up the piece of pink paper. “You recognize this?”

Jessica barely looked at it. “Nikki, that was what? Like eight months ago? I don’t know what it is. And I know you don’t want to hear this, but we cared for each other.”

Nikki nibbled on her lower lip. “Did you return this call?”

“Nikki, I don’t know. I don’t remember. How many calls do we return to clients a day?” Jessica looked up at her from across her desk. “Do you think it would be okay to call the police and see if I can pick my car up from impound yet?” As expected, the police had contacted Jessica midday Tuesday, gotten the location of her car, and had it towed in to examine for evidence.

“There’s no way they’re going to release it this soon.” Nikki held up the call memo slip. “You sure you didn’t return this call, because I’m sure I didn’t.”

“I
don’t remember
.” Jessica shrugged dramatically; she sounded like she was teetering on the edge of tears. “I think I might just go home. Of course, I
can’t
go home because the police have my apartment roped off because I found a dead man in my bed. I’m just going to catch a cab.” She opened her desk drawer and pulled out a cute little leather handbag that was the same burnt orange as her dress. “See you at your place later?”

“I might try to catch a bite with Jeremy tonight. Could you let Ollie and Stan out?”

“Sure,” Jessica sighed; she didn’t have a lot of patience for pets.

When she was gone, Nikki studied the pink slip of paper in her hand. It had Rex’s name, Jess’s name, and a phone number. There was something written beneath the phone number, but the pen used to write the note had smeared. She studied it under her desk light. It looked like the number 511.

Nikki hesitated, then picked up the phone and dialed the number.

“Good afternoon,” said a man on the other end of the phone. “Sunset Tower Hotel, how may I direct your call?”

Chapter 10

I
t was close to five by the time Nikki reached the landmark art deco hotel; the traffic on Sunset Boulevard was awful, even for a Friday afternoon. Nikki had given enough potential real estate buyers the canned tour of L.A. that she knew the spiel on all the hotspots by heart.

Designed by the architect Leland A. Bryant, the Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood had been built in the early thirties as a luxury apartment building. It was the first quakeproof structure built in L.A. Occupants over the years had included Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe, and Frank Sinatra. In the eighties, the building fell into disrepair, but was saved at the last moment from demolition by preservation laws. Truman Capote was once quoted as saying, “I am living in a very posh establishment, the Sunset Tower, which local gentry tell me is where every scandal that ever happened, happened.”

Nikki didn’t like to consider how many nights Victoria had spent in the Sunset Tower while Nikki was tucked safely in bed back in Beverly Hills. Victoria was never considered a loose woman by anyone’s standards, but she managed to marry seven different men, so she had by no means been a social recluse.

Nikki pulled up to the valet parking stand in front of the hotel. “I won’t be long,” she told the young man who opened her car door. As she climbed out, she picked a peanut up off the seat, giving him a quick smile of apology. “Thanks,” she called as she accepted the ticket, handing him a few ones instead of the peanut. As she headed for the front doors, she tossed the nut into her mouth.

The lobby of the hotel was grand, done in dark wood, mauve accents and marble floors. Unfortunately, despite the enormously expensive restoration job, Nikki got the feeling that the true ambience of the hotel was lost forever. The Tower Bar (once gangster Bugsy Siegel’s apartment), where she occasionally met clients, was nice enough, but she couldn’t help feeling the place was touristy. In her mind, the Sunset Tower Hotel would never be what it had once been in the Golden Age of Hollywood.

She walked up to the front desk; the clerk was busy typing into the computer, though for all she knew, he could have been bringing up YouTube clips of kittens riding unicycles. She waited patiently until the young man in the cheap suit jacket glanced up.

“May I help you?”

Nikki moved in closer, lowering her voice. “I was wondering if you can answer a couple of questions about one of your guests.”

“I’m sorry, but we don’t reveal the names of celebrities currently staying with us,” he replied, a line he’d obviously memorized. He returned his attention to his YouTube video.

That’s because no celebrities would stay here,
Nikki thought, but she didn’t say it. Instead, she gave him
the smile.
“This isn’t exactly a celebrity. And he’s . . .
was
a client of mine.”

The clerk stared at her.

“Could you tell me if Rex March stayed here February 11
^th
of this year?” She indicated the computer screen. “Would it be possible to just . . . look it up?”

“Never heard of him,” the young man said.

“You’ve never heard of Rex March?” She reached into her handbag, pulled out a leather business card case and began to thumb through the cards. She’d been meaning for months to clean it out; the good news was that she was almost positive she still had one of Rex’s cards, complete with a photo of him grinning. Bingo! She offered the business card. “You don’t recognize this man?”

He barely looked at the card. “Nope.”

“Do you read the newspapers?”

“Excuse me?”

“Read the papers?” she asked, trying to check her annoyance. “Watch the news? My client, Rex March, was murdered this week.” Seeing no need to clutter the conversation with details, she left out the part about her friend being the main suspect.

“There’s been no murders in the Sunset Tower Hotel, ma’am. Is there anything else I can do for you?”