Murder of the Maestro Page 4

  “Tony,” Jack said addressing the Lost Hills police officer who now had a name. “While I escort Dave’s good agent to the kitchen, will you please close and lock the door and then go upstairs and tell Sgt. Bardot a very important visitor has joined us?” Tony hopped to it, shut and locked the door, and then ran up the sweeping stairway to the floor above. Pat and I tagged along as Bernie shuffled as if Jack not only gripped his arm but had placed him in leg irons. His eyes widened as he caught sight of the disarray in the great room and the kitchen.

  Jack seated Bernie at the same table in the morning room where Pat and I sat earlier. Sgt. Bardot came barreling into the room with Tony on his heels. When the senior officer stopped abruptly, Tony came close to bumping into him. That didn’t go unnoticed by the sergeant.

  “Will you get back out there to the front door and make sure we don’t get any other unwelcome guests?”

  “Sure,” Tony replied, moving away at a snail’s pace. I’m sure he wanted to hear Bernie’s explanation for why he had that checkbook. Still within earshot of the conversation, Tony came to a halt, hovering in the background waiting for the action to continue.

  “So, what gives? What are you doing with a dead man’s checkbook?” Sgt. Bardot asked, taking the lead as you might expect him to do. Bernie’s head snapped up from where he’d been staring at his fingernails. His face paled.

  “Dead? Dave’s dead?” Bernie asked as a tinge of green joined the pall left behind when the blood must have rushed from his head. “How? When? I just saw him last night at the gala and he was fit as a fiddle—in his glory!”

  “How and when are questions we want you to answer since we believe someone took that checkbook from a desk upstairs during a break-in or a fight of some kind with Mr. Rollins. When and how did it happen to come into your possession?”

  “He gave it to me.” By the way Bernie was squirming, I found that hard to believe. The man had started to sweat too.

  “When?” Jack asked.

  “A couple of days ago.”

  “Really? Then, how come there’s a check receipt in here with yesterday’s date on it.” Jack had donned latex gloves and held the checkbook open.

  “Lying to the police isn’t a good idea, is it Detective Wheeler?” Sgt. Bardot asked, smirking at Jack.

  “Not during a murder investigation, that’s for sure, Sgt. Bardot.”

  Hmm, I thought, isn’t one of them supposed to be the good cop?

  “M-m-murder! Marla couldn’t have killed him. She told me Dave was still at that gala when she drove over here and picked up her check. It was hers, so why not?” Bernie shook his head and murmured to himself as though lost in thought, “Murdered…” Then he snapped to! “Are you saying she killed him? That conniving… she set me up!”

  “If she came by to pick up her check, why take the checkbook, too?” I asked.

  “She told me she took it to get back at Dave for not bringing her check to the gala like he promised. Marla wanted to teach him a lesson by making him hunt around for it for a day or two—inconvenience him the way he’d done to her.”

  “Okay, maybe you should tell us again why you have it,” Pat suggested.

  “One of her old neighbors called us—er—her this morning to say there were cops in front of the house. Marla panicked, thinking he’d reported the checkbook as stolen. I said I’d take it back and drop it somewhere as if it had been there all along.”

  “Does that mean you spent the night with your client’s ex-wife?” Jack asked.

  “Yes. I didn’t know she was planning to kill my client and use me as the dupe, like that sap in Body Heat.” Bernie was clearly feeling sorry for himself, but he was more louse than sap in my book. As if we needed more of a demonstration that he was, indeed, a louse, he spoke again. “Marla’s no Kathleen Turner, so definitely not worth this much trouble.”

  “And, you’re no William Hurt,” I groused. Bernie glared at me. Jack stifled a grin. “What time did you get to Marla’s house?” I asked.

  “It was nearly eleven.”

  “Pat, what time did Dave call you?”

  “Late. I was in bed, exhausted by all the running around that went on even before that gala that lasted much later than planned. Hang on, and I can tell you the precise time.” Pat dug through her purse she’d left on a counter in the kitchen. She pulled out her cell phone and scrolled through the calls.

  “Eleven-forty-three.” She shook her head as she gave the detectives that information. “I would have chewed him out today for calling me that late without giving me a good reason. Setting up a meeting, even at the last minute, could have waited until today.” Pat sucked in a gulp of air, realizing how wrong that statement was under the circumstances. “Sorry to speak ill of the dead. Dead men don’t make meetings, do they?”

  I reached out and clasped her arm, hoping to console the woman who suddenly seemed less steady on her feet. I spotted a few bottles of water sitting in a tray on the edge of the kitchen island and handed her one. Coffee made, and beverages set out—the woman had been at the house for hours and must have gone into hostess mode at some point.

  Dead men still have Personal Assistants, I mused to myself as Jack spoke.

  “If Bernie’s telling us the truth, Dave was still alive after he arrived at Marla’s house.” I suppressed my disappointment that Bernie probably wasn’t going to get arrested for murdering Dave Rollins. For now, I couldn’t think of a nicer end to this episode than watching Tony haul Bernie off to spend the night in jail.

  “What about it, Bernie? Are you telling us the truth?” Sgt. Bardot asked.

  “Call Marla. She’ll tell you what time I got to her house.”

  “So now you want us to believe the woman who set you up for murder is going to provide you with an alibi?” Bernie thought about Jack’s question for a few seconds.

  “You call her, or I will! I also believe I’m entitled to call my lawyer,” Bernie replied. “In fact, I’m not saying another word until he gets here.”

  Despite claiming he wasn’t going to say another word, more conversation followed. I didn’t hear it because my phone rang. I scrambled to dig out the phone as that ringtone blasted out the melody Dave had written so many years ago. It made me sad to hear the jaunty notes. What made me even sadder was the identity of the caller.

  “Max,” I said and then paused to take a deep breath. Jack and Pat spoke almost in unison.

  “You’d better talk to him.”

  “Yeah, I know, but what am I going to say?” I walked away from the group gathered around Bernie. The good agent struck me as a ticking time bomb likely to explode at any moment with outrage. I stepped out onto Dave Rollins’ expansive patio overlooking the Pacific Ocean and gulped sea air.

  “Max, how are you doing? I’m afraid I don’t have much news for you since Pat called to tell you about Dave’s death. I’m so sorry.” An unearthly silence followed. Max, speechless, is a rare event. That he didn’t interrupt me as I explained what we’d learned since arriving at Dave’s home was unprecedented. When he did speak, his voice was weary, but determined. Max Marley has a will of iron.

  “So, what are you doing next?” He asked. I wasn’t quite sure what to say when Jack appeared at my side.

  “Come on,” Jack said.

  “Hold on. Maybe I can tell you what’s next,” I told Max. I clamped a hand over the cell phone in case I didn’t want Max to hear what Jack had to say.

  “We’re going to go interview a person of interest for Sgt. Bardot,” Jack replied. “You know her far better than I do, so I’m taking you with me.”

  “Uh, Jack tells me we’re going to interview someone for the police,” I didn’t explain further, and Max didn’t ask for more information.

  “Go, go, go! Keep me posted, though. Call me immediately if you find out who did this monstrous thing to Dave. In the meantime, I trying to figure out how to handle this with our Associates and the public. It’s a difficult loss for the Marvelous Marley World fa
mily. Monstrous, just monstrous,” Max muttered to himself as he ended the call.

  As self-proclaimed head of the family, “Uncle Max,” was obviously trying to come to grips with the situation. Not just for business reasons, either, as the anger and sadness in his voice revealed. The demand that we keep him informed was delivered more as a plea than an order.

  “Poor Max,” I said as I hustled after Jack to our car parked out in front of the maestro’s house. Right now, the entrance gate at the street was open. It wouldn’t have been that way Friday night. “This is the only entrance from the street, right?” I asked Jack moments later as we drove through it.

  “Yep. The only other way to get onto the property is through the back gate.”

  “It had to be someone close to him, then,” I muttered.

  “Like an ex-wife, you mean?” I nodded in response. A knot formed in my stomach at the thought of facing Marla under the circumstances. On a good day, she was hard to take. This wasn’t a good day by any stretch of the imagination.

  “Buckle up, Detective. If I know Marla, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

  “Yes, you do know Marla and I’m hoping if I miss something, you’ll catch it. By bumpy, do you mean she’s going to be on a crying jag playing the grieving widow, even though she and Dave are no longer married?”

  “No. Not unless there are cameras around. She’s quite good at striking a pose or putting on a show like that for the media. In private, we’re more likely to get a glimpse of the Marla Broussard Pat had to deal with so often. I’ve caught her in action a time or two. Our catering associates have had run-ins with her in tantrum-throwing, diva mode many times. She’s not shy about expressing her dislike for a dish by hurling it.”

  “At someone?”

  “I’m not sure that was the intention, but she’s come close to it.”

  “Maybe Dave Rollins was lucky he lived as long as he did.” Jack stared at me. “None of what Pat had to say about her must have come as a surprise to you.”

  “Not a bit of it.”

  “She’d better hope her alibi holds up.”

  5 The Ex-Mrs. Maestro

  “Yes, I was at his house. So, what? Is it my fault the fool fell off the cliffs?” As I’d expected, Marla was anything but grief stricken. She was suspicious from the moment we arrived and I introduced her to Jack. Then she grew indignant as soon as he asked her a few basic police detective questions.

  “Who said that’s how he died?” Jack asked.

  “Are you kidding? Someone gave him a push?” Marla Broussard asked and then paused. Jack said nothing in reply to her questions. Then she looked at me as if searching for confirmation. I shrugged slightly, trying to remain noncommittal since we really didn’t know for certain how Dave had ended up at the bottom of the cliffs.

  “What Jack’s asking is how you knew he didn’t just die in his bed from a heart attack.”

  “His neighbor called me and said he’d fallen to his death. Dying in bed from a heart attack would have served him right, the old coot. A dive off the cliffs is a much more dramatic end for the maestro though, isn’t it? Especially if someone pushed him. Now that’s a story!” Jack still said nothing, but he raised his eyebrows.

  “Don’t look at me like that, Detective. Dave wasn’t even home yet when I got to his place. Besides, I was wearing a pair of heels almost exactly like these. They’re great for man-chasing, but not in a literal sense, if you know what I mean?” She batted her eyelashes at Jack, and then sighed in an exasperated way as he fixed her with a withering gaze.

  “Oh, come on. Even he could have outrun me while I was wearing shoes like these,” as she said that, Marla stretched, turning her ankle for Jack to get a better look at those shoes and her legs. “That’s especially true if he got anywhere near those stairs before he took that dive. I hated walking down those stairs to the beach even when I wasn’t in spiky heels.” Jack’s eyes narrowed as he deployed his worldly-wise, detective’s truth-o-meter, measuring the “ex-Mrs. Maestro” as she sat across from us.

  “Why would I kill him? He’s my meal ticket—or would have been for a while longer. Shoving the golden goose off a cliff would have been stupid. At least, until my current prospect pops the question.”

  That must have done something to Jack’s assessment of the woman because he blinked and shifted in his seat. Her analysis was shamelessly self-serving, but her logic was brutally frank.

  She and Bernie are made for each other, I thought, remembering how quickly Bernie Morse had concluded that the lovely Marla Broussard had set him up for murder.

  “Would that be your dead ex-husband’s agent?” I asked.

  “Maybe. What’s it to you? I don’t even understand why I’m speaking to either of you without my lawyer present.”

  Another totally self-serving comment. It came as no surprise to me that Marla Broussard was a piece of work. I’d mingled with her on occasion after she married Dave, but she worked at Marvelous Marley World before she married her way up and out of The Cat Factory. Younger than Dave Rollins by many years, their affair had been considered scandalous, especially when their daughter was born six months after a hasty marriage in Reno.

  I was a little surprised by her willingness to speak to us, but if she and Bernie were serious enough to be considering marriage that would explain it. Bernie had asked her to do it. After consulting his lawyer, Bernie had called Marla and explained that Jack and I would be right over. When she asked why, he didn’t say a word about corroborating his alibi, but stuck with the script he’d been given.

  “They have some questions for you about Dave and they want to clear up confusion about why I’m at his house this morning. I told them you could do that.”

  Here we were, face-to-face with her, in a swanky home in Pacific Palisades. I scanned the well-appointed room around me and could believe that Marla didn’t want to give this up.

  “I’ve confirmed what Bernie told you. I was in my ex-husband’s house last night while the maestro was still being heralded as a genius. So, what?”

  “How did you get in?” Marla tapped one of her stiletto-shorn feet.

  “I used to live there, Georgie. Remember? I still have the code. He changed the entry code on the security system from time-to-time, but he’d give me the new one. Or he’d give it to the kids and they’d give it to me. They’ve both stayed in the guest wing of his house if they wanted to spend a weekend at the beach—sometimes even while he was away doing concerts and recitals.”

  Dave and I were colleagues at Marvelous Marley World the entire time I’d worked there, although he’d been hired years before me. It wasn’t until I moved into management that I ran into him much. Even then, we weren’t close associates. My role in Food and Beverage Management sometimes crossed over into the entertainment side of Marvelous Marley World Enterprises. That usually happened when our caterers provided services during rehearsals and business meetings or for opening night concerts, theater, or film premiers.

  When Dave and I chatted at one of those galas, he sometimes mentioned Marla or one of his children. I had no idea he saw them on what sounded like a regular basis. The last I heard, his daughter, Katie, was in San Francisco and his son, Carter, was in San Jose. Katie was musical, Carter was not, if I remembered correctly.

  “This is really no big deal. I knew where Dave kept my check. I picked it up and left.”

  “What about the checkbook? Bernie says you took it to get back at your ex-husband?” I asked.

  “That’s where Bernie’s winging it, or he misunderstood me. I didn’t take it on purpose. What I told Bernie is that I had considered taking it on purpose to hassle Dave since he’d ‘forgotten’ to bring my check with him to the gala as he’d promised. I’ll be honest and tell you that the idea crossed my mind, but I put it back, or so I thought. When I realized Dave was expecting company, I was in such a rush to get out of there, I took off with it.”

  “Why were you in that big a hurry if the gala wasn’t even o
ver yet?”

  “I thought I heard a car pull up. The last thing I wanted to do was run into Dave with some young thing on his arm, while he was still basking in the glory of being the maestro.” To me, it was entirely possible for Marla to be as shallow and banal as her explanation appeared to be, but Jack’s face registered skepticism.

  “If you’re looking for a confession, here’s one. I was tempted to jerk Dave around by dropping the checkbook into the trash can next to his desk or tossing it off his balcony and into the ocean. After all, he could have made life easier for me if he’d set up an automatic payment to my account. Instead, I had to contact him every month, like a beggar asking for a handout instead of getting what I was owed after putting up with his massive ego and roving eye. Even at home that mousy PA was always underfoot. Why would he set Pat up with an office in our home unless some sort of hanky-panky was going on?” Marla was getting worked up. The knot in my stomach was back. Fortunately, Jack switched the subject.

  “I take it if Dave’s place had been turned upside down when you arrived you would have called the police, right?” Jack didn’t even blink as he asked that question.

  “Turned upside down? Are you serious?” She appeared to be genuinely puzzled. Dave’s neighbor who called to tell Marla he’d fallen off a cliff must not have known about that part. When neither of us jumped in with a response, Marla continued speaking. “Only an idiot would go into her ex-husband’s house if it had been trashed. I’m no idiot. The place looked perfectly normal. Normal for Dave in Casanova mode, anyway, with his little mousetrap all set to snag some starry-eyed wannabe ‘it girl.’ I spotted the rose, his smoking jacket on the valet stand, the empty ice bucket waiting to be filled, and the little bauble lying there like a bit of cheese to lure the mouse into the trap.”

  “A bauble—what kind of a bauble?” I asked. Jack went on alert.

  “A diamond-studded, treble-clef shaped pin. Not very original, is it? He must have bought them in bulk, too, since his date last night would have been only one of many to wear the maestro’s pin.”