Using the nurse’s strength, Altford rose slowly and carefully to make sure nothing had been sprained or broken. After she was back in bed, the nurse asked if she’d like something to help her sleep.
“I’d like a big glass of ice, please, Liz. And after you get that, I’d be ever so grateful if you’d pour in one of those miniatures of gin and let it sort of percolate down?”
The nurse left Altford propped up in bed on pillows, her hands wrapped around a tumbler of iced gin. Altford had two large swallows, put the glass on the bedside table, placed the nearby telephone on her lap and tapped out a number that was answered halfway through the second ring by Edd Partain.
“How long’s it gonna take you to get over here?” she said.
Millicent Altford let Partain drive this time and noticed he was a timer who hit most of the traffic lights on the green or yellow. She liked the way he drove and also the way he listened to her tale of the failed smothering.
When Partain was sure she had finished, or at least run down, he said, “The guy waited for the shift change.”
“Obviously.”
“Would you recognize him again?”
“In a second — providing he wore a blue mask, coat, hair cap and see-through plastic gloves.”
“You said he was big. How big?”
“Six-four at least.”
“What about his eyes?”
“You mean were they the cruel eyes of some crazed proctologist who’d rather kill than cure?”
“Just their color.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Too bad,” Partain said.
“Would you remember their color if a pillow was about to cancel your breathing?”
“Yes, but that’s what I do. Or did. Notice things. Like how many fingers has Mickey Mouse got?”
“You’re asking me?”
Partain nodded.
“Three,” she said. “Because it’s easier and cheaper to draw three than four.”
“Then you do notice stuff.”
“Yeah, when guys aren’t trying to smother me.”
Partain nodded his understanding.
“Fact is, I closed my eyes,” she said. “That’s a lie. After that first look at him, I squeezed them shut, just like a little kid.”
“A little kid wouldn’t have rolled off the bed,” he said.
“I reckon I also yelled and cussed a lot.”
“Even better,” Partain said, then asked, “He say anything?”
“Not a word.”
“If he’d said something, maybe you’d recognize his voice, if you ever heard it again.”
“Maybe,” Millicent Altford said.
It was just after 1 A.M. when Partain stopped the Lexus in front of the Eden’s glass doors, switched off the engine and turned to Altford. “Don’t get out till I open your door. I’ll see you up to your place, then come back down and put the car away.”
“You think he’ll try again?” she said, sounding more interested than frightened.
“I don’t know what he’ll do,” Partain said, got out, went around the car’s rear and opened the right-hand door. As Altford stepped out, a dark brown windowless van with no license plate stopped on Wilshire Boulevard, shifted into reverse and backed quickly into the Eden’s concrete drive until it was no more than thirty or thirty-five feet from the Lexus. By then, Partain had slammed the passenger door shut and forced Altford to kneel beside the right front wheel where it and the car’s V-8 engine would provide some protection should the shooting start.
But there were no shots. Instead, Partain heard, but didn’t see, the van’s back door open, then close. In between the opening and closing was the sound of something landing on the concrete drive. It made that peculiar sound of something that doesn’t mind being dropped. Huge sacks of flour or rice don’t mind, Partain thought, and neither do dead or unconscious bodies.
After he heard the dark brown van speed off, heading west on Wilshire, probably toward a freeway, Partain rose, hurried around the nose of the Lexus, went another seven or eight quick strides, stopped and stared down at the dead man who wore a lot of light blue clothing.
Altford called to him from behind the Lexus. “What is it?”
“I think it’s your fake doctor.”
She rose slowly and even more slowly joined Partain. The body lay on its right side, facing the street. The blue hair cap was still in place. So was the blue shirt jacket, but the surgical mask was gone. The one hand they could see, the left one, still wore a transparent surgical glove. The pants and shoes were the only clothing that wasn’t blue. The shoes were sockless cordovan leather loafers and the pants were tan cavalry twill, now badly soiled.
“Let’s make sure,” Partain said as he moved around the body.
“Of what?”
“That he’s dead,” Partain said.
“He’s dead all right,” she said, joining Partain in his inspection of the man’s face, which belonged to Dave Laney, late of Guadalajara. Laney’s eyes were open. So was his mouth, and something other than his tongue was sticking out of it.
Partain removed the car keys from his pocket and gave them to Altford. “Call 911 on your car phone.”
She absently accepted the keys, still gazing down at the dead man. “Dave tried to kill me,” she said, giving each word equal emphasis so that her sentence was neither accusation nor question but merely a statement of fact.
“Go make the call,” Partain said. Altford nodded, still staring at Laney until she turned and hurried toward the car.
Partain knelt to remove the thing that had been protruding from Laney’s mouth. It was a plastic key card that Partain was almost sure would unlock the front doors of the Eden and also the door to apartment 1540, the residence of Millicent Altford, her daughter and their temporary live-in bodyguard.
Chapter 15
The stay-behind LAPD homicide detective sergeant, Ovid Knox, reminded Partain of certain Special Forces types he had known in the Army. Not the dumb ones, who liked to boast of their membership in a chosen elite, but the smart ones, who scoffed at elitism even though they devoutly, if secretly, had believed in it since they were four years old or maybe even three.
After Millicent Altford’s 911 call, a swarm of plainclothes detectives, uniformed police and technical staff, most of them from the Westside Division, had quickly arrived and slowly departed, taking with them the late Dave Laney. But Ovid Knox had lingered on because of what he said were a couple of minor items he needed to check with Ms. Altford, her daughter and Mr. Partain.
Knox was closer to 40 than 30 and still had a lot of tousled sun-streaked blond hair that complemented his easy manner and lazy smile. Partain suspected the smile and manner of being a mask for the contempt that lay just behind a pair of sardonically amused blue eyes.
At 2:44 A.M., the four of them sat drinking coffee in the significant-money salon, which was how Partain now thought of Millicent Altford’s huge living room. She still wore the gray pants and sweater. Her daughter wore baggy dark green shorts, a white T-shirt and laceless white jogging shoes. Partain wore the blue suit, white shirt and the same carefully knotted tie. Of the four, Ovid Knox seemed most at ease, perhaps because he was the law and also the most elegantly dressed in his sand-colored suede jacket, chocolate-brown gabardine pants, tieless off-white shirt and the plain loafers whose leather resembled carefully polished black walnut. It was an outfit whose retail price, Partain guessed, would top $2,000. But Partain also guessed that Knox never paid retail for anything over $100.