“Yep,” Bones agreed. “But even pros make mistakes. If he had just thrown the radio in the tub without drowning her first, she would have been killed instantly, and we would never have known the dif. Ironic, isn’t it? That blunder may just get him a noseful of gas.”
Me? I was wondering what kind of car Eddie Woods was driving these days.
CHAPTER 22
I was high up on Beverly Drive when I found Boxwood. I could see why Millie asked me if I wanted directions. It wasn’t much of a street-barely two lanes wide and unpaved. The sign was lost among shrubs and trees. I made the sharp turn and followed the bumpy road around several curves. There was an occasional mailbox but the area was so heavily forested you could hardly see the houses from the road. Then the woods to the south began to thin out and I could catch fleeting glimpses of Beverly Hills and to its right, in the early evening haze, the sprawling Twentieth Century-Fox lot. I could see the big arc lights occasionally streaking into the evening sky from the sets where Tyrone Power or Gene Tierney or Don Ameche, the reigning monarchs of the studio, were probably shooting a scene in New York or Singapore, courtesy of the designers and carpenters who created movie magic.
I came on the property suddenly. The forest closed in on me again, I went around a shallow curve, and there it was. A stone wall about three feet high enclosed several acres of woods. The mailbox was imbedded in the wall. I could see the house flickering past through the trees, about two hundred or three hundred feet back in the woods. I turned in an open gate and drove down the dirt road that wound lazily around trees and wild bushes to the house.
It was a surprise. In my mind I had pictured one of those big Beverly Hills mansions, but this house was rustic, a high-peaked, one-story built of stone and wood. Cedar shingles surrounded an enormous chimney that was in the center of the structure. I drove past the carport, its door raised and the Pierce-Arrow Phaeton parked inside, up to a massive teakwood front door.
I was wearing my best suit, the blue linen double-breasted, with a pale blue French-cuffed shirt, a yellow tie with little blue dingbats, my best cordovan wing tips, and the small gold cuff links that, with $784, were my inheritance from my father. I had sixty-five bucks in my wallet including another ten Moriarity had given me for expenses. I was dressed to the nines and why not. I was going to take a Coldwater Canyon princess to the deli for dinner and to a free movie.
Chimes rang softly somewhere inside. The door opened immediately and she was standing there, her grin as wide as Sunset Boulevard and her eyes sparkling as they caught the rays of sun filtering through the trees.
“Hi,” she said. “Any trouble finding the place?”
“Came right to it.”
“I know, you’re a cop,” she said. “You can find any street in town and you remember phone numbers.”
She took my hand and led me into the house, stepping aside as she did. The dog sat behind her. A pure white German shepherd, larger than Rosie, his pointed ears straight up on alert, his eyes, coal black at the center ringed with flecks of yellow, looking straight at me.
“I keep running into dogs every time I go through a door,” I said.
“This is Montana,” she said. “He’s very well trained and very friendly, as long as you don’t do something stupid.”
“Is that supposed to reassure me?”
“He’s a dear. You’ll grow to love him, just like Rosebud.”
“I’m calling him Rosie, after a prizefighter.”
“I know who Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom is,” she said with fake exasperation.
“How come you call him Montana?”
“Because that’s where he came from. Dad has a little spread out there, uses it for hunting. His caretaker’s dog had pups and I got the pick of the litter.”
A little spread. For hunting. With a caretaker. In Montana. What am I doing here?
I walked past her into a wide hallway that went all the way through the house. There was a staircase on the right side that curved around to the second floor, where what looked like two rooms were tucked into the eaves of the otherwise A-frame structure.
“I’ll be ready in five minutes,” she said, trotting up the steps. “Make yourself at home.” She stopped about halfway up, leaned over the banister, and pointed out directions to me. “The bar’s to your left at the end of the hall, sitting room to the right, terrace straight ahead. Montana will show you around.”
And she disappeared.
Montana stood up and walked slowly toward the rear of the house as if he understood every word. I followed him.
There were archways on both sides of the hall. To my left was the kitchen and to the right, a library, which smelled of leather, its shelves jammed with books. One chair, enormous with an equally enormous ottoman, held down a corner of the room, with a coffee table on one side of it, an unruly stack of magazines on the other side, a floor lamp behind it. The record player and her records filled almost an entire bookshelf behind the chair.
The main room was at the end of the hall and ran the full width of the place. It was huge. The fireplace, an island of brick and brass, served as a room divider, separating the barroom on the left from the sitting room on the right. The ceiling soared above, forming the back side of the A-frame. Skylights made both rooms bright and inviting.
The sitting room was furnished with white goose down sofas and chairs. It was a room decorated for comfort. On a table at one side of the living room were a dozen or so photographs: pictures of Millicent as a child in riding clothes on a black horse; family groups; Millicent on graduation day with her father standing proudly beside her. And one photograph of a roguish-looking young man in an RAF uniform with the insignia of the Eagle Squadron-a group of Americans who, in 1940, had formed their own flying squad within the British Air Force. Scrawled across the bottom was: “To my dear heart, Mill the Pill. Keep the faith. Hugh. 11/14/40.”
An enormous window faced the terrace, with French doors on either side.
And what a terrace.
I followed Montana onto a length of neatly mowed lawn, twenty feet I guessed, up to the swimming pool, which stretched the length of the terrace and looked at first like a reflecting pond. I walked around one end of it out to the edge of the terrace and watched a broad facade of water, almost as long as the pool itself, pouring like a solid sheet straight down on rocks a dozen feet below and, in turn, running into a small pond surrounded by wildflowers. Then there was a tennis court, and beyond it the forest sloped down to a natural stream that tumbled down the hillside. The stone wall ended five feet from the stream, with a gate at its center. On the other side of the creek, nothing but trees. A sudden breeze took the heat out of the air and brought with it a guarantee of rain.
I was in a place far, far away from the L.A. I knew.
“So this is where Adam bumped into Eve,” I said to Montana.
“I assume from that remark you like it,” Millicent said, behind me.
I turned and walked back to the doorway. She was dressed in a pastel blue, lightweight cashmere blazer, white blouse, a pleated yellow silk skirt, and a matching silk scarf around her long, aristocratic neck. She was so chic she embarrassed the word.
“If Eve looked as good as you, Adam wouldn’t have been interested in apples,” I said.
She blushed, her lips parted slightly, and she stared up at me for several seconds. Then she smiled and said, “Wasn’t it Eve who was interested in apples?”
We stood a foot apart, staring at each other, until she broke the spell. “Come on, we’ll be late,” she said. And to Montana, “Alert, Monty.” His attitude changed. He suddenly got serious. He pranced around one corner of the pool and off into the woods.
“He’s beautifully trained,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said brightly. “When he’s on alert, he gets very officious.”