A police officer stood by the pool, talking on a radio. All Deirdre could hear were bursts of static. The officer belted the receiver, exchanged a few words with one of the paramedics. He crouched by the body, then lingered there a few moments longer, looking into the pool.
Slowly, he got to his feet and took in the yard and the back of the house, then shifted his gaze over at Deirdre and Henry. He crossed the grass to the patio. He was an older man with the boyish intensity and short sturdy stature of Richard Dreyfuss.
“I’m Officer Ken Millman.” He offered Deirdre his I.D., just like in the movies, only this wasn’t a movie. “I’m sorry. He’s gone.”
Deirdre knew full well that her father was dead, and yet she felt as if the air had been sucked out of her. She groped for a chair and sat. Tears filled her eyes, her stomach clenched, and her mouth opened in a silent scream.
Chapter 4
Deirdre barely heard Henry’s “Are you okay?” Or the police officer’s “Do you need a glass of water?” She tried to say I’m fine, to wave them away, but it was another few minutes before she could even lift her head. She found the tissues she’d stashed in her waistband and wiped her eyes. Blew her nose. Sat some more, just trying to wrap her head around what had happened.
At last, she found her voice. “Sorry.”
The police officer whose name she’d already forgotten was crouched in front of her, his eyes searching hers. “The county coroner will be here soon.” He was speaking slowly. “It’s routine in an unattended death. Do you understand what I’m saying?” He waited for her nod, then continued, “I need to collect some information. Are you okay with that? Can you answer a few questions?”
Deirdre blinked. Henry put his hand on her back.
The officer stood. He pulled out a notebook and flipped it open, then thumbed to a fresh page and jotted a few notes. “The victim’s name?”
“Arthur Unger,” Henry said. “He’s our dad.”
“He lives here?”
“Yes. I live here, too. Deirdre lives in San Diego.” Henry gave the officer his name and phone number. Deirdre gave him hers.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
“We don’t know what happened,” Henry said. “My sister got here and found him floating in the water.”
Not really floating, Deirdre thought. Arthur had been barely suspended above the bottom of the pool, beneath the surface, like a fly in amber. She choked at the memory.
“How long ago?” the officer asked.
“Not long,” Henry said. “Fifteen, twenty minutes maybe.”
“I called it in right away,” Deirdre said.
The officer drew a rectangle on his pad, and around it a larger dashed rectangle with a gap that Deirdre realized was meant to represent the chain-link fence. “Can you show me approximately where your father was when you found him?”
Her hand trembling, Deirdre pointed to a spot near the edge in the deep end.
The officer drew an X. “Then what?”
“My sister called 911.”
“You’re both wet.” The officer squinted at Henry, then looked over at Deirdre. “I’m guessing one of you went in after him.”
“Of course,” Henry said, looking more annoyed than chastened. “I did. I thought . . . Actually, I didn’t think. I mean, it was just a gut reaction. He might have had a heart attack or a stroke. Or fallen in and hit his head, for all we knew.”
“I see.” The officer gave Henry a long look. Deirdre had the distinct impression that he didn’t think Arthur had just fallen in. “Thank you. That’s all for now. I need you both to wait in the house until we finish up our investigation out here.”
Henry hesitated a moment, then turned and started for the house.
“And I need you to leave that where you found it,” the officer said, indicating the tumbler that Henry had picked up from the table.
Deirdre sat at the dining table, watching the activity through the sliding glass doors. Investigators had constructed a makeshift tent over Arthur’s body. To protect him from what, she wondered. A photographer took pictures—not just of Arthur but of the entire pool area.
“You want anything?” Henry called out from the kitchen.
“No thanks.”
He came out with an open bag of potato chips and set it on the table in front of her. “I found this on the floor in the front hall,” he said, snapping a business card down on the table. “You know anything about it?”
Deirdre picked up the card. It had Joelen’s name on it. “She was here this morning.”
“I didn’t know you two kept in touch.”
“We didn’t. Did you?”
“Why would I?” Henry said. “I barely remember her.”
Deirdre let it go, but she knew that Henry remembered Joelen Nichol. Remembered her well, and not just because she’d made headlines. Henry, who’d never wanted Deirdre within fifty feet of him and his friends, used to hang out with her whenever Joelen came over. Once she’d discovered the pair of them making out on the musty sleeper sofa that her parents stored in the garage.
Sometimes, on nights when she was sleeping over at Joelen’s, Henry would show up late and toss pebbles at Joelen’s bedroom window so she’d come down. One night Henry’s pebble missed Joelen’s window and hit Bunny’s instead. Bunny’s boyfriend, Antonio Acevedo—the man everyone called “Tito”—had come whaling out of the house, armed with a baseball bat. Lucky Henry had ridden over on his bicycle and could get the hell out of there before he got hurt.
“She wasn’t here to see me,” Deirdre said. “She was here to talk to Dad.”
Henry’s look darkened. “Why’d she want to talk to Dad?”
Deirdre pointed to the setting sun logo and SUNSET REALTY above Joelen’s name. “Just guessing. She’s a Realtor. He’s selling a house.”
“I thought he already talked to a Realtor.”
Deirdre shrugged. “All I know is she was here. She said she had a meeting with him. She freaked out when the police arrived.”
“I’ll bet she did.”
“Don’t be mean. I remember, you liked her.”
“Sure I liked her,” Henry said. “We had fun. Fooled around. But it was never serious. I haven’t talked to her since she killed—”
“Supposedly killed.”
Henry stood at the glass door and looked out into the yard. “Hey, she confessed.”
Chapter 5
The story had made national news—DAUGHTER KILLS STAR’S BOYFRIEND.
It had happened on a night when Deirdre was sleeping over at the Nichols’ house, late after one of Bunny Nichol’s lavish parties. Bunny’s boyfriend, Antonio “Tito” Acevedo, was stabbed to death in her bedroom.
Deirdre didn’t find out about the murder for days after because she was in the hospital. Her father—he and Gloria had been among the guests at the party earlier—had come back in the middle of the night to take her home. He’d carried her, half-asleep, out to his car. On the way home, his car skidded off the road and she was thrown out.
She’d spent weeks in Northridge Hospital—Arthur had insisted the ambulance take her there because of their excellent reputation rehabbing Vietnam vets. After multiple operations, skin grafts, and physical therapy, the doctors finally conceded that the damage to her femoral nerve was permanent. She’d never be able to move her hip or bend and straighten her leg. She’d never feel heat, or cold, or pain, or even a gentle touch on the front of her thigh. Over time, the muscles would atrophy.
No one had warned her how much she’d come to cherish what she’d once been—unremarkable and nearly invisible. Instead, her mere presence would attract uneasy stares.
Desperate for anything to distract her from the pain and uncertainty of her ordeal, Deirdre had found a newspaper someone had left in the hospital visitors’ lounge and read about the murder. After that she watched the nightly news, first from her hospital bed and later from the living room couch, as the story of the murder, photographs of the crime scene, and the lives of Bunny and Joelen Nichol and Tito Acevedo were endlessly dissected and fed to an audience ravenous for every sordid detail. Later, when Deirdre was strong enough to visit the public library, she surreptitiously tore news articles from the public copies of the L.A. Times and stole away with them so she could read and reread their accounts of the murder and inquest that followed.