Chapter Six

The Joneses were keeping up with everyone else in Bel Air.

The house sat at the end of a long, hedge-lined drive behind tall and ornate gates reminiscent of those guarding Paramount Studios. It looked like a small-scale replica of the Palace of Fontainebleau -- and probably cost more. Just one of any number of the lushly landscaped multimillion-dollar mansions dotting the winding hillside of Chalon Road in the Platinum Triangle of Los Angeles’s Westside.

A maid with a German accent opened the door to me, and I was escorted upstairs to an enormous bedroom suite. It looked like it had been decorated for Barbara Cartland -- or Emma. I’ve never seen so many shades of pink in one room. The grieving widow greeted me in her red satin slip. By greeting, I mean she spotted me and said, “I don’t have time to talk to you.”

“Would you prefer that I come back later?”

“I’d prefer you not to come back at all.” She held up two black dresses on hangers. “Which do you think?”

Did I look like Mr. Blackwell? “The one on the right,” I said, which is what I always say on the rare occasions a lady asks for my sartorial guidance.

“That’s what I thought,” she said, and tossed both dresses over the winged back of a rose-colored Queen Anne chair. Then, propping her hands on her hips, she stared at me.

I estimated her age as a little younger than mine. She was very tanned and very blonde. I’d assumed because her hair was such a brassy color that she -- unlike my stepsisters -- dyed it, but the startling absence of eyelashes and eyebrows indicated otherwise.

“I just have a couple of questions. I won’t take long,” I assured her. The flimsy slip and bedroom setting pretty much guaranteed that. Nothing against Ally, who was built like a Valkyrie, because I wouldn’t have been happy interviewing any half-naked stranger in his chamber.

“Hmph,” she said with a little toss of her head. I didn’t know women really did that. Hmph! Just like a cartoon character. Like Betty Rubble when Barney was more of a bonehead than usual. She turned away, rifling through one of those tall jewelry boxes that could have doubled for a walk-in closet, and muttered, “This is the dumbest plan. I don’t know what Paul is thinking.”

I was with her on that one. I said, “I guess he’s hoping to circumvent a lot of unpleasantness with the police by having people talk to me.” Yeah, hand me my monocle and top hat because I can babble this stuff on cue.

While she pawed through the crown jewels, I took a look around the bedroom. Either she’d had every trace of Porter removed or she was sleeping single. There wasn’t so much as a stray slipper or tie pin. Nor was Porter featured in any of the numerous gold-framed photographs.

Of course, some married people did sleep separately. Or she might have gotten rid of all the painful reminders.

“Well, I don’t see how talking to you is going to save me any unpleasantness with the police. I’ve already had to talk to them once, and I’m sure I’ll have to talk to them again,” Ally said. Which just goes to prove that a woman may be foolish enough to receive you in her boudoir wearing nothing but her slip, and yet not be a total idiot.

So I changed the subject. “How are you holding up? I never got a chance to tell you how sorry I was about Porter.”

She raised her head and gave me a wide-eyed stare. “Can you fasten this for me?”

Where were the sleaze horns when I needed them?

She sauntered over to me and turned her back, indicating that I should fasten the necklace around her throat. I obliged. For all the obvious care and pampering that had been bestowed on Ally, there was something sort of coarse about her, but I couldn’t pin it down. Her neck was a little on the thick side. She smelled of Chanel, which my mother occasionally wears, but somehow Ally made it smell cheap. Her back to me, she said, “I know what Paul thinks. Everyone thinks I didn’t love Porter, that I just married him for the money, but Porter and I --” She shrugged.

As avowals of lasting love go, I’ve sat through more professional presentations.

But I said, “No outsider can understand a relationship between two people.” Hell, sometimes even the people in the relationship couldn’t understand it.

“That’s right,” she said, turning to me in surprise. “People on the outside never understand. They always want to give you advice or tell you off or…something.”

I said, “Maybe everyone hadn’t heard the divorce was off.”

“What divorce?” Her expression changed. “I know where you heard that,” she spat. “That’s totally Paul. I don’t know why, but he has always had it in for me. Maybe he had a thing for Porter.”

I tried to picture that, but the picture wouldn’t come -- thankfully.

She went on, “Yes, Porter and I did discuss divorce, and we realized we loved each other too much to do anything so silly.”

“That’s got to be a comfort to you now,” I said. “I can imagine how painful it would be to have someone you care for die with a lot of unresolved --”

“Yes!” she exclaimed. “That is exactly right!” She gave me an approving lashless gaze. “See, gay guys always understand these things!”

“We’re born with that understanding gene,” I said. “Do you and Porter have kids?”

She swallowed hard at the idea. “No.”

“How long were you married?”

“Four years.”

“Was it your first marriage?”

She smiled at this bit of whimsy. “It was my first real marriage.” She shot me a speculative glance. “You know, if I had to pick someone who I thought might have wanted Porter out of the way -- which I wouldn’t do because that would be totally crass -- I’d suggest you talk to Al January.”

“You’re kidding.” If I’d had a monocle it would have popped right out at that point.

She shook her head. “Paul didn’t tell you that, did he? No. Because he likes Al. And because he needs Al for this movie. Al’s like his Bosley.”

“His what?” I had a sudden vision of Jill, Kelly, and Sabrina gathered around the loudspeaker to receive orders from Charlie.

“Oh, you know. His biographer. Al’s like his personal screenwriter. Paul’s happy to throw me to the wolves, but he doesn’t want anyone looking too closely at Al January.”

I deciphered this as best I could. “What would there be to see if someone looked closely?”

Ally got a mulish expression. “Well, for one thing, Porter and Al have never been that close even though they were all part of that whole Langley Hawthorne clique, and for another thing they’ve all been arguing a lot recently. Porter and Al were arguing at the party. Plenty of people heard them, including Paul.”

“I don’t remember that,” I said.

“I don’t think you were there yet. You arrived pretty late.” She smiled. “I noticed you right away.” She gave me an approving look. “I like quiet, polite men. And men who wear Hugo Boss. I was hoping you weren’t gay. Or that you were only half-gay. Like Paul.”

“Uh…sorry,” I said. “It’s pretty much full-time now. The pay’s not great, but the perks…”

She squealed with laughter. “I scared you!” Then she turned grave and dignified. “You know, I am a widow.”

“I know,” I said. And God help the unsuspecting Southland with Ally on the loose once more. I thought Kane had it right: Mrs. Jones wasn’t all that broken up over her older husband’s death. That didn’t mean she’d knocked him off, though. Frankly, the poisoned cocktail seemed a little complicated for Ally. I figured she was more the type to run him over with the Jaguar or clunk him with a marble finial and toss him into the pool out back. “Do you have any idea what your husband and Al January were arguing about?”

She had moved over to the dressing table where she proceeded to put mascara on, tilting her head at an unnatural angle and ogling herself open-mouthed in the three mirrors. Framed there in gilt, she reminded me of a split-image Picasso.

“No.” She formed the word carefully, still combing her lashes out. “Business, I suppose.”

“Was business bad enough to kill?”

She shrugged another plump shoulder. “I never listened to Porter when he got going.”

Ah. At last. The secret to a successful marriage.

“January tried to save Porter,” I pointed out. “He was the one who administered CPR.”

“You’ll notice he didn’t save Porter, though,” she pointed right back.

“From the little the police have said, I don’t think anyone could have saved him. It sounds like he got a massive dose of whatever killed him.”

“Heart medication,” she said.

“Did Porter have a heart condition?”

She pumped the mascara wand in the tube. “Nope.”

“Do you?”

I smiled in answer to her indignant look. “See, I do,” I said.

“Oh.” She unbent a fraction. “Really?”

I said, “Can you think of anyone else who might have had a reason to get your husband out of the way?”

She blinked, creating an effect reminiscent of Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. “Fuck!” She grabbed tissues and began dabbing away the black dots. When she had wiped away the smears, she recapped the mascara, and placed it neatly back on the tray of cosmetics. “No,” she said flatly, and it took me a second to remember exactly what I had asked her.

“Did Porter have any enemies? Or any problems with anyone besides Al January?”

She shook her head, staring down at the collection of cosmetics.

“Was this a second marriage for Porter? Does he have an ex? Or maybe kids by another marriage?”

She brightened. “Yes. He was married to Marla Vicenza. But they didn’t have any children.” She slanted me a look. “Porter was sterile.”

Too much information. See, this is why I really wasn’t cut out for the amateur sleuth gig. I really didn’t want to know that much about my fellow man.

“How did Porter get on with his first wife?”

“Fine.” She shrugged. “Listen, if Marla was going to kill Porter she’d have done it twenty years ago.” She waved a makeup brush at me and little specks of powder flew through the air. “Now is that it? Because I have to get dressed.”

I noted that she had decided I needed to leave once she was putting her clothes on. I said, “Yeah, that’s it. Is it okay if I call you if I have any other questions?”

She sighed. “I guess. I just want to make sure you understand that Porter and I were very happy. Our marriage had never been stronger.”

“Sure. And thank you for talking to me so openly,” I told her.

“I just want this all to go away,” she said, and while I sympathized, I could have told her from personal experience that murder took a long time to go away.

I found my own way downstairs through all the marble and tile and priceless art. I’d rarely seen a place that looked less lived-in, unless it was the Palace of Fontainebleau. Casa Jones had the chill feel of an after-hours museum. Maybe it was the décor or maybe it was just the domestic vibe.

Not that I was convinced Ally was a murderess. I thought she had been telling the truth right up until the end of our interview. And she might still have been telling the truth when I asked her about other people with a motive for wanting Porter out of the way, but she had definitely got cagey. Of course everyone got cagey in a murder investigation -- including me.

She didn’t have any qualms about putting Al January under the bus, so it wasn’t like she was resisting the idea that Porter had been murdered. She seemed to have accepted that. So who had she suddenly realized had a motive for murder -- and why did it bother her?

I crossed the brick courtyard, climbed into my Forester and started down the long drive through what looked like a private park. Positioned outside the gates at the bottom of the driveway was a silver unmarked police car, prickling with antennae. Jake Riordan leaned against the side of the car, arms folded, clearly waiting.

I pulled through the gates and parked beside his car, rolling down my window.

“Well, well,” he said. “This can’t be a coincidence.”

“It could,” I said. “The odds aren’t high, but they do exist.”

“Uh-huh.” His face was impassive as he stared at me, and I felt a flare of nerves. I think it was nerves; certainly I knew firsthand just how unpleasant he could make himself. “So you’re trying to tell me that this is just a sympathy call, and you’re not thinking of sticking your nose into this investigation?”

I didn’t say anything. According to Paul Kane, my asking a few questions wasn’t supposed to be a problem, but here Jake was, and that generally spelled p-r-o-b-l-e-m in my book.

Into my silence, he said, “You mean like you kept your nose out of the Garibaldi investigation?”

“Sure,” I said warily.

He snorted. “You’d think with all the practice you’d be better at lying.”

“My lies?” I said, forgetting caution in an irrational surge of anger as I remembered Paul Kane admitting that Jake had been fucking him all the time he had been fucking me. He straightened up at whatever he read in my face. I hoped we weren’t in for another wrestling match because, really, what would the neighbors think? Even in Bel Air, where they say celebrities get away with murder, there were standards.

I said, “Maybe I was invited over here.”

“Maybe you were,” he agreed -- and it dawned on me that despite the hard appraisal of his eyes, he wasn’t angry. He should have been. The old Jake would have been. This Jake seemed…watchful? Guarded? The truth was, I didn’t know what he seemed. I couldn’t read him. And that, more than anything, confirmed for me how much time had passed since we were together. Together being relative.

It was painful and it was freeing at the same time.

“Maybe me and Mrs. Jones, we got a thing going on,” I said.

His mouth twitched into that reluctant, wry half smile I remembered so well. “I hope not,” he said. “That would make you a prime suspect in Mr. Jones’s murder.”

“I thought I already was.”

Astonishingly, he said, “Yeah. Well. Maybe we should talk.”

“Is that why you’re waiting here?”

“I’m waiting for Alonzo,” he said. “He’s late.” He checked his watch, and I found myself staring at his wedding ring again. Not that it was particularly flashy, but it kept catching my eye. “It’s nearly lunchtime. Let’s go grab something to eat.”

I didn’t want to have lunch with him. I didn’t want to ever see him again, but I needed to hear what he had to say, so I nodded and rolled up my window.