The Private Concierge

When he came over to pay he set down the coffee and dug a money clip from the pocket of his jeans. He let the paper slip from under his arm and it fell open on the counter. As he laid down a five, Ginger Sue turned the paper around and skimmed the headline: Star Outfielder Dies in Murder-Suicide. The color picture of a crime investigation and the insert of a familiar male face caught her eye next.

Ned Talbert? Was that his friend, the baseball star? “Mr. Bayless, did you see this?”

She turned the paper around so he could view it. He’d just taken a sip of his coffee, and he let out a strange, strangled sound. Clearly he hadn’t seen the headline until that moment. Black coffee exploded from his cup as it hit the counter.

“Oh!” Ginger Sue ducked behind the counter, shielding her face with her arms. By the time she came back up, he was gone, flying out the door like a crazy man. The bell rang madly as the door crashed shut behind him.

She grabbed her rag and mopped quickly, but there was no way to stem the steaming morass. He’d scared her half to death, and look at the mess he’d made of her countertop. The coffee had already soaked a stack of TV Guide magazines and some credit-card receipts she hadn’t yet filed. That kind of behavior was enough to get a customer banned from her store, but right now, she just wanted to know what was going on.

2

Rick felt dread bloom in the pit of his stomach, cold and wet, like clammy flesh. He was only a few minutes from Ned’s place in Pacific Palisades, and Rick knew what he would find there, a crime scene in progress. He’d seen a million of them, but this wouldn’t look like anything he recognized. The corpse would not be a lifeless shell to be pitied, lamented and then analyzed down to the last gruesome detail. This was his friend, someone Rick knew only as warm, vital and human. Ned was a living, breathing part of him. And, worse, instead of wearing a badge that would give Rick jurisdiction over the nightmare, instead of taking charge and righting wrongs, he would be helpless to do anything.

His knuckles were blood-white against the steering wheel. He’d made the drive from the mountains to the beach in record time, despite having to ditch a cop in the foothills. The dread had been living inside him since he read the newspaper, but it hadn’t had a chance against his abject disbelief. Not Ned. No way. He couldn’t be dead. He was all that was left of their goofy boyhood dreams. He was supposed to carry the torch, be the man.

Rick had spaced out, driving without a thought to the consequences. But at some point, he’d noticed the vibration in his hands that had nothing to do with his grip on the steering wheel—and the explicable had dawned on him. His friend was dead, and Rick was probably to blame. If he’d listened last night instead of swimming in his own private pool of despair, he might have prevented this. He was guilty and friendless. He had nothing left and nowhere to go, yet his hands were vibrating, and he felt more alive than he had in weeks.

That wasn’t right. It was totally twisted. But there was no time to analyze it now. He’d been mired in self-analysis for days, weeks, and that wasn’t his style at all. Maybe anything that could drag him out of that muck would have sparked some life. But, God, why did it have to be this?

Ned Talbert’s turreted Moorish-style home was on a street that sloped toward the sea. It sat like a crown jewel in a neighborhood where selling prices ran into the millions, and the terraced bluffs below the house featured one palatial property after another.

Rick pulled in down the street from the house, giving himself time to scope things out. Yellow crime scene tape roped off the area, but other than that there was no sign of a CSI team or an active investigation. The deaths had occurred last night, according to the newspaper, some time before 11:00 p.m. Apparently Ned’s housekeeper had stopped by to drop off something she’d forgotten, found the bodies and called the police.

The way it looked now, the forensic guys must have done their work last night, packed up and gone. And so had the media, it seemed. Even a sports star’s lurid death couldn’t command attention for more than a few hours in celebrity-soaked L.A. There was money to be made on the living.

A lone police officer, young enough to be a rookie, sat in his car, clicking away on his cell, probably texting or playing games when he should have been standing guard at the door. Sloppy security, but not unusual with murder-suicides, where in theory the case was already solved before the cops got there. The victim and killer were all wrapped up in one neat bundle, a real timesaver. It was more than some overworked and underappreciated homicide investigators could resist, especially if all the evidence was there, including a suicide note.

But Ned would not have left a suicide note. Writing wasn’t his thing. He couldn’t even sign a birthday card without it sounding lame.

Rick could tell when a crime scene had been body-bagged and zipped up right along with the dead, and this one had, even before the lab results came in. Were the investigators already that certain about what had gone down, or were they more interested in getting rid of this case?

A cover-up? That was jumping the gun, but Rick’s mind was going there anyway. On the way down from the mountain, he had realized what the police could have found in Ned’s house. He was fairly certain the brass would want to keep it under wraps because of the scandal potential, even though the information was old news—very old—which was also why they wouldn’t connect it with the murder-suicide. But Rick could not get his mind around the idea that this was a murder-suicide, which only left one other possibility. Someone wanted Ned and his girlfriend dead.

Rick’s original plan had been to talk his way in. He’d worked with most of the guys at the West Side station at one point or another during his time at LAPD, and knew them well. Some of them had even gone to Ned’s games with him. Cops were a fraternity, as tightly bonded as the military, and they bent the rules for each other. All he wanted was to be escorted inside long enough to have a look around. Shouldn’t be a problem, except that he didn’t recognize the officer in the car, and his gut was telling him this wasn’t like every other crime scene.

Sweat dampened the close-cropped hair on Rick’s scalp. He needed to make his move now, while junior was still otherwise engaged. He slipped on his mirrored aviators, let himself out of the car and started for the house at a lope. With Ned’s front-door key clutched in his hand, he ducked down and swept past the black and white from behind and made it all the way to the porch before he heard the guy shout.

“Police! Stop where you are!”

Rick halted, but made no attempt to turn until he was told.

“Drop what you’re holding. Drop it!”

The house key clinked on the slate walk, dancing end over end until it hit the rise of the porch step.

“Put your hands up and turn around,” the officer barked. “Slowly.”

Rick turned, aware of the officer’s hand hovering over his hip holster. “The guy who lives here is my closest friend,” Rick said. “I just heard what happened. Please, I need to see him.”

The officer blinked, his sole expression of regret, if that’s what it was. “He’s not here. The bodies have been taken to the coroner’s office on Mission Boulevard. If a member of his family can’t be located, you may have to ID him.”

Rick wanted to slam the unfeeling words right down the guy’s throat. He would love to have decked him, but he understood that for some of these guys, lack of empathy was protection—if they bled over every victim, or even one, they wouldn’t be able to do their jobs—so Rick was going to give this SOB the benefit of the doubt.

Rick had never managed that kind of detachment on his watch. He’d been involved up to his neck, and look where that had landed him—on the sidewalk and looking for a job. He’d quit under fire, and probably just before they could fire him. He’d had the audacity to question policy decisions, but he didn’t regret any of it. Nor did he miss the politics and the red tape.

The officer peered at Rick, his brow furrowing. “You look familiar.”

Rick wondered if he’d made a mistake. He was pretty good when it came to names and faces, but he couldn’t place this guy. He just shrugged and left his glasses on. “I doubt it.”

The rookie should have asked to see ID and Rick’s car registration, but he let it go, maybe out of respect for the situation.

“Look, go over to the West L.A. station and tell them who you are. Maybe they’ll give you some information,” he suggested. “If you want, you can drop back tomorrow. The tape should be down by then.”

Rick pretended to be surprised. “They’ve already determined it was murder-suicide, like the newspaper said? What about burglary, a home invasion or some other kind of foul play? What if someone wanted it to look like murder-suicide? A jealous boyfriend? Or another ballplayer, trying to eliminate the competition? A rival team owner?”

The officer’s expression said Ned Talbert wasn’t that good an outfielder. “It was murder-suicide. Trust me, you don’t want to know what happened in there.”

The dread turned soft and queasy in Rick’s stomach. Something fetid coated the back of his throat. He would have said it was the tide, but the onshores rarely carried the sea smells this far. Most of the time, this area existed in a velvet-draped moneyed hush.

Rick didn’t want to know what had happened inside, but he had to find out. Ned wasn’t violent. He was a big chicken—not a coward, just a good-hearted, easygoing guy, who could leap like a ballet dancer to snag a fly and slam a ball into the next county. He would have made a terrible member of Delta Force. He didn’t like guns, and Rick had often kidded him about that, just the way Ned had dissed him about his fear of water. But even if Ned had that kind of violence in him, why kill himself and his girlfriend instead of the blackmailer?

Rick should have listened. He had nothing to go on, not even the most rudimentary details of the blackmail attempts. He didn’t know when, how often or why. But there was another reason Rick needed access to Ned’s house. Years ago, he’d given Ned a package for safekeeping. The police may have found the eight-by-eleven bubble pack in Ned’s safe, and Rick had to get it back, if it was still there. A part of him hoped this investigation was as cut-and-dried as the officer had suggested. It was why Rick hadn’t mentioned Ned’s concerns about blackmail, and wouldn’t.

3

Lane Chandler was doing four things at once, which was about two less than she normally did. She’d pulled up Gotcha.com, a tabloid Web site, on her computer screen, praying not to see any of her clients featured there. She was also mentally updating her to-do list, a never-ending task, and she was undressing…all while chatting with her favorite client on her cell-phone headset.

“She wants gangsta rappers for her sweet-sixteen party?” Lane draped her suit jacket over the back of her office chair and then perched on the edge of her desk, easing the pain of her obscenely overpriced new high heels. She turned enough to continue searching the Gotcha home page, but so far no clients in jail or rehab—and no mention of the one she was specifically looking for.

“Thank you, God,” she said, mouthing the words. She felt lighter, but it was too soon to relax. She had yet to check Jack the Giant Killer’s column.

“Jerry,” she implored her headset, “say no! Someday your daughter will thank you for refusing to book the Gutter Punk Bone Dawgs for her special day.”

“Say no to my Felicity? I’d stand a better chance against the Bone Dawgs.”

Jerry’s loud snort of laughter made Lane wince. She turned away from the computer screen to give her shoes a dark look. The way her day had gone, if her high-profile clients didn’t kill her the Manolo Blahniks would. Fortunately, she had Jerry on the phone rather than in her office, so he couldn’t see her torturing the side slit of her skirt as she bent over and pulled off the exotic footwear that was cutting her insteps to ribbons.

She sighed with relief as she sank her feet into the plush office carpet. Who invented these stilts, the Marquis de Sade? A woman in high heels was supposed to be a sexual thing, creating an inviting tilt to the pelvis and a sensual swivel when she walked. But only a guy into serious S&M could love the pain on this woman’s face.

“Lane, is that heavy breathing?”

“That’s me, in ecstasy. I took off my shoes, and I’m warning you, the Spanx are next.”

Silence. She couldn’t have shocked him. Not Jerry. He wasn’t shockable, and they often bantered. It was all in good fun. He was a big sweet bear of a man with a thick head of brown hair and a matching beard. He ran one of the largest discount chains in the country and he was among her top five clients, if you ranked by sheer business clout, but he was also her mentor and someone she could let down her hair with, which she was about to do right now, before the tightly embedded hair clip gave her a migraine.

She reached into the back of her upswept do and freed the claws that held the heavy mahogany waves off her neck.

“Spanx are panty hose, Jerry.”