My immediate reaction was to run back to the safety of the hotel and call the police.
But when I got to the corner, I realized that I couldn’t do that. If I made a police report of the vandalism, my name on it might come to the attention of Detective Manny Hatch. He’d pounce on me like a cat on a mouse, demanding to know why was I near the Olympia Grand. Who was I talking to? What was I up to? And could I spell “interfering with a police investigation”?
No, I couldn’t report this to the police.
I felt relatively safe on the busy corner of Oakwood Drive and Wilshire Boulevard. Cars whizzed by in both directions as shoppers and tourists strolled past the elegant stores on Wilshire Boulevard. Peering down both sides of Oakwood Drive, I didn’t spot anyone sitting in a car, or walking along the street. It was likely that whoever slashed my tires got away. And now I had to deal with what the vandal had done.
I pulled my wallet and my cell phone out of my bag, found my Auto Club card, and dialed the number for Emergency Roadside Service.
After reciting the make, model, color, and license number of my Jeep, and the location, I told the dispatcher that my tires had been slashed and I needed a tow to the All Tires store on Pico Boulevard near Beverly Glen Canyon Boulevard.
I heard the usual assurance that a driver would arrive in thirty minutes or less, and thanked the dispatcher. Next, I phoned Liddy, who had a key to my house. Happily, she was home. I told her what happened to my tires and that a Triple A truck would take me to All Tires.
“I don’t know how long I’ll be at the tire store. Could you go to my place and take Tuffy for a walk?”
“Glad to,” she said. “I need the exercise. Where are you right now?”
“On Oakwood Drive just south of Wilshire.”
“Oakwood? That’s the street that runs next to the Olympia Grand. Were you at the hotel? Were you investigating without me?”
“Yes, but for what I had to do, you couldn’t have come with me. I’ll call you later, after they put new tires on the Jeep and I get home.”
“Okay, but don’t leave anything out. After all, I was your wheel woman and lookout while you were-well, I’m not going to say what on the phone.”
“Good idea. Thanks for taking care of Tuff.”
As has usually been my experience with Triple A Emergency Roadside Service, the truck arrived sooner than the dispatcher’s outside estimate. Such was the case today.
I showed the driver my two slashed tires and he mumbled something in what sounded like Russian. That would have fit because the name on his shirt said “Ivan.”
Ivan examined my membership card, made a note, and handed it back. I told him where to take the Jeep. He nodded, and got into his truck to position it for attaching his chain to my vehicle.
I was on the sidewalk, still scanning the street for anyone who looked suspicious. There was no one. While the driver prepared to tow my car, I walked down the street a few yards, studying the other parked cars. Mine was the only one with slashed tires.
The driver called to me. “Hey-come look.” He gestured to the passenger side of the Jeep. “You got a bigger problem than you thought.”
When I joined him in the street, I saw what he meant: The two tires on that side had been slashed, too.
All four of my tires had been ruined.
As far as I could see up and down Oakwood Drive, my car was the only one that had been targeted.
While the men at All Tires were replacing my four, I sat on a folding chair one of them had brought outdoors from the office for me. I was replaying in my head the story Eugene Long had told me about what he and Keith Ingram had plotted to do to Roland Gray, in retaliation for Gray embarrassing Tina Long four years earlier. It was an outrageous tale that I found very hard to believe.
Sitting in the hot sun was making it hard for me to think. I moved the chair into the shade and felt better. Even though there was a stale taste in my mouth and my stomach was empty and felt hollow, my head was clear.
I decided to do what I would have done more than an hour ago, if I hadn’t gotten sick and then discovered the vandalism to my Jeep. I dialed John O’Hara’s cell phone.
He answered on the first ring.
“Hi, it’s Della. I have a question. When Keith Ingram’s clothing and belongings were inventoried and bagged, was anything unusual found in one of his pockets?”
“Unusual-like what?”
“A dry, ground substance, brown in color. Probably in a little packet of plastic wrap.”
“How did you know that?” I heard surprise in his voice.
“So they found it. Tell me if it was tested to find out what it was.”
“Yes, sure. But it wasn’t a drug of any kind. Forensics said it was a spice.”
“Nutmeg?”
His voice hardened into his detective-on-the-job tone. “What’s going on, Del?”
“Was it nutmeg?” I asked.
“Yes, but it isn’t relevant to Ingram’s murder.”
“Not directly. Or maybe not at all. I don’t know yet.”
“What have you been up to?”
“This morning I went out drinking,” I said.
John laughed. “I wouldn’t believe that if you said it with your hand on a Bible. Tell me the truth.”
“Okay, but I want you to listen without yelling. Deal?”
Momentary pause. “Deal.”
I told John what Long had told me about the plot he and Keith Ingram had devised.
“That’s the most idiotic scheme I ever heard of,” John said.
“I found it hard to believe, too, until you told me that Ingram had a packet of nutmeg in his pocket.”
“Even if I was back on the force, I can’t arrest someone for what they intended to do.” He was silent for a moment. “If Gray had found out what they planned, then he’d be my number one suspect in Ingram’s murder, but then somebody tried to kill Gray.”
“None of the pieces of the puzzle we have make a picture yet,” I said.
Behind me, I heard a car horn honking. Turning my head I saw a familiar ivory Range Rover pulling into the driveway of the tire store.
“Liddy’s here,” I said. “Talk to you later. Bye.”
I disconnected before it occurred to John to ask me how I managed to get that story out of Eugene Long.
Hurrying over to meet Liddy, I saw that she wasn’t alone; sitting in the front passenger seat beside her was Tuffy.
“This is a nice surprise,” I said.
“Get in and sit with me. I couldn’t wait to hear what happened this morning.”
As soon as I opened the passenger door and greeted Tuffy, he moved into the back.
“You certainly have Tuff well trained,” Liddy said admiringly.
I had to laugh at that. “Not me. He pretty much trained himself. Sometimes I think he reads my mind.”
Liddy looked at me and frowned. “You’re pale. No lipstick or mascara, and there’s a yellowish stain on your blouse. What happened to you? Are you all right?”
I assured her that I was fine. As we waited for the last of my tires to be replaced and balanced, I repeated to Liddy what I’d told John about Long and Ingram’s bizarre plot to frame Roland Gray for attempted murder by sabotaging Gray’s lemon pudding with a lethal dose of nutmeg. I also told her the things I’d left out of my report to John: getting Long drunk, my increasing stomach distress, Tina Long’s unexpected kindness in the women’s bathroom, and then returning to my Jeep to find the tires slashed.
“Your idea of getting Long drunk so he’d tell you what he knew about Ingram’s murder-that was as weird as the nutmeg story he gave you. Do you believe him?”
“It was hard to. I wasn’t sure, so I called John just before you got here. John confirmed that one of the things they found in Ingram’s clothes was a packet of ground nutmeg.”
Liddy gave a low whistle. Tuffy, who had been lounging in the back, sat up and stuck his nose between our seats.
Stroking his head, I said, “It’s okay, Tuff. That wasn’t for you. Liddy was expressing amazement at how crazy people are getting.”
“If we needed any more proof, all we have to do is watch the news a couple of nights a week,” Liddy said.
Tuffy lay down again, and Liddy asked me, “Did they test the pudding Gray made at the cook-off?”
I shook my head. “It burned up. In the confusion when the smoke bomb went off, Gray accidentally left his stove turned on. Anyway, Ingram couldn’t have stirred the nutmeg into the pudding until it was finished and dishes were given to the judges for tasting.”
“But that never happened,” Liddy said.
“No, it didn’t.”
“What’s next on the detecting agenda?”
“I’m having tea with Roland Gray this afternoon at four. Sometime between now and then, I’ve got to figure out a subtle way to learn if Roland knew what Ingram and Long were planning, and if he has any idea at all about who shot at him.”
“Let’s examine what we do know,” Liddy said. “Long hated Roland Gray and plotted with Ingram to frame him for attempted murder. But why would Ingram get involved? I mean, if their scheme was uncovered, it would mean a big embarrassment for Ingram, maybe even criminal charges, since he was actually committing the act of trying to frame Gray.”
“My guess is that Ingram agreed to do it to stay on the good side of his potential father-in-law.”
“That makes sense. He could have been afraid that if he didn’t help Long, Long might have managed to stop the marriage, and it would be bye-bye to the Daddy’s billions.”
“Let’s look at who had a motive to kill Ingram,” I said. “Any of the women he taped in bed with him who were afraid of exposure. But only two of the women were at the gala: Yvette and Tina. Tina’s acted pretty wild. She might have been taped willingly, or perhaps she didn’t know. She seemed genuinely distraught when Ingram was killed. Yvette was near Ingram when he was stabbed, but there wasn’t a drop of blood on her. Roland and I ducked under a table together just seconds after the smoke bomb went off. He couldn’t have lighted and tossed the smoke bomb mixture and stabbed Ingram in those few seconds.”
“So he didn’t do it.”
“No,” I said. “But there was one man unaccounted for at the gala-he paid for his ticket at the last minute with a phony check. My theory, or piece of a theory, is that he’s the one who brought the bomb mixture and murdered Ingram. Okay, that makes sense. But where I bump into a cement wall is on the question of why would he, or anyone else in this case, have wanted to kill Roland? No one has suggested yet that Roland and Ingram ever met. That’s one of the things I want to find out from Roland.”
“Two mysteries,” Liddy said. “There doesn’t seem to be any connection between them, but there has to be. What’s the link?”
“There are two, or at least two that we know about so far. Yvette Dupree is one link, and Tina Long is the other. Yvette, because Long told me he made a play for her years ago, but she was seeing someone. Judging from the way she acted when I told her that Roland had been shot, he’s probably the man in her life, but I don’t think Long knows that.”
Liddy nodded. “And Tina’s a link because the cruel embarrassment Roland put her through was Long’s motive for wanting to frame Roland. But I can’t picture either Yvette or Tina lying on her stomach and firing a sniper rifle into a café.”
“Yvette is tougher than she looks,” I said. “According to John’s contact at Interpol, in London a decade ago she killed her abusive husband.”
Liddy’s eyes lighted up with interest. “Did she shoot him?”
“No-she hit him on the head. The jury believed it was self-defense, but John’s contact said there were lingering suspicious because the man was so much bigger than Yvette. If Yvette is involved with Roland, she wouldn’t have a motive to shoot him. As for Tina… Tina is so thin I can’t picture her being able to lift the kind of weapon that almost killed Roland, let alone knowing how to fire it.”
“She could have hired a pro,” Liddy said. “Or her father could have, when his plan for framing Gray went awry. Did you ask him if he had any idea about who killed Ingram?”
“Not directly, but from what he said, it didn’t seem as though he had any idea. He didn’t even appear to be interested in who did it, or to care, except for the fact that it ruined his plan. He must have liked Ingram, to some degree; he remarked that Ingram would have made a good ‘first husband’ for Tina. I’ve thought a lot about this, and I can’t picture Eugene Long putting himself in the power of a professional hit man who would then have had a conspiracy to murder charge to hang over Long’s head, and be able to blackmail him forever.”
One of the tire mechanics came out of the store and waved at me. I said to Liddy, “The Jeep’s ready. I’ll take Tuffy home with me. Thanks for looking after him.”
“Call me tonight, after your tea party with Gray.”
I promised that I would.
Driving home on my four new tires, a plan began to form in my mind.