Jeff Sherratt - Detour to Murder

“A regular parade. I was the clown leading the band.”

“Then the car pulled into burger place behind you and parked. I wondered who they were, thought maybe they were the police, or investigators working for the DA, keeping an eye on you.”

“You had nothing to do with them?”

She looked up at me with those baby blues. “No, I don’t know anything about them. It’s just a coincidence that they were also there. Who were they, anyway?”

She sounded sincere. I could have been mistaken that day. When she glanced at the Buick after warning me off the case, I just assumed she had been tied in with them. But I hadn’t seen her connected with the thugs since then. If what she’d just told me was true, then that meant there were others who wanted Roberts to remain in prison. However, it seemed like an awfully big coincidence that there would be more than one person or persons interested in my client’s freedom.

But of course, there were a lot of people who’d be up to their eyeballs in a morass of crap if all the facts about the Roberts murder case came to light. Starting with Frank Byron, the DA back in ’45, the guy who’d duped him into to confessing to Vera’s murder in the first place.

“You must’ve been waiting for me when I left the prison after my first interview with Roberts. How’d you know I’d be assigned to the case? That I’d be at the prison that day?”

“Simple.”

“Suppose you tell me.”

“News about the Roberts parole hearing was in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner , a small piece in the local news section. The article said you were going to be his attorney. It mentioned the day and time when you were scheduled to be there.”

“The hearing made the papers?”

“It wasn’t in the Times , just the Examiner. The paper is owned by the Hearst organization. They cover a lot of gory crime stuff. They recently did a retrospective-you know, an article on L.A. in the forties. The piece touched on Frank Byron’s career and mentioned the woman’s tragic death. I have a clipping service that sends me anything in the news even remotely connected to my father.”

“Your father? What are you talking about?”

“My father is Francis Q. Jerome.”

“I see…” So that’s how she was connected with the actor. That’s why she was driving his car. Now it fit.

“And my mother was one of his wives, Mildred Rayfield.” She paused for a beat. “Her professional name was Sue Harvey.”

I flipped on the lightas I thought about what she’d just told me. Kathie glanced around. “Quaint,” she said, surveying the decor in my apartment, a couple of beanbag chairs and a portable Zenith TV resting on an end table against the wall. One of the TV’s rabbit-ear antennas was broken. It hung limp like the useless appendage of a neutered donkey. I’d been meaning to get it fixed.

“Pull up a beanbag and stay a while,” I said, bracing myself in the opening to the kitchenette off to the right. “We have a lot to talk about.”

“Do you have coffee?” she asked.

“Of course.”

She glanced around again. “And a table?”

I nodded over my shoulder toward the kitchenette. “Yeah, all the modern conveniences. The designer insisted.”

“Let’s sit in the kitchen. I’ll make the coffee.”

I couldn’t remember the last I had been alone in my apartment with a beautiful woman-any woman, for that matter. Not since my divorce. But I had questions that needed answers.

“I want to know what in the hell is going on. Why are you here, anyway?” I said.

“I’ll tell you the whole story while we have coffee.” She shrugged out of her coat and dropped it on a beanbag. Underneath she wore tight fitting, bell-bottom jeans with a plain sleeveless knit shirt. Her figure was just as I’d remembered it-stunning.

I stepped aside and she marched into the kitchenette. Looking in the cupboard, she found a can of Yuban and proceeded to make a pot of coffee. Soon the fresh-brewed aroma filled the air. She brought two cups and sat at the table across from me. Clutching her cup with both hands, she raised it slowly and took a sip. I waited patiently to hear her story.

She set the cup down, paused, and focused on the tabletop. “Where shall I begin?”

I leaned back and folded my arms. “Why are you involved?”

“As I told you, my last name is Rayfield. I was given my mother’s maiden name when my father at first disavowed my parentage. I was born in Los Angeles, but spent my childhood in Europe. I didn’t really know my father until I was practically grown up. Oh, I knew he’d been in the movies. But when I was a child he was just a name and a face.”

“Your mother never talked about him?”

She shook her head. “I rarely saw my mother, even when I was young and living with her in Beverly Hills, before she lost the house.”

“That must’ve been tough.”

“After my mother’s marriage fell apart she hung on for a while, but then things deteriorated. She went from a life of luxury, the wife of a big-time movie star-living in a mansion with servants and a five-thousand-a-week allowance-to being a five-dollar party girl. It happened in a matter of a few years.”

“You didn’t have relatives? Grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles?”

She scowled. “Oh, I had lots of uncles, all right. Uncle Tom, Uncle Bill, Uncle Mac, Uncle Bob, Uncle Joe-men my mother would bring home at night. I lost track of how many uncles I had,” she said sarcastically. “It wasn’t long before I was taken away by my father’s parents, from back east. They sent me to Europe to live in a boarding school. I was confused and too young to understand what it was all about. Later, I went to the university in Montreux, Switzerland. After graduation I came home.”

I began to feel a certain compassion for her, the life she’d led-not the part about living in Europe, but the loneliness she must’ve felt not knowing her father, and the sorrow that must’ve filled her heart, realizing her mother had hit the skids.

I needed to understand why she had wanted Roberts to remain in prison. She had her reasons, and I felt she’d get around to telling me. But I couldn’t get the thugs in the Buick out off my mind. Kathie came here of her own free will to explain why she was involved, and that counted for a lot. I hoped her alluring charms weren’t prejudicing my reasoning, but it was hard to believe that she could have been the type of person who would’ve hired thugs to murder an old woman like Mrs. Hathaway.

“What happened when you came back home?”

“By then I knew a lot more about my father. I mean, I knew he’d been a big motion picture actor in his day. But still I had no desire to meet with him. First of all, I didn’t think he’d want to see me. Secondly, I didn’t care.”

“What about your mother and your grandparents?”

“While I was away, I hadn’t heard anything about my mother. But when I got home, I contacted my paternal grandparents and they told me she had died. So, naturally, my grandparents wanted nothing to do with me. After all, I had my mother’s blood in my veins. I was a grown woman and their obligation to their son’s daughter was finished.”

“What did you do then?”

“I bummed around for a few years, and then I finally got a job at a magazine in San Francisco, Rolling Stone.”

“Sooner or later,” I said, “you must’ve made a connection with your father. You’re driving his car.”

She looked surprised that I knew about the Mercedes. “Oh, so you did do your homework.”

“Yeah, I got the plate number-”

“He has no license, can’t drive anymore,” she said, a slight edge to her voice.