Jonathan Kellerman - Guilt

“You’re not making sense!” said Weathers. “Adriana had excellent character but she still committed some kind of … bad deed?”

“She didn’t do anything, Mr. Weathers. Something was done to her.”

“She’s hurt?” said Daisy.

“She’s dead, ma’am. Someone murdered her.”

“Oh, no!”

“I’m afraid yes, Mrs. Weathers.”

“I never even knew her, Jack hired her. Poor thing.” She cried. It seemed genuine, but who could be sure about anything on the Westside of L.A.

Her husband remained dry-eyed.

Milo said, “Care to fill us in, sir?”

“Not on your life,” said Jack Weathers. “Not on one blessed second of your blessed life.”

We lingered outside the door Jack Weathers had just shut. Conversational noise began filtering through the wood: Daisy Weathers’s higher-pitched voice, plaintive, then demanding. No response from Jack. Daisy, again, louder. A bark from her husband that silenced her.

Several seconds later his voice resumed, softer, less staccato. A long string of sentences.

Milo whispered, “On the phone, now it’s a lawyer game.”

We left the building.

Milo drove a block, U-turned, found the farthest spot that afforded a view of the marble-clad building. Red zone but until a B.H. parking Nazi showed up, the perfect vantage point.

I said, “Waiting for Jack to leave?”

“Maybe I stirred up enough for him to meet with legal counsel. I tail him, find out who I’ll be dealing with. Without that I can’t approach him.”

“No warrant party with BHPD?”

“Yeah, right. On what grounds?”

“Jack’s demeanor.”

“He got agitated? To a psychologist, that’s grounds. To a judge, you know what it is.” He stretched, knuckled an eyelid. “Any way it shakes out, he’s toast. Runs a business based on image and trust and hires one woman with a police record, another who ends up getting killed. And who was referred by the bad girl. Screening my ass.”

I said, “Maybe it goes beyond that. Weathers bills himself as a Hollywood insider so maybe he also placed Wedd. At the same client who employed Qeesha and Adriana. Someone powerful enough to shelter income in the Caymans and to scare Weathers straight to legal counsel.”

“CAPD,” he said.

“Let’s try to find out who they are.”

“Easier said than done.”

“Maybe not.”

I pulled out my cell, punched my #1 preset.

Robin said, “Hi, hon, what’s up?”

“Got a spare minute for some research?”

“About what?”

“Ever hear of CAPD?”

“Nope.”

“Who would you call if you needed info on a big-time showbiztype?”

“What’s this about, Alex?”

I told her.

She said, “Interesting. I’ll see what I can do.”

Most of Robin’s guitars and mandolins are commissioned by professional musicians and collectors who play seriously. A few end up stashed in the vaults of rich men seeking trophies-lucky-sperm recipients, real estate tycoons, Aspergian algorithmers, movie stars.

Plus the lampreys who get rich off movie stars. I rarely think of my girl as a Hollywood type but she’s the one who gets invited to all the parties we seldom attend.

Six minutes later, that paid off. “Got what you need.”

“That was quick.”

“I looped in Brent Dorf.”

Dorf was a luminary at a major talent agency. I’d met him last year when he picked up a replica of an eighteenth-century parlor guitar that would end up hanging on a wall. When he found out what I did for a living, he reminisced about being a psych major at Yale, regretted that he hadn’t pursued it because his “primary passion” was helping people. My experience is people who talk about being passionate seldom are.

Brent had impressed me as the perfect political type-a mile wide and an inch deep, programmed to banter on cue. His jokes were clever, his attention span brief. Whatever charm he managed to project was diluted by the flat eyes and sanguinary grin of a monitor lizard. At least he paid his bills on time.

I said, “Dorf knew about CAPD?”

“Boy did he, honey. Unfortunately, Big Guy’s life is going to get really complicated.”

She explained why.

I told Milo.

He said, “Oh.”

Then he swore.

Prema-Rani Moon was Hollywood royalty. As is the case with real royalty, that meant a mixed bag of privilege and decadence.

Grandpa Ricardo (ne Luna) had been nominated for an Oscar but didn’t win the statuette. Grandma Greta’s success rate was one for three. Uncle Maximilian’s average over a forty-year career was the best: a perfect two out of two.

Daddy Richard Jr.’s star had glittered, then sputtered, with seven forgettable pictures followed by a descent into the gummy haze of heroin addiction. Rick Moon’s final attempt at rehab was a stint at a Calcutta ashram run by a guru later proved to be a rapist. Flirtation with fringe Eastern philosophy led Moon to endow his only child with a hybrid Indian name: Prema, a Sanskrit word for “love,” and Rani, “queen” in Hindi.

By the time the little girl was five, all traces of religion in her father’s muddled consciousness had been banished and he was living in Montmartre with the little girl’s mother, a second-tier Chanel model turned semi-famous by her marriage to the handsome, tormented American film scion.

A coke-induced heart attack claimed Rick’s life at age thirty-eight. Lulu Moon claimed she’d tried to revive her husband. If so, the powder she’d crammed up her nose hampered the process. Fourteen months later, she was buried next to Rick at Pere Lachaise cemetery after slashing her wrists while her daughter slept in an adjoining bedroom.

Prema, as she was now known, discovered the body. Never schooled, she couldn’t read the barely literate suicide note that belied Lulu’s claims of attending the Sorbonne.

Shipped back to Bel Air, the child was raised by her grandparents, which translated to a stream of boarding schools where she failed to fit in. The child-rearing ethos on Bellagio Road was less-than-benign neglect. Ricardo and Greta, still working occasionally in character roles, were gorgeous alcoholics and compulsive plastic surgery patients who had no interest in children-in anyone other than themselves. By the time Prema was fourteen her grandparents were pickled in Polish vodka and resembled wax figures molded by addled sculptors. Two years later, Ricardo and Greta were dead and Prema was an adolescent heiress whose considerable assets were managed by a private bank in Geneva.

With no other option, Maximilian Moon, now knighted and living in London, took on the task of serving as his niece’s guardian. That translated to a two-room suite on the third floor of Sir Max’s Belgravia mansion, Prema enduring her uncle’s abysmal piano playing and getting to know the coterie of young lithe men he labeled his “paramours.”

When Prema was sixteen, a poobah at a major modeling agency noticed the tall, slender blond girl with the scalpel-hewn cheekbones, the ripe-peach lips, and the huge indigo eyes standing in a corner at one of Max’s parties with an unlit joint in her hand. The offer of a contract was immediate.

Prema yawned her way down the runway as a Gaultier clothes-hanger, rented herself a garret off Rue Saint-Germain, never bothered to visit her parents’ graves. The combination of passive income and modeling fees allowed her to regularly score chunks of hashish the size of soap bars from Tunisian dealers near the flea market, a treat she shared with her fellow ectomorph beauties.

Her apathy during Fashion Week made her all the more attractive. Elle and Marie Claire vied to feature her as the next jeune fille sensation. Prema turned them down and abruptly abandoned modeling because she found it “stupid and dull.” Back in London, she occasionally ran with a crowd of similarly bored kids but preferred solitary time for smoking weed.