James Patterson - 11th hour

“Last Friday. I work Tuesdays and Fridays. There were absolutely no heads lying around when I weeded the flower beds. And I didn’t see any sign of digging. Nothing. At all. When do you think I can get in there and get the place cleaned up?”

“You work exclusively for Mr. Chandler?”

“No, but he’s my main job.”

The three of us took a stroll along the outer path of the garden. The tape was still up, and so was the main tent just off the patio. The piles of dirt were casting shadows over the pachysandra.

The kid told us that he’d had this job for only three years, but he was attached to the place. He got agitated when he saw what the forensics team had done to the garden.

“Look at this mess. Just look. I’m pretty freaked out, if you want to know the truth. Whoever did this knows this garden. He could be someone I know.”

I said, “Who, Ricky? Who do you know who could have done this?”

“Look, I want to tell you something, but not officially.”

“Okay,” Conklin said, playing along.

“Nigel Worley doesn’t like Mr. Chandler. And I know why, because Janet confided in me. She had a thing with Mr. Chandler when the Worleys first moved in, like ten years ago.”

“A ‘thing’?” Conklin said.

“Janet told me it was just a fling and that she didn’t hold that against Mr. Chandler. She was married. He was married. It went on for a couple of months.

“She said that she still loves him in a funny way.”

“That’s the word she used? Funny?”

“She said odd. Do I think that she killed people and dug up their heads? Honestly, I don’t see it.”

“And Nigel?”

“Nigel has a temper and he’s not subtle. If he was going to kill someone, he would just freakin’ kill him. And I think first up would have been Mr. Chandler.”

Perez showed us the gate that opened onto a narrow concrete walkway on Ellsworth Place and he showed us the lock for the gate. He said that he had the only key.

It was a simple lock, could have been picked, but there was no evidence to show that it had been tampered with.

I took out the sketch of Jane Doe.

“Do you know this woman?”

Perez took the drawing, looked at it for a long few seconds.

“Is she one of the victims?”

“Yes.”

“Her head was cut off?”

“Do you recognize her?”

“She looks familiar, but I don’t know her. It’s like, maybe I saw her in a coffee shop or something like that.”

He handed the drawing back to me, then said, “You know who you should talk to? Tom Oliver, Mr. Chandler’s driver. He’s been with Mr. Chandler for about twenty years. He’s gonna be your expert on Harry Chandler. And maybe he’ll recognize this woman.”

I pressed the bell marked T. L. OLIVER at number 4, one of the four identical six-story brick houses on Ellsworth Place that bounded the mansion on its west side.

“Mr. Oliver?” Conklin said into the intercom. “This is the police.”

T. Lawrence Oliver buzzed us in and we climbed the flights of stairs up to the top floor and found Harry Chandler’s driver waiting for us at his front door.

He was forty-something, white, looked like he could bench-press three hundred pounds. He wore jeans and a print shirt, earring in his left ear, which in the nineties would have meant he was straight. Now it only meant that he liked earrings.

We took seats in the run-down apartment with no view of the back garden, and Conklin started asking the questions. Oliver answered, but he was edgy. He fidgeted with a watch; it looked like a gold Rolex.

“I take time off when Mr. Harry is away,” he told us. “So I dropped him and Kaye off at the boat on Thursday afternoon, then I drove to Vegas. I was gone the whole weekend.”

“Where’d you stay?” Conklin asked.

“The Mandalay Bay. I played a lot of blackjack. I didn’t win and I didn’t lose, but I did get lucky,” he said.

“Write down the name of that lucky person for me, will you?” Conklin said.

“Aw, jeez. Her name was Judy Lemon or Lennon, something like that. She’s a cocktail waitress at the casino. Oh. Wait. I have her phone number.”

He wrote down the number for Conklin, then said, “Anything else?”

“Relax, Mr. Oliver. We’ve got a lot of questions.”

“Can I get you a beer? Mind if I have one?”

Oliver was drinking at nine in the morning. What did he know? What had he done? He dragged a kitchen chair into the living room, and Conklin and I took turns throwing questions at him.

He told us that he had worked for Chandler since long before the trial. While Chandler was in the system, Oliver had taken a job in LA driving for a friend of Chandler, a TV producer. He’d come back to the Ellsworth compound when Chandler was acquitted.

He said he knew nothing about the severed heads except that it was creepy, and his vote for Most Likely to Commit Murder was Nigel Worley, although he couldn’t come up with a motive.

He also didn’t recognize our Jane Doe.

Oliver said good things about Chandler, how generous he was, how there was no way the movie star had ever killed anyone. He said Chandler’s only vices were women and nice things.

“He gave me this watch when he got tired of it,” Oliver said, showing off the seven-thousand-dollar Rolex.

I didn’t like Oliver, but was he a killer? I told him we’d be checking out his alibi and I gave him my card. He wanted us to leave so badly that I pushed back one more time.

“Mr. Oliver, if you had anything to do with this crime, you should tell us now, before it goes any further. My partner and I can help you. We can say that you came to us voluntarily.”

“No, no. I haven’t done anything like that. I came back from Vegas and saw all the cop cars outside the main house and thought, Aw, shit.

“Listen, I drove Mr. Chandler’s Bentley to Vegas. I’m not allowed to. I don’t want to get fired. Please don’t tell him. Check it out with the garage at the hotel. There’s a time-stamped record of the Bentley going in and out all weekend.”

I told Oliver we’d check out his story and that I wasn’t making any promises about what I would say to Chandler. I told him that if he had any thoughts about what happened inside the walled garden to call me any time.

“I have a thought right now. Do you know LaMetta Wynn?”

Lametta Wynn was Harry Chandler’s personal assistant. She lived in a small Victorian house in Golden Gate Heights, a residential neighborhood where everyone had his or her own patch of lawn and a porch overlooking the street.

Ms. Wynn was fifty or so, white, a fading redhead with sharp, pale eyes.

She asked us to come in, and we sat down in her living room. There were watercolor landscapes on the wall and a shotgun in a rack over the sofa. She answered our questions about her whereabouts, saying that she’d been alone all weekend.

“I got some sleep, caught up on e-mail, and was in touch with Harry Chandler. You know, he pays me a lot. He expects me to answer the phone when he calls.”

“Did he call you over the weekend?”

“In fact, he did. He was in Monterey. Wanted to get the names of some restaurants where he could take Kaye.”

“I understand that Mr. Chandler has an active social life.”

“I’m not going to tell you the names of Harry’s old girlfriends,” Wynn said. “Take it from me, there have been a lot of women, but Harry will be happy to give you names and dates, if you just ask him. I want to help you if I can. But I don’t know who could have done this — whatever this is.”

“All of the heads that were exhumed from the garden were female,” I said.