James Patterson - The 8th Confession

Conklin and I worked the top floor of the Baileys’ museum of a house while Clapper’s team did the kitchen and baths. We looked for signs of disturbance and we looked for notes and journals, found none. We confiscated three laptops: Isa’s, Ethan’s, and the one belonging to Christopher Bailey, age nine, for good measure.

We methodically tossed the closets and looked under the beds, then searched the servants’ quarters so the staff could return to their rooms when they got back from the Hall.

I checked in with Claire as the deceased were being zipped into body bags, and she looked at my frown, said, “ I’m not worried, Linds, so relax yourself. The tox screens will give us a clue.”

“HERE WE GO,” said Conklin, nodding in the direction of the fortyish, sandy-haired man in shorts and a hot-pink T-shirt waving to us from a tiki hut, one of several similar cabanas grouped around an oval-shaped pool.

If there was ever a place where Conklin and I stood out as cops, this was it. The Bambuddha Lounge had been the epicenter for hipster-richies since Sean Penn had held a party here after wrapping his Nixon film. As we crossed the patio, eyes shifted away, joints were snuffed out. I half expected someone to shout, “Cheese it, the fuzz.”

“I’m Noble Blue,” said the man in pink.

We introduced ourselves. I ordered mineral water to Noble Blue’s mai tai, and when we were all comfortable, I said, “I understand you had dinner with the Baileys last night.”

“Can you imagine?” Blue said. “They were having their last meal. In a million years, I would never have guessed. We were at the opera before dinner. Don Giovanni, ” he told us. “It was terrific.”

The word “terrific” got caught in his throat, and tears spilled down his tanned cheeks. He grabbed a tissue and wiped them away. “Sorry,” Blue said. “It’s just that Isa and Ethan saw so many of their friends there. It’s almost as if they’d had a big night out because they knew…”

“Could they have known?” Conklin asked. “How did they seem to you?”

Blue told us that they were “a hundred-percent normal.” Isa had flirted at dinner with a man at a nearby table, and, as usual, that made Ethan wild.

“How wild?” I asked.

Blue smiled, said, “I don’t mean violent, Sergeant. It was part of their foreplay.”

Conklin asked, “Can you think of anyone who might have wanted them dead?”

“No. I mean, not in my wildest. But people felt snubbed just as a matter of fact. Everyone wanted to be around the Baileys, and it just wasn’t possible.”

Blue brought up committees that Isa chaired and people who were slighted by that. He spoke of other big-name couples and the not-so-friendly competition among them to see who could be mentioned most often in the Chronicle ’s lifestyle pages.

And he went into a kind of rhapsody as he described Isa’s thirtieth-birthday party in Paris, what she had worn, the fact that Barbra Streisand had performed and that their three hundred guests had been treated to a week of exorbitant luxury.

Conklin had been taking notes, but the three-hundred-name guest list stopped him.

“There’s a list of the guests somewhere?”

“Surely there is. I think it was published. You could Google it?” Blue said helpfully. He blew his nose, sipped his drink, and added thoughtfully, “Sure, people hated them. Ethan and Isa attracted envy. Their money. Their fame. And they were both so hot, they perspired pearls.”

I nodded, but after Noble Blue’s hour-long virtual tour of the Baileys’ lifestyle, I was exhausted by so much information that had yielded so little.

At the same time, Noble Blue had managed to hook me. I found that I cared about these two people who’d seemed lucky and blessed until their lives were canceled – as if someone had thrown a switch and simply shut them down.

I thanked Blue, unfolded my cramped legs, and stepped down from the tiki hut in the center of the Tenderloin.

“I know less now than when Jacobi lobbed this hot potato to us,” I said to Conklin as we walked out to Eddy Street.

“You,” Conklin said, unlocking the car.

“Me, what?”

He gave me his lady-killer grin, the one that could make me forget my own name. “You,” my partner said again. “Jacobi lobbed this hot potato to you. ”

THE COPS on the Bailey investigation were loosely arranged around the grungy twenty- by-thirty-foot squad room we often think of as home.

Jacobi sat behind my desk, saying into the phone, “They just got here. Okay. As soon as you can.”

He hung up, told us, “Clapper says there were no suspicious prints in the bedroom or bath. There was nothing interesting in the glasses or the pills or the bottle of champagne.

“Claire’s on her way. Paul, why don’t you start?”

Paul Chi is lithe, upbeat, resourceful, and a first-class interrogator. He and Jacobi had interviewed the Baileys’ live-in staff, and Chi gave his report from his seat.

“First up, the gardener. Pedro Vasquez, forty-year-old Hispanic. Seemed twitchy. He volunteered that he had some porn on his laptop,” Chi said. “But it turned out to be legal-age porn. I spent an hour with him, don’t see a motive, not yet, anyway. His prints were not found in the Baileys’ bedroom. Vasquez told me he’d never been above the ground floor, and at this point, we’ve got no reason to think that’s a lie.

“Two: Iraida Hernandez,” Chi said, flipping the page in his notebook. “Hernandez is a nice lady.”

“Your professional opinion, Chi?” Lemke asked mildly.

“Yes,” said Chi, “it is. Hernandez is a naturalized citizen, Mexican, fifty-eight, employed for more than thirty years by Isa Booth’s family and by the Baileys. As expected, her prints are all over the Baileys’ bedroom.

“She’s got no record, but as for motive? It’s a maybe.”

“Really?” I said.

Chi nodded. “She says she’s probably in the Baileys’ will, so you never know, but my Grift-O-Meter didn’t go off. Iraida Hernandez does things by the book. She’s loyal. She didn’t have a bad thing to say about anyone, so as I said, ‘Nice lady.’ ”

“What about the cook?” Cappy McNeil called out. Cappy’s a big guy, two hundred fifty, and if the doughnuts and the stairs don’t get him, he could get promoted out of here to a good lieutenant’s job in a small town down the line. That’s what he’s shooting for. Calls it “going coastal.”

“As I was about to say,” Chi said to his partner, “number three: the cook is Miller, Marilyn, white, forty-seven years old. Moved here from somewhere in flyover country.” Chi looked at his notes. “ Ohio. Only been working for the Baileys for a year. Has a clean record. No prints upstairs. All I got off her was ‘What’s going to happen to me now?’ I see no motive. What’s she got to gain? But like the rest of the staff, access to the Baileys was a given. And if we’re thinking poison…”

Chi shrugged as if to say, She’s the cook .

Jacobi said, “I told Miller not to leave the city, and I got two teams from the Special Investigation Division. They’ll be on her at all times.”

Chi was finishing up his report on the remaining two of the Baileys’ live-in staff, a second housekeeper and the mechanic, both as clean as cat whiskers, when Claire stomped into the squad room in her sneakers and scrubs.

She looked around and said, “Are you all thinking, Now that Claire’s here, the party can begin? Think again.”

CHI WHEELED A CHAIR over for Claire. She sat down, propped her feet up on a desk, said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Baileys’ bodies were so pristine, I expected them to start breathing. No pills in their stomachs, no abrasions, contusions, or lacerations. Negative for carbon monoxide. And since I never let skin stand between me and my diagnosis, I did a layerwise dissection on both necks, and the backs of their necks as well.