Linda Fairstein - Final Jeopardy

“Shit, I should have thought of him, too. Isabella used to call him Johnny Gorilla. Remember when she did one of those Tom Clancy movies, about gun runners and dope dealers in some Central American country? Johnny was a great-looking, brain-dead ex-Marine who had a bit part in the movie, and they had an affair during the filming. Hit all the tabloids and supermarket magazines.”

“I must have missed it.”

“It worked fine for three weeks in the jungles of Guatemala, but once she got him back to Bel Air, he had trouble holding up his end of the conversation.

“Anyway, she came to New York for a shopping trip without the gorilla and we met for brunch at Mortimer’s on Sunday morning. The place was packed, everyone there knew who she was, and in the door comes this wild-eyed, oversized madman who’d gone straight from the red-eye to her hotel, where the concierge who had put Isabella in a cab directed him to the restaurant.”

“What did he want?” Mike asked.

“He just raged at her for leaving him behind. The usual stuff of a B-movie – she thought she was too good for him, she thought she could buy him off, comments about her sexual interests. I was halfway under the table and he wasn’t talking about me but she just took it in great style, put down her bloody mary, rose to her full height, told me she’d be right back, and walked him out to the sidewalk. The people in the front half of the restaurant – the ones who count – watched as she hailed a yellow cab and put him inside, then left the taxi door open as she came back in to whisper an apology to me. As she started for the door again, she turned and smiled at ten or twelve of us within hearing range and announced, ”Let this be a lesson to you, girls – always fuck your own rank.“ I sat there dumbfounded until my friends Joan and Louise, who were at the next table, stopped laughing long enough to invite me to finish my salad with them.”

“And the gorilla?” Mike asked.

“He hung on for a while. Could still be an occasional one-nighter for all I know. I don’t think she’d brag it about to me after the episode I witnessed. She’s made a lot of mistakes like that with her personal life. While they’re looking for Johnny they’ll find ten more just like him. Isabella desperately wanted respectability – a man who was solid, not show biz, not drug-involved – there just weren’t a lot of them in her orbit. She never stopped searching for one, though.”

I nosed the car onto the dirt shoulder of the road just before we reached the Bite. Karen saw me first and practically squealed with excitement.

“Alex, what are you doing here? You told us you wouldn’t be back till the weekend we close.” She realized as soon as the words were out that she knew the connection.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Isabella Lascar was staying at your place. I’m so sorry.“

“Thanks, Karen. We’re up here trying to help Wally. This is my friend – Mike Chapman.”

“She was here, Alex. She was here on Wednesday.”

“Isabella?” I should have known I could get a pretty good scouting report from the Quinn sisters. They were enthusiastic, hardworking young women who loved celebrities, and if they trusted you with the information, they could tell you when Vernon Jordan or Billy Joel or Mike Wallace or Princess Di had his or her last order of clams and oysters.

“Yeah, did you send her to us?”

“Well, of course, you’re on the top of my list, Karen, and I would have sent her here, but I actually never got to speak with her on Wednesday.”

Mike casually began to ask for more details.

“Do you remember what time she was here?” was how he started, and when he found out it was between two and three in the afternoon, he moved on to whether or not she was alone.

Jackie had joined in the conversation, too, and both were quick to respond that Isabella had been with a man. No, he didn’t seem at all familiar to them, and yes, they had both checked him out, simply because they assumed he might also be a movie star.

“He was a looker,” Jackie offered. Taller than Mike, also with dark hair, and probably in his forties.

“They had a medium order of clams with some fries, and both of them had bottled water.”

“Did you happen to hear anything about where they were coming from or what they were up to?” I knew from lots of experience here that the deep-fryers were against the windows, right over the picnic table. My father once came close to bringing the girls to tears, unintentionally, by sitting below that window and grousing that there were too many potatoes and too few clams in the chowder. So I tried to make it easier for them to admit an overheard by urging, “It’s really important, girls. It could really help us a lot.”

Karen was eager to be useful.

“It sounded to me like they were on their way to the ferry. He had to be somewhere else and she was going to stay on the island. I’m telling you, she was all over him. I’m pretty sure she was driving him to the ferry, or maybe it was the airport. But they were in a hurry and they ate pretty fast.”

“Thanks, Karen. I’m going to ask Wally to come up and take some more details from you, okay?”

“Sure.”

“Meanwhile,” Mike smiled at the sisters, ‘let’s have a large order of clams, some Bite fries, and two cups of chowder.“

While the order was cooking I walked Mike around the bend to show him the fishing dock and the remains of the ever-shrinking fleet of commercial boats that worked off the coastline. The Quitsa Strider and the Unicorn were both moored in the picturesque harbor, but no sign of their two island captains, brothers who are descendants of original Vineyard settlers, who still caught their swordfish by harpooning them rather than dragging a gill net at sea for days.

We came back, picked up our food, and sat at one of the tables, barely talking as we devoured our late lunch. Mike inhaled the soup and ate two-thirds of the clams before he came up for air.

“You’re right, Coop, this is great stuff.”

“We may have stumbled on an important bit of evidence. Was Isabella killed before her lover left the island… or just after? Thank goodness you wanted fried clams.“

“As Mae West would say, ”Goodness had nothing to do with it,“ Mike responded.

I reached for another clam belly as I asked Mike what he meant.

“I was all set to eat your friend Prime’s pizza for lunch. Then Wally told me about the autopsy report. Looks like Isabella got knocked off within an hour or so of her last meal…“

I gagged on the delicious morsel as Mike finished his sentence.

“Fried clams undigested, sitting in her stomach big, juicy ones, with a little batter on them. I knew I could count on you to tell me who served the best ones on the island.”

He grinned as he raised his soda can to click mine: “Here’s looking at you, Coop. Hope you’re not still hungry that fried food is lousy for your diet.”

I had promised Wally that I would pack and ship Isabella’s belongings to Los Angeles to save his deputies the trouble of going back to the house another day, so Mike and I returned there after lunch to finish that chore. He turned on the CD player, slipped one of my Smokey Robinson discs in place, and sat in the rocking chair next to the bed as I began to fold the clothes that were so casually strewn about.

“I’m tossing these half-used candles,” I said as I walked behind Mike to reach for the one next to the bed.

He picked up the movie script and thumbed through it as I worked.

“Why don’t you keep one of those silk pajama things for yourself, kid? Nobody would begrudge you that.”

“Thanks for the thought. Isabella sent me an identical set for my birthday this spring. The tags are still on it somehow it just doesn’t have ”me“ written all over it.” I stroked the silky fabric of the champagne-colored lingerie as I fitted it into the already crammed duffel bag, guessing from Isabella’s descriptions of her pudgy cousin that these gorgeous indulgences of La Lascar would find their next life in some charity’s thrift shop in Sherman Oaks.