Meg O'Brien - The Last Cheerleader

Then I realized the sound must have come from the bathroom. Without thinking, I strode over there and threw the bathroom door open, determined to confront Craig about why he hadn’t been answering his calls and why the hell he was hiding from me. It was his own fault, I thought, if I caught him on the john.

But Craig wasn’t hiding at all. He was right there on the floor, blood all over his forehead that was slowly seeping onto the old, grubby tiles.

In shock, I could barely move. I looked at the window, which was open. Cheap plastic curtains in a gaudy flower pattern were blowing in a light salty breeze that came off the ocean from this side of the motel. There were marks on the sill that seemed to be blood, marks that might have come from a killer, possibly escaping that way.

I knelt down beside Craig, feeling for a pulse. I couldn’t find one anywhere. I touched his cheek. Still warm. He hadn’t been dead long.

Stroking his forehead, I couldn’t hold back tears. The poor guy never got the chance to get out of the hole he’d dug himself into. And we were so close to getting what he wanted.

Then, as if in a nightmare, I saw that the blood had originated at a large gash on Craig’s forehead, and that lying by his side was a bloody Chinese dildo—made of ivory, and intricately carved to please, I supposed, in all the right places. It looked very much like the one in Tony’s apartment the night before.

I knelt there for a long moment, so staggered I wasn’t able to stand. I guess I noticed the draft, finally, that slammed the front door shut. Grasping the bathroom sink, I pulled myself up slowly and realized there was blood on my skirt and my knees.

I was still standing over Craig’s body, blood all over me, when the police banged on the front door and piled in. “Don’t move!” they ordered, guns pointed directly at me.

I didn’t even breathe.

El Segundo is a smallish town along the coast, south of Santa Monica and north of Redondo Beach. It’s a nice town, growing perhaps too quickly, but the cops, I’d heard, were generally pretty friendly.

My experience, however, was a bit strained because I’d been found at a crime scene, with blood all over me.

Inside the El Segundo police station, I’d been allowed to wash most of the blood off me. A female officer stood outside the bathroom door, “just in case I needed help.”

Yeah, right.

After I’d done the best I could, I was escorted to an interview room where a Lieutenant Davies sat across from me at a table. He didn’t tell me much, but I knew by now that he was wondering if I’d also killed Tony and Arnold. Although the ESPD and the LAPD were entirely separate entities, surely they shared information when something as important as murder was involved.

The one thing that probably kept me out of jail, at least for the moment, was the open bathroom window and the blood on the sill. I could have set that up, they thought at first, to make it look as if someone else had killed Craig Dinsmore and then escaped out that window. But when my prints didn’t turn up on the murder weapon and there was a third, unidentified person’s blood type on that sill, they couldn’t charge me.

Which did not, however, exonerate me entirely. I could have been an accomplice, the lieutenant said, and just didn’t make it to the window before the police broke in.

“I’ve been wondering about that,” I said. “How did you know to show up when you did?”

He hesitated again, but shrugged. “We had an anonymous phone call saying a murder had been committed in that room.”

“Do you mind telling me when that call came in?”

He hesitated, but said, “One-forty or thereabouts.”

“So, whoever it was, they called you while I was in Craig’s room.”

He didn’t answer that, and for good reason, I thought. If I were an accomplice to the crime, why would the other killer call the cops at a time when I’d be caught there?

I spent the next couple of hours in the interview room dealing with questions I had no answers to. In between questions I had time to think, and I figured that whoever had killed Craig did it while I was pounding on the door the first time. When I came back with a key, the killer was just getting ready to go out the window, but he hesitated when he heard me come in. The noise I’d heard while I was looking at Craig’s manuscript must have been the killer climbing, finally, through that window. I’d been so quiet, he probably thought I’d gone.

Or maybe he was afraid that I might decide I needed to pee.

“Ms. Conahan,” the lieutenant said at last in a hard voice, “I don’t believe in coincidence. There were two murders last night in Brentwood, and the LAPD says that both men were closely connected to you. Now there’s this third murder. I would think you might be getting nervous about that.”

“Well, I’m not nervous,” I said calmly. “I’m sad. I’ve lost two very good authors and an ex-husband who didn’t deserve to die. But I didn’t do anything, so there’s nothing for me to be nervous about.”

Lieutenant Davies fell silent, and I suspected he was using that psychological technique of not speaking, which usually forces the other person to break the silence by saying something.

He’d probably never had an agent as a suspect, and didn’t know that we were well-versed in those kinds of tricks, from constant negotiations. Though, come to think of it, the odds that no agent had ever committed murder upon an author were probably worse than an old, broken-down nag winning at the Hollywood Park racetrack.

I reached for my purse on the table and stood. “Unless you intend to arrest me,” I said firmly, “I’m leaving. I have work to do.”

It was a bluff, but a safe one. If he’d had enough evidence to hold me, I’d be booked and behind bars by now.

The lieutenant smiled, but it was a tight smile, not quite making it to his eyes. I noticed that his teeth were very white against his tanned skin, and that there was an odd little scar on his left cheek. Overall he might be considered quite handsome, but the eyes took away from that. They were all business, not giving anything up.

“I have to ask you not to leave town,” he said.

“I wasn’t planning to,” I answered.

He nodded and stood. “I’ll walk you out.”

I stopped by the office before heading home, and found Nia still there. She hadn’t left at three after all, but was in my workout room, which connected to the office. She was sweating away on the exercise bike, a cordless phone from the office on the floor. The door from the workout room to the reception room was open, which meant that she’d been listening for anyone who might walk in.

“Hi,” I said, dropping my purse on a chair and stepping behind the Chinese screen that served as a changing room. Pulling off my suit and tugging on workout clothes, I did my usual stretching exercises, then climbed on the treadmill next to Nia and started it up.

“Anything new?” I asked.

“I talked to Paul Whitmore after your last call about Craig, and it was weird. After how hot he seemed for Craig’s new book, he didn’t sound all that upset to hear he was dead.”

“Really? How did he sound?”

“Quiet. Didn’t say much, just to tell you he was sorry to hear it. Hung up rather quickly.”

“Hmm. He was probably signing another author already. Whatever it takes to keep the coffers filled.”

Not that I was anyone to talk. I’d been worrying a bit about my own coffers.

“And a Detective Rucker came by,” Nia said. “Yum!”

“Yum?”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, God, don’t tell me you didn’t notice. That curly hair, and those gorgeous white teeth.”

I studied my teeth in the wall of mirrors in front of us. “You know something? Everybody has white teeth these days. Ever since all those actors started having their teeth whitened, everybody you meet hassuper-white teeth. If they all got together in a room and smiled, they’d blind each other.”