43

As soon as I let Tuffy and myself into the house, my cell phone rang. The number on the faceplate was unfamiliar.

I answered and heard Olivia Wayne’s voice. She started talking without the preamble of a greeting.

“Victor Raynoso has a public defender, but I persuaded the PD to let me go with him into the interview with his client and ask questions about one of the charges against him. To give you a quick snapshot, Raynoso’s got tattoos up to his chin, over the top of his shaved head and across the knuckles of both hands. His rap sheet goes back to his first incarceration as a juvenile. He’s a total creep with a bad attitude, not worth the price of the air he’s breathing.”

“But do you like him for the café shooting?”

“No,” she said. “He denied it, adamantly, but everybody I’ve ever met in custody denies everything, so I paid no attention to that. The evidence-I should say, the lack of evidence-supports Raynoso’s denial. He was caught taking shots at cars on the freeway, and he was carrying drugs. No surprise there. What makes me think he’s telling the truth about being so drunk he wasn’t even awake at the time you and the writer were having coffee is that he’s stupid. And his whole criminal history is one of acting on impulse. I got a-shall we say an informal-look at the police report of the café shooting. Whoever did that had to plan it, had to know how to get to the roof across the street and set up for the shoot. I’d bet my year-end bonus that Raynoso has never even planned where to eat lunch.”

“Then Hatch is wrong about Raynoso being our sniper.”

“I’m sure he is. Look, Della, I told you I’d be billing you for my time visiting Raynoso, but because we have a mutual friend-a very nice guy, even if he’s as slippery as a greased eel-I gave you a fifteen-minute freebee.”

“What do you mean?”

“After chatting with Raynoso, I went to see Detective Hatch. I volunteered my opinion that he has no case against Raynoso for the Gray shooting, and that he’ll look like a fool if he tries to include that charge.”

“How did he take it?”

She chuckled. “Not very well, but he listened. You’ve never seen me in action, but I’m inclined to express myself in somewhat forceful language. Hatch wanted to know why I was interested in Raynoso. I told him it was because I get hot for lowlife scum with tattoos.”

I was beginning to like Olivia Wayne. “What do you think Hatch will do now?”

“My guess is he’ll realize he’s playing a bad hand in trying to tie Raynoso to the Gray shooting and he’ll fold,” she said. “But he’s embarrassed now, and that will make him mucho vindictive. If he really wants to get John O’Hara for the Ingram murder, he’ll have to find motive and opportunity for O’Hara to have tried to take down Gray.”

“He can’t possibly succeed, because John doesn’t have any motive to hurt Gray.”

“Meaning that he did have reason to want Ingram dead. Wait-don’t answer that.”

“I wasn’t going to,” I said, “except to repeat that John did not kill Keith Ingram.”

“Don’t let that belief, or loyalty, make you complacent,” Olivia Wayne said. “If Ingram’s real killer isn’t found quickly, who knows what piece of human excrement with a grudge against O’Hara, and who needs a favor from the cops, might suddenly materialize and tell Hatch some story he would be happy to believe. Good luck.”

Olivia Wayne disconnected, once again without saying good-bye. Apparently, she didn’t pad her billable hours with unnecessary chitchat.

After showering, shampooing, brushing my teeth twice, and putting on fresh clothes, I finally managed to erase all traces of the morning’s stomach ordeal.

Tuffy followed me into the kitchen. He already had fresh food and water, so he just glanced at his full bowls and settled down to watch me cook.

The ingredients I needed for what I was going to make were among the staples in my cabinets. No need for a trip to the market. I organized them in front of me on the counter and set about preparing a batch of my friend Carole Adams’s Quick & Easy Chocolate Nut Butter Fudge Pudding. I’d planned it as a gift for Roland when I joined him for tea at his apartment this afternoon.

While I melted the honey, sweet butter, chocolate chips, peanut butter, and other components of the recipe together in the top part of my double boiler, I thought about murder.

I visualized the pieces of the puzzle as though they were real pieces, spread out across the kitchen table. That was where Eileen and I used to put such puzzles together when she was a child. But those were easy, because we had the picture on the box to guide us in fitting the parts together.

As I stirred, I began to think again about what I knew. I hoped that if I concentrated hard enough, I would begin to understand what the handful of fragments were trying to show me.

I decided to organize them as if they were points in a mystery story I was reading:

Eugene Long hated Roland Gray.

For revenge, Long and Ingram plotted to frame Gray for attempted murder.

But before they could implement their scheme, Ingram was murdered.

Ingram disliked Yvette Dupree, and it was probably mutual, even though at some point she’d gone to bed with him and he’d taped the event.

Ingram intended to marry Tina Long, in all likelihood for her father’s money.

Yvette adored Tina as though Tina were her own daughter. I understood how great a force that kind of love could be, because I felt it for my own honorary daughter, Eileen. I doubted that Yvette was happy about Ingram planning to marry Tina. Could she possibly have been unhappy enough about it to want Ingram dead?

There was one unidentified guest at the gala: the mystery man who paid with a phony check. Because no one at the ticket desk remembered him, he must have been innocuous looking. (It certainly could not have been Victor Raynoso. From Olivia’s description he sounded like one big walking tattoo. Anyone would remember seeing him.)

Yvette couldn’t have killed Ingram-but could she have hired the mystery man to do it?

Roland Gray must have had a powerful grudge against Eugene Long to have made him humiliate Long’s daughter. It didn’t seem likely that Roland would have had anything against Tina herself. She was only eighteen at the time he engineered her embarrassment. And, if he did take out anger at Long on his daughter, that was a very cowardly act.

Yvette Dupree killed her husband ten years earlier, in London, claiming self-defense because he was abusing her. Did she have help, as John’s friend at Interpol suspected?

And what about the person in the dark green hooded sweatshirt who was watching me in the library? And the fact that someone slashed the tires on my Jeep? Were those little pieces part of the big murder puzzle? And was the person in the hooded sweatshirt the same one who slashed my tires?

If those acts were connected to the puzzle of Ingram’s murder, then it had to be because someone knew I was trying to find Ingram’s killer.

Thanks to Olivia Wayne’s visit to Victor Raynoso and, later, to Detective Hatch, Hatch was probably going to return to the belief that the murder of Ingram and the attempted murder of Gray were connected. But I was as sure as Olivia was that Hatch wasn’t going to stop looking for evidence that would allow him to arrest John O’Hara. I didn’t doubt that Hatch would be happy if the real killer walked up to him and confessed, but unless that unlikely event occurred, his investigation was focused on John.

I was very glad that I’d broken into Ingram’s house and stolen the tape of Eileen. If Hatch had found that tape before I did, it was likely John would be in custody now. A father protecting his daughter was a powerful motive for murder.