Chapter Twenty

“You know, they already arrested that caterer,” Ally informed me, raising her head from the lounge chair beside the pool. She was clearly in mourning: a one-piece black swimsuit and Jackie O. sunglasses. “It was all a mistake. She was trying to kill Paul. Too bad she got it wrong.”

Well, that seemed like the understatement of the year, although I’d already deduced Ally hadn’t been much tempted to throw herself on Porter’s funeral pyre.

“I heard that,” I said. “I just wanted to ask you one or two questions.”

She settled her head back on the blue cushion. The clouds overhead were reflected in her giant black lenses. “That’s what you said the last time.”

“Was Porter working on a book when he died?”

“A book?” Her tone implied that this was some avant-garde art form I was accusing her dead husband of experimenting with.

“Like his memoirs. Or an autobiography.”

She pushed up on one elbow and pulled her sunglasses off. “Oh. Yeah,” she said slowly. “He was working on that again.”

“Do you know what happened to the manuscript? Is it with his papers?”

She drew her brows together. “No. I’ve been through all his stuff.”

That I didn’t doubt.

“Do you know if he’d finished it?”

She shook her head.

“Do you know if he had a publisher or an editor or a cowriter? Maybe a literary agent?”

“I don’t know,” Ally said and she sounded a little peevish now. “I think he showed it to someone. I mean, he was always trying to show it to people.”

“But he had definitely resumed work on his memoirs?”

She replaced her sunglasses and lay flat again. “I guess so. I think he had some idea of finishing it before…The End.” She said it casually, like people referred to the final credits of a movie. “I don’t know if he’d bother to finish it, though, because who would want to read that?”

I asked, “Did Porter ever talk to you about the accident aboard the Sea Gypsy?”

“The what?” she murmured.

“The Sea Gypsy. It was a yacht belonging to a friend of Porter’s named Langley Hawthorne. Langley drowned one night. Did Porter ever talk about that?”

She smothered a huge yawn. “I never listened to Porter when he started yakking about the old days. Just thinking about it makes me tired.”

* * * * *

I’d faithfully phoned Jake before my visits to Marla and Ally. Each time I’d ended up leaving a message, and I hadn’t heard back from him. In fact, I hadn’t spoken to him since Wednesday night when I’d told him good-bye and locked the bookstore door after him.

Not that I was surprised at his silence. LAPD had gone forward with the arrest of Nina Hawthorne, and I figured Lieutenant Riordan had his hands full with the media -- and with Hawthorne’s lawyers who were claiming everything from harassment of a celebrity to police brutality.

It would have been nice to bounce some of my airier ideas off that hard head of his, but I realized that was unrealistic on my part. Jake’s ego was smarting at my unwillingness to resume our old friendship, and that was pretty much what I had expected. If we could have really been platonic friends, then maybe I’d have made an effort but I knew Jake wasn’t going to respect the boundaries of --

Who was I kidding? I had no idea whether Jake was capable of maintaining a platonic friendship or not. And I didn’t care. Because the bottom line -- and no pun intended -- was that I couldn’t handle a platonic friendship with him. It was just too damn painful.

Maybe I could have handled it when I believed he was doing everything possible to have a real marriage with Kate Keegan, but the fact that he had fallen back into his old patterns, that he was seeing Paul Kane on what appeared to be a fairly active basis, that he wanted to have his cake and eat it too, made it impossible for me.

Not to mention the fact that once Jake figured out the direction my sleuthing was taking me, my popularity with him was once again going to nose-dive. Apparently he’d forgotten just how truly annoying he’d found me in the past.

All the same, I called him to tell him I was going to visit Al January again, and as luck would have it, this time he picked up.

“Hey,” he said neutrally.

“Hey,” I returned -- because sparkling repartee is my middle name.

He said, “I meant to call you earlier.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “You’ve made your arrest. I’m just following up on a couple of things.”

“That’s not why I wanted to call you. About the other night --”

“There’s nothing to say, Jake.”

A little shortly he said, “You don’t mind if I say it anyway, do you?”

Equally short, I said, “Go ahead.”

But he said, after a pause, “Another time. What did you need?”

“Nothing. I’m just…following orders. I’m going to see Al January this afternoon.”

“Why?”

“I told you. I’m following up on a couple of things.”

“What things?”

“Apparently Porter Jones was writing his memoirs.”

I could hear the crackle and static of empty air. He said slowly, “You’re the one who thought Paul was the real target. That was your theory.”

“I’ve been wrong before.”

“Oh yeah, that’s for damn sure.” He was angry, but controlled. “Someone knocked Porter off because he was going to write a kiss and tell biography? That’s the current theory?”

Kill and tell in this case. “Don’t you think it’s worth checking out?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Have you figured out how Nina got the poison into Porter’s glass?”

He didn’t answer.

I said, “Well, maybe Al can shed some light on that. He was standing right at the bar with me.”

Still no answer.

It occurred to me -- and it was not a happy thought -- that perhaps his feelings ran deeper than I had allowed myself to believe. I was astonished to hear myself say, “Look, if you…ask…me not to go over there…I won’t go.”

“I…” He didn’t finish it. Or I couldn’t hear what he said over the heavy pounding of my heart. I felt like we were standing on the edge of some precipice -- and I remembered two years ago and a vacation from hell when he’d kept me from taking a nosedive off a cliffside. So many close calls. So many near misses. I had relied on Jake to be my safety net then, and I was relying on him now. And I was willing to return the favor -- if he needed it.

“Call me after you talk to him,” he said abruptly and rang off.

* * * * *

“I was a little surprised to get your phone call,” Al said, handing me a bottle of noni juice.

I set the bottle on the table. It was very hot today, the air still and heavy. Even the bees sounded hot and lazy. The wild grass rustled dryly on the burnished gold hillside.

“You were pretty definite the last time we talked that no way was Nina capable of murder.”

“I didn’t say that,” Al said slowly, apparently thinking back to our last conversation. “I said, no way did she push her father over the side of that boat.”

“But you think she’s capable of trying to kill Paul Kane?”

One of the dogs stood at alert, staring out across the gorge at the hillside. Al spoke quietly and the dog came back and sat down, panting, beside his chair. Al said, “I think Nina…at one time might have been capable of that. I find it hard to believe that she would wait this long to go after Paul. They’ve been…maybe not friendly, but…cordial for years now.”

“Did Paul use her company a lot of cater his parties?”

“I don’t really know.” He frowned, thinking. “I think he might have used her once or twice. She’s very good and very popular. I’ve used her a couple of times -- back when I used to give parties.” There was that little flash of bitterness again.