Death Takes the Cake Read online

  The investigator went on to report that discreet inquiries provided information that surprised Taggart. Amazing as it seemed to the detective, none of Mickey’s three former wives talked about him with animosity.

  Regarding “the incumbent,” as Taggart referred to Iva, he reported that Mickey’s fourth wife had been born Iva Diane Brody, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, thirty years ago. He added, “Information on the current Mrs. Jordan is attached. It makes for juicy reading.”

  That was an odd note, I thought. According to Iva, the only embarrassing thing in her past was that at a time when she’d lost her job and was desperate for money, she’d tried to work as a phone sex operator. And she hadn’t even succeeded in doing that.

  Unless . . .

  I began to get a creepy feeling, a little prickle at the back of my neck.

  Into the envelope went the report on Mickey. I removed the pages on Iva—and got another shock. Iva Diane Brody had been arrested twice for “solicitation.” One need not have been married to a police detective to know that “solicitation” meant Iva had been charged with prostitution.

  It was so hard to imagine Iva, with her delicate features, soft eyes, gentle manners . . . I’d never even heard her swear.

  But I’d learned in my lifetime that all kinds of people did all kinds of things.

  According to Taggart, Iva’s second arrest had occurred less than a year before she met Mickey.

  It was no wonder she was afraid that Mickey would leave her if he found out about her past. Even though Iva had lied to me about the reason, I didn’t doubt that her terror was real.

  I couldn’t predict how Mickey would react if he learned about it, but one thing was clear to me: Iva had a motive to murder both Reggie and Taggart.

  Another possible scenario occurred to me. Suppose Mickey had found out about Iva’s past, perhaps from Reggie. Or suppose Taggart had contacted Mickey and tried to be paid for burying the information. If Mickey really loved Iva, as I’d had no reason to doubt, he might have killed to protect her secret. It was already on record that he was capable of violence. Mickey’s own long-ago arrest might have been for something bad enough that he would go as far as murder to hide it.

  If the contents of Taggart’s reports were made known to the police, then Bill Marshall would probably slide down the list of suspects, but either Iva or Mickey would rise to the top.

  If I told the police what I knew, it could help Bill, but if Iva and Mickey were innocent of the murders, then exposing what Taggart learned might destroy their marriage. Even worse, I wasn’t sure that Iva would be able to recover from the public humiliation.

  The Marshalls were much closer and dearer to me than either of the Jordans, but if neither Mickey nor Iva was a killer, how could I ever forgive myself if I set the police onto them for the purpose of diverting attention from Bill?

  Somehow, I had to learn the truth.

  I picked up Taggart’s reports on Mickey and Iva and put them back in the envelope. When I slid his report on me out from underneath Emma, I found those papers had been warmed by her body heat. I gave her a gentle stroke before I added that report to the envelope.

  Is the answer to who killed Reggie and Taggart in the pages I held?

  I had the strong feeling that it was. To think that two different people had murdered Reggie and Taggart was to believe in an outrageous and bizarre coincidence. I wasn’t buying that. The link between the two victims was that Reggie had hired Taggart to investigate us.

  Does the killer know I have these reports?

  If so, my situation could be reduced to an exercise in Logic 101: Here were two facts and a conclusion.

  1. The killer knew what Reggie had hired Taggart to do.

  2. I knew what Taggart had found out.

  3. Ergo, the killer couldn’t afford to let me live.

  While I contemplated this grim syllogism, the doorbell rang.

  30

  Tuffy followed me to the front door, wagging his tail and making what I recognized as “friendly” noises in his throat. I was sure he knew who was outside before I looked through the living room window and saw Nicholas D’Martino. He pointed his finger at the bell, about to ring again.

  NDM saw me. Instead of ringing, he lifted his hand in greeting. But he wasn’t smiling.

  When I opened the door, he skipped a greeting and said, “You didn’t tell me you went to see T. J. Taggart yesterday.”

  “You didn’t tell me his hard drive had been stolen. We’re even.”

  He reached down to give Tuffy an affectionate scratch behind the ears. Straightening, he said, “Do you want to fight, or would you rather compare notes?”

  “If we discuss the Taggart murder, will you keep what I say off the record?”

  “I can’t promise that.”

  “Then we can’t compare notes,” I said.

  I moved around him and reached for the knob to close the door. He put his hand on my arm to stop me.

  “Okay,” he said. “We’ll go off the record. “But I have my price.” He smiled in that way he had of instantly making me think about sex.

  I closed the door and took a step away from him. “What’s your price?”

  “Coffee, and whatever you have in the cupboard for a hungry man who missed lunch.”

  “Deal.” I nodded in the direction of the kitchen and started toward it, but he took my wrist and drew me close to him. His lips touched mine in the lightest, most gentle kiss. “Let’s start all over again. Hello,” he said.

  Tuffy squeezed in between us. Feeling my big dog’s entire back end wagging made me laugh.

  NDM looked down at him and grinned. “See, Tuff likes me even when you don’t.”

  “I’ll have to have a chat with him about that,” I said.

  Out in the kitchen, NDM flipped the switch on the coffeemaker and put napkins and cutlery on the table while I heated the Bolognaise sauce I had in the refrigerator, and quickly made a pot of angel hair pasta. With that—and running half a loaf of buttered French bread under the broiler for a few seconds—I’d produced one of the world’s fastest meals.

  NDM poured two mugs of coffee for us as I ladled angel hair and sauce into a pasta bowl and set it, along with a basket of hot French bread, in front of him.

  He saw that I hadn’t made a bowl for myself. “You’re not eating?”

  “I just had lunch, with someone you know.”

  NDM’s fork paused on its way to the pasta. “Ah. Phil Logan. So that’s why he called me.”

  “Eat,” I said. And while he did, I studied this man with whom I was having a romantic relationship. It still surprised me that this had happened so quickly. Twenty plus years ago, I had waited until I knew Mack Carmichael very well before we went to bed together. Nicholas D’Martino and I had reversed the process.

  “I want to be able to trust you,” I said. “What I’ve found out could be very harmful to people I care about. If I tell you the things I’ve learned, I don’t want them to be made public unless one of those people actually committed murder.”

  He put down his fork and reached across the kitchen table to touch my hand. “You’re smart, and it looks as though you’ve gotten further in the Taggart case than I have, but I have resources you don’t. The best way to save an innocent person is to find out who committed the crime.”

  “Crimes, plural,” I said. “I’m sure you’re right about Reggie’s and Taggart’s murders being connected.”

  “Let’s share what we know, and see where the clues lead. The sooner the better.”

  I stood up. “Finish your pasta. I have to get something I want to show you.”

  When I left the kitchen, Tuffy looked up from where he was relaxing on his comfy pad by the refrigerator, but instead of following me, he stayed put. Perhaps it was because I’d talked to him conversationally from the time he was a puppy, but I was sure Tuff understood a lot of what I said and knew that I was coming right back.

  When I returned to the kitchen wit
h Taggart’s reports I found NDM at the sink, washing his dishes.

  “That’s nice,” I said. “Your mother brought you up well.”

  “She used to say, ‘Nicholas, if you want to be invited back someplace, you need to be a good guest.’ ”

  I sat down at the table and moved my coffee mug away from the middle of the table. “Is that what she called you? Nicholas?”

  He nodded. “Yes, and that’s what I wish you’d call me. Do you realize that you never use my name when you talk to me?”

  “Oh, there’s something I call you to myself.”

  “What? ‘That bastard’?”

  I chuckled. “Not more than once or twice a day. Truthfully, when I think of you, I call you by your initials, NDM.”

  “Like FBI or CIA—or SOB?”

  More like WD, as in WD-40. Like that handy spray, he’d certainly loosened me up, but I knew if I voiced that thought it could lead us right to the bedroom, so I kept it to myself.

  He sat, glanced at the envelope I’d placed facedown on the table, but didn’t make a move toward it. Instead, he looked at me. “Call me Nicholas. Nobody else does.”

  “All right—Nicholas.” The name felt good on my tongue.

  But it was time to get to work. I took the three reports out of Taggart’s envelope but held onto them. “At this moment it doesn’t matter how I found out, but you’re not the only one who learned that Reggie Davis hired private investigator T. J. Taggart. She went to him immediately after she agreed to sponsor the cake mix competition slash TV reality show.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “I suspected it was because of me,” I said. “Addison Jordan, who made the deal with her, insisted that I was to be a contestant. He said she’d asked him a lot of personal questions about me, but that he couldn’t give her any answers. I was sure I was the reason she’d hired a private investigator when I figured out that she’d deliberately gone after Bill Marshall—one of the people closest to me—to try to lure him into having an affair with her.”

  I handed Nicholas the pages Taggart had written about me. “Near the end of this ‘unauthorized biography’ is a list of my closest friends.”

  “Am I on it?”

  “You’re on my list,” I said, “but Taggart didn’t find out about us. If he had, I think Reggie would have gone after you—to punish me.”

  I gave him time to read the report. When he put it down, I told him about my college history with Reggie, and my belief that she still was trying to hurt me any way that she could manage. “I think that if she couldn’t break up a relationship of mine, the next best thing in her mind must have been to destroy my friends. My reason is that I remember something Reggie said when I was driving her home from my house because she was drunk.”

  “What was that?”

  “She said something about being interested in a married man because he thought he was in love with his wife. I was shocked, and said that Reggie could break up their marriage. Her answer was, ‘Revenge is sweet.’ She fell asleep before she said anything else, but when I learned she went after Bill Marshall—my good friend, a man she found out about through investigating me—I made the connection.”

  “That makes sense, in a twisted sort of way,” he said. “I’ve known women who . . . well, no need to go into that.” He indicated the pages I was holding.

  “Who else did she investigate?”

  “This is the sensitive part. It was Mickey Jordan, and his wife, Iva. After you’ve read these, please don’t jump to any conclusions. I want us to discuss how we can find out more than Taggart did.”

  Nicholas took the papers and began to read them carefully. I saw his eyebrows rise twice, but he kept his expression neutral.

  When he finished the last page, he said, “Who knows you have this material?”

  “I haven’t told anyone. The police—and you—found out that I’d been to see Taggart. When John and his partner came to question me about my visit to Taggart, I only answered their questions—and narrowly at that. Without Taggart’s files, they had no idea what might be missing, so they didn’t ask if I’d talked Taggart out of any reports.”

  “How did you manage that?”

  “Professional secret. Let’s just say I was persuasive.”

  Nicholas gave me a wry smile. “You can be pretty damn persuasive. I remember the night you came to my house and persuaded me into bed.”

  “It didn’t take much,” I said. “On Taggart all I had to use was words.”

  “I’d have paid to have heard that conversation,” he said.

  “It wasn’t exciting, but I got the reports, which is all that matters—except he was alive when I left him.”

  “That reminds me. I found out what the medical examiner’s ruled as the time frame of his death.”

  “When?”

  “Based on when he’d eaten last, the ME judges Taggart was struck a fatal blow to the head sometime between five and seven pm.”

  I expelled a heartfelt sigh of relief. “I’d almost reached the studio in North Hollywood by five, and I was there for the next several hours.”

  But I had no idea where either Mickey or Iva were.

  “What was the murder weapon?” I said.

  “Apparently, the police aren’t sure yet. Whatever it was, the killer took it away.”

  “Reggie was struck by a heavy crockery mixing bowl that was in my test kitchen cubicle, which could mean the person who hit her hadn’t come there intending to kill her.” I thought for a moment. “Taggart’s death might have been to cover up Reggie’s killing.”

  “Which brings us back to Taggart’s investigation,” Nicholas said. “You haven’t told anyone except me that you have these reports?”

  “No, and it’s hard to believe that Taggart would admit he’d turned them over to someone. He was worried about people finding out.”

  “The killer must have taken Taggart’s hard drive to keep anyone from seeing his files. If no one knows what you have then you should be safe.”

  Another “if.”

  Briefly, I considered telling Nicholas about the car that I thought had tried to force me off the road, but I couldn’t swear that was what the driver was trying to do. I resisted the impulse to say anything and instead, turned the conversation toward making use of Taggart’s reports.

  “I know where I’d like to start digging,” I said.

  “So do I. You first. Where?”

  “The officer who arrested Mickey way back in the Dark Ages. Is he still alive? If he is, I want to know what he remembers about the case. What exactly did Mickey do? Was the case adjudicated, and if so, how? And how did Mickey end up in the army a few months later?”

  “With a case that’s thirty or forty years old, the chances are slim that anyone who knows the facts is either alive or coherent enough to remember the details.”

  “I’m going to try anyway. Where are you going to start?”

  “With Iva Jordan’s prostitution busts. The most recent happened four years ago. I’ve got a friend on a Manhattan paper who hangs with some vice cops.”

  “You’ll be careful what you tell him? You won’t let him know that Iva’s name came up in a murder investigation?”

  He patted my hand reassuringly. “I’ll put my questions on the basis of a favor. But if it turns out Iva’s a killer, I’ll cut him in on the story. That sort of quid pro quo has always been the basis for exchanging information. Do you want me to help you find out about Jordan’s arrest?”

  “No, thanks. At least not unless the idea I have doesn’t work.”

  He cocked his head and gave me a quizzical stare. “You’re not a trained investigator.”

  “I’m not a trained chef, either, but I’m cooking on television.”

  “Touché. Okay, let’s get to work.”

  We stood and he drew me into his arms. His lips brushed my forehead and he whispered, “Send this soldier off to the trenches with a kiss.”

  “It will be my pleasure . . . N
icholas.”

  Several sweet, hot, dizzying moments later, we came up for air, and Tuffy and I walked him to the front door.

  31

  The first thing I did after Nicholas left the house was go to my bedroom to find the old suitcase I kept in the back of the closet. My closet wasn’t nearly as neat as I wanted it to be, nor was it as well organized as I’d kept it when Mack was alive.

  I removed several layers of old sweatshirts, a stained floral tablecloth, and washed-out sheets and towels. These were fabrics I’d saved because I used to fantasize I’d sew them into a quilt when I had time. But I never had time, and, to be honest, except for replacing buttons, I was terrible at sewing. But I loved the look and feel of homemade quilts. I’d had to buy the only one I owned.

  Finally, I spotted what I was looking for.

  It took some tugging and grunting, but I managed to drag the suitcase out into the room. With a mighty heave, I got it up onto the foot of the bed.

  Good lord. How young I was to have thought that this college suitcase of mine—this bag with its peeling, imitation leather corners, covered in tapestry fabric with a not-very-artistic depiction of a scene from The Canterbury Tales—was grown-up, and even elegant. But that’s exactly what I thought back then. With apologies to Carl Sandburg and his poem about fog, as we age cellulite, too, “comes in on little cat feet,” but at least our taste gets better as we mature.

  I pushed the case’s twin locks to the open position, raised the top, and was hit with a wave of grief. Unexpected. I thought I’d gotten past it, but for a moment, it took my breath away. I hadn’t opened the suitcase for two years, not since a few days after Mack’s funeral. These were his things that I’d packed away: the weights he’d used for endurance training, the college term papers he’d saved, his copy of the penal code, his police academy graduation photograph, a citation for bravery that he’d never let me display, our wedding pictures, Tuffy’s “adoption” papers, an often read paperback copy of his favorite Joseph Wambaugh novel, The Choirboys—and letters. Lots of letters, four stacks, tied in bundles but not organized.