Death Takes the Cake Read online

  I sat quietly and stroked Tuffy as I thought about what I’d just heard, that Bill had lied about where he was last Tuesday and tonight because he was secretly taking dancing lessons . . . I was thrilled to hear Liddy sounding so happy, but I wondered if he was telling her the truth. With all of my heart, I hoped he was.

  Reminding myself that I’d known Bill Marshall for more than twenty years and had never doubted that he was a devoted husband, I tried to banish the feeling of unease that was threatening to envelope me.

  I told myself that I believed his story.

  Almost.

  With one last glance at the phone on the living room end table—ridiculously, as though by looking at the instrument I could learn if Bill was telling Liddy the truth—I stood and took a step toward the hallway leading to my bedroom.

  And then the doorbell rang.

  I hurried to peek out the front window and saw Addison Jordan on the front steps. He was pale and shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

  Good Lord—what now?

  Before he could ring again, and perhaps awaken Eileen, I opened the door and ushered him inside. Addison had lost his cool self-possession. He looked as though he’d dressed hastily because his top shirt button was in the wrong hole.

  The moment I’d closed the door behind him, he said, “Regina Davis was murdered?”

  “How did you find out?”

  “A reporter from the Chronicle called. Guy with an Italian name.”

  “Nicholas D’Martino?”

  “That’s it.”

  “He wanted Mickey, but Mickey was out so I picked up the phone. I’m staying with Mickey you know.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “The house is so big Iva barely knows I’m there, which is a good thing for Iva. She’s polite, but I don’t think she’s exactly crazy about me. Anyway, when I told the reporter I was Mickey’s son and an executive in the company, he told me what happened to Regina Davis.”

  NDM must have tried to contact Mickey as soon as I left the Cork.

  Addison was pacing back and forth behind my sofa. I invited him to sit down, but he declined with a shake of his head. “I’m too upset. D’Martino said you found her—her body. What were you doing at the test kitchens?”

  “Trying to get inspiration for a cake. What did he tell you?”

  “He just asked questions. He knew you were one of the contestants in the Reggi-Mixx Cake Competition and wanted the names of the others.”

  “Did you tell him?”

  “Yes. There didn’t seem to be any reason not to. Jeez, I feel awful.” Now he was pacing around the edges of my area rug. “Della, this could be my fault.”

  “How in the world could it be your fault?”

  He paused to straighten one of my already straight lampshades. “If it turns out to be connected to the contest and the reality show. They were my ideas. I talked her into the project—although, when I mentioned Mickey’s name she didn’t need much persuading.” I sat down on the couch, hoping my example would make him light somewhere.

  I said, “When did you meet her?”

  “November fifth, a few days after I moved out here from New York. I’d started working for Mickey, but he didn’t know what to do with me. Going over the channel’s schedule, he was most enthusiastic about you, so I thought up the contest as a way to promote the network, and your show. Before I told him what I had in mind, I researched food companies, looking for one that needed promotion as much as we did.”

  “Reggi-Mixx. That makes sense. I’ve heard that the company has lost market share.”

  Addison nodded. “When I had her data and crunched the numbers, I ran the idea past Mickey. I think I impressed him because he gave me the okay to try and set up a deal. Regina Davis went for it, I could tell, but she pretended to make me keep selling her. She asked a lot of questions.”

  “What questions?”

  Addison began to calm down, at least enough to perch on the arm of the sofa. “A lot of them were about you. What were you like to work with? What kind of person were you off the air? Then there was one question she asked that didn’t seem relevant to the contest.”

  “What was that?”

  “She said she’d read that you were a widow and she was curious to know if you were romantically involved with anyone. I didn’t know anything about your personal life—I hadn’t even met you yet—but I didn’t want to admit that, so I just told her what I hoped was true: You were a dream to work with, always cooperative. I did know for sure that the viewers liked you and your audience was building. When she agreed to the deal I proposed—that our two companies share expenses on the project and share ad revenue from the TV special—she said that you could be one of the five contestants, but that she would pick the other four to keep anyone from thinking that the contest was fixed because you’re on our network. I said, ‘Fine.’ I didn’t care who was in the contest as long as you were.”

  Addison stood and started pacing again. “Do the police think someone in the contest killed her?”

  “I doubt they have any theory yet. It’s only been a few hours.”

  “Mickey told me you’re friends with a police detective. When you hear anything at all, will you tell me?”

  “I’ll share what I can, but until we know what happened, please don’t blame yourself just because the contest was your idea.”

  “You’re right. It’s just that this was such a shock. I’ve never known anyone who was murdered.”

  You’ve been lucky, I thought.

  Addison looked at his watch and sighed. “Mickey should be home by now. If he hasn’t heard about the murder, I’ll have to tell him.” He made an unsuccessful attempt to smile. “I don’t know Mickey very well yet. When he gets bad news, does he kill the messenger?”

  “Not that I’ve ever heard.”

  “Maybe the bodies just haven’t been found,” he said.

  13

  Next morning, when I brought the newspapers in from where they lay in the middle of my driveway I saw that the front page of both the Los Angeles Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times featured stories about the murder of Regina Davis.

  NDM’s byline was on the Chronicle’s piece, which mentioned that the victim’s body had been discovered by “the Better Living Channel’s new cooking show star Della Carmichael.” The reporter for the Times referred to me simply as “a cable TV chef.” There were few details in either article, but NDM had managed to learn that the medical examiner’s office was going to report that the victim’s death was estimated to have occurred between seven and nine pm.

  I wondered how—and from whom—he had extracted that information. Dr. Sidney Carver had not looked to me like the kind of woman who would be susceptible to NDM’s charm. Then I remembered that the man had a great deal of charm.

  Stop it, I told myself. Don’t think about how good it felt to be in his arms, or how much you enjoyed the touch of his hands, the taste of his lips . . .

  The phone rang, mercifully cutting off that train of thought.

  “Hello.”

  “Della, it’s Iva Jordan. Can you hear me?”

  “Just barely. Could you speak a little louder?”

  “I’ve got to talk to you.” She raised her voice just enough for me to stop straining. I realized that she was crying. “It’s a matter of life and death. May I come in?”

  “Come in? Where are you?”

  “Parked in the alley right behind your house. I don’t want anyone to see me.”

  Now what? I wondered. But what I said was, “I’ll come right out and unlock the back gate.”

  My little one-story English cottage on Ninth Street in Santa Monica, three blocks north of Montana Avenue, has a small front yard but a large back area. Privacy was assured by a chain link fence Mack and I’d screened with rows of young trees that we’d planted on three sides of our lot shortly after we moved in. Now, eighteen years later, the trees had grown to more than six feet high and had filled out in all the
ir year-round leafy glory, making the chain link behind all but invisible.

  In the center of the rear property line there was a wooden gate that I kept locked, and usually opened only to put out the trash for the weekly collection. Two dozen rosebushes that I’d grown from bare root packages gave the yard gorgeous splashes of color when they bloomed, but in late December I’d performed the yearly task of cutting them back down to about eighteen inches high. At the moment they held only the promise of future beauty.

  Grabbing the key to the back gate from a hook on the kitchen wall, I hurried out the door and down the rear flagstone path. As I pushed the heavy gate open, I heard the hinges squeaking and reminded myself to give the metal a few squirts with WD-40 later.

  Iva squeezed inside before I’d had the chance to open the gate all the way. Fortunately, she was slender enough so that her winter white cashmere sweater didn’t catch on the rough wooden edges and rip.

  As soon as I closed and relocked the gate, Iva sighed in relief. “Thank God you’re home!”

  “Come inside and have some coffee.”

  Halfway up the path to the kitchen door, Iva suddenly stopped and looked around at the yard. “Where’s your pool?”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “No pool?” She said it wonderingly, as though the idea of a house without a pool was a concept difficult to grasp.

  Mack and I had wanted to put in that famous California luxury and fitness asset, but we’d never been able to afford to do it. That was not something I was willing to discuss with Iva. Annoyed, I said, “No pool. I’m allergic to chlorine.”

  She missed my sarcasm and replied in a sympathetic tone, “Oh, I’m so sorry. Have you tried to find a doctor for that?”

  I liked Iva, but I’d never counted her among the brightest people I know. I dropped the sarcasm, ushered her into the kitchen, and gestured for her to take a seat at the table. “What would you like in your coffee?” I asked.

  “Just black. I have to watch my figure. Being married to a man as rich as Mickey, with so many women after him, is a full-time job.”

  The mental image of hordes of women chasing short, rough-edged, sixty-year-old Mickey Jordan down the street made it hard not to chuckle, but I forced myself to keep a straight face and poured her a mug of black coffee. I’d already had enough that morning, so I just sat down opposite her. Iva, the much younger and a bit taller fourth wife of Mickey Jordan, wore her pale gold hair in a gamine cut that emphasized her high cheekbones and large brown eyes. Usually, she was attired in some stunning designer ensemble, gilded with at least one piece of serious jewelry. This morning, in plain gray wool slacks, a white sweater, no jacket and no ornaments except her diamond “eternity” wedding ring, she looked—for Iva—unfinished.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked. “Why did you need to see me?”

  She put down the coffee mug without having taken even a sip and clasped her perfectly manicured hands together so hard her knuckles were white. “That woman who was murdered . . . Della, I’m so scared! I’m afraid the police are going to think I killed her!”

  That was the last thing I expected to hear. “I didn’t know you knew Regina Davis.”

  “I didn’t, not until she came to my house eight days ago to blackmail me.”

  I couldn’t imagine what Iva might have in her past that could be blackmail material, but I’d only known her for about a year and a half. We met when she enrolled in my cooking school, and it had been Iva who had convinced her husband that I would be the right person to replace the show host he had fired a few months ago. I would always be grateful to her for that.

  “Did you tell Mickey about Regina’s visit?”

  “Oh, no!” Both hands flew to her mouth and she flinched. “I couldn’t let Mickey know because she was threatening to tell him something about me!”

  I handed her two paper napkins from the holder—a plywood dragon that Eileen had constructed and painted in her high school shop class—in the center of the table. Iva used one to wipe her eyes and the other to blow her nose.

  “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “No,” she sniffed, “but I have to because you’re friends with the detective the TV news said is investigating: Lieutenant O’Hara. Please speak to him on my behalf. Beg him to keep me out of this.”

  Because Iva was so nervous, instead of asking what she had done, I phrased the question more delicately. “Why did Regina Davis think she could exploit you?”

  Iva expelled most of the air in her slender body. “Oh, this is so embarrassing. I never wanted anyone to know.” She took a deep breath in. “A couple of months before I met Mickey I was having a terribly tough time paying my bills. I was a fit model—you know, one of the girls that designers fit their sample clothes to—but the company went out of business and left us all stranded. Suddenly no income. I don’t have any regular skills. I can’t do data entry, whatever that is, or operate a forklift. Lots of employers want those people. Then, when I was literally down to my last forty dollars, I saw an ad for a telephone actress.”

  Yikes.

  Iva’s lips twisted into a wry smile. “I can see you guessed what that was, but I didn’t figure it out until I applied for the job. It was an adult entertainment company—but the people there were all so nice and so . . . normal. They explained what I’d have to do on the phone, and gave me some written guidelines, a kind of script. . . .” She shivered. “Oh, this is awful!”

  “How long did you work at that?”

  “One hour.”

  “One hour? Was there a police raid? I thought the phone sex business was legal. What happened?”

  “I was a total failure, Della. Every caller hung up on me in less than a minute. I never even got to the talking dirty part.”

  Her story fascinated me. I propped my elbows on the table and leaned forward. “Why did they hang up?”

  “Well, we’re supposed to start off talking about what we do for a living, if we’re going to college. The callers were supposed to want sort of girls-next-door. Anyway, I wanted to be really good at this because I needed the money. When the men called, I said my name was Judy, or Betsy, or Diane, and told them that I was going to college part time and studying marketing because I wanted to be a focus group leader. That’s when they would hang up. Nobody even stayed on long enough to ask what I was wearing. The switchboard woman unplugged me after an hour.”

  I couldn’t help it—I laughed.

  “I guess it’s funny, now. But then I was devastated. Anyway, I couldn’t pay my rent, so I had to bunk with a girlfriend. Luckily, in a few days I got work modeling for catalogues.” She hastened to add, “Regular, ordinary catalogues. That’s what I was doing when I met Mickey.”

  “You weren’t involved in anything illegal. In fact, you didn’t even work at phone sex, so how could Reggie hold that over you?”

  “She had a detective investigate me! I know because she showed me the guy’s report. Somehow he got hold of a copy of my employment agreement. It had photocopies of my driver’s license and Social Security card, and listed the shift I was supposed to work. It didn’t say that I didn’t actually do any of the work.”

  “I’m sure Mickey would understand about the situation you were in.”

  She shook her head and moaned. “Mickey is sort of old-fashioned. He thinks there are only two types of women, and I’m the good kind. He thinks you are, too. If he found out what I was willing to do, he might be disgusted and leave me. I really love him, Della. My losing Mickey—the police could think that’s a motive for murder.”

  “You didn’t kill Reggie, did you?”

  “No, of course not! But I can’t prove I didn’t. Mickey was out at a business meeting and I was just home alone, watching TV. Mickey’s driver was with him, but our butler, Maurice, was sick in bed with a bad cold, so I could have gone out without him knowing. Please—you’ve got to help me.”

  “I’ll do what I can, but one thing puzzles me. From everything I’
ve heard, Regina Davis was a wealthy woman. What did she want from you, in exchange for her silence?”

  “She told me her arrangement with Mickey about the cake contest was that they split the cost of producing the TV special, but she said she had a ‘little cash flow’ problem. She wanted me to persuade Mickey to pick up the whole tab.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I couldn’t say no because I was terrified, so I told her that I’d start working on Mickey. I wasn’t going to, Della—I’d never do something behind Mickey’s back. She called every day, but I kept stalling her, telling her that I had to do it at just the right moment. Her last call, day before yesterday, she told me I’d better hurry, or I’d regret it.”

  It concerned me that Reggie had called Iva’s house several times. When the police checked Reggie’s phone records they’d find that number and ask questions, but I thought there was no reason to upset Iva further by telling her that now.

  “I’ll do what I can to keep track of how the investigation is going,” I said. “If I find out that your name has come up, then I’ll go with you and help you explain this to Mickey. I’m sure we can make him understand that what you almost did was really nothing.”

  Iva gave me a grateful hug. I walked her down the path and let her out through the gate to the alley where she’d left her car.

  Back in the kitchen I quickly reviewed my notes for today’s shows, then checked the wall clock. There was just time to take Tuffy for a thorough morning walk before we had to leave for the TV studio.

  As I snapped the leash onto Tuffy’s collar, I thought about finding Reggie’s body last night. It had shaken me more than I wanted to admit to anyone. While I was still feeling the effects of that shock, I didn’t have the luxury of indulging myself by going back to bed and pulling the covers over my head. The common link in such seemingly diverse lives as having been the wife of a police detective, teaching in the public school system, being responsible for my own little cooking school, and hosting In the Kitchen with Della was that it didn’t matter what I was feeling. No matter what, I had to show up when I was supposed to, and do whatever was necessary.