City of Fire (28 page)

Lena and David Gamble had been a team, signing a pact and shaking on it and fleeing their home before the Department of Human Services had a chance to ruin their lives.

Driving south, then west, they stayed away from the freeways until they got outside the city—everything they owned in the back of their father’s Chevy Suburban. Within two days they were in L.A. Within a week, both of them found jobs. After another six months, they’d saved enough money to pay rent on a small efficiency apartment and finally move out of the car.

As she thought it over, it sounded more bleak than it really was.

For some bizarre reason, those six months living in the car usually brought on a smile. A deep feeling of satisfaction and warmth. David always liked to say that they made it because they had to. If there had been a safety net, someone feeding them money anytime they asked, they would have taken the bait and ended up losing who they were. That the trick was that they had each other and didn’t spend a lot of time looking back.

She took another sip of coffee, grateful that the junkie had vanished from the window and was no longer staring at her.

She could remember watching her brother’s development as a musician and a songwriter. The shock of pleasure and pride she felt when she realized his talent was genuine and that he really would succeed. By eighteen David was playing guitar behind real names in the studio. By twenty he had met Tim Holt and formed their band. Articles began to appear in newspapers and magazines, and months were spent on the road developing an audience. A few years later, David was three CDs in on a five-album deal with Blue Moon Records, while Lena had graduated from college and the police academy and earned enough air miles to begin thinking about the detective civil service exam.

She looked at the pack of cigarettes in her hand. Although her brother and Holt chained them in the studio, Lena had
never been a user. She struck a match and drew the smoke into her lungs. Blowing it out the window, she realized that she was holding the cigarette between her thumb and first finger as if smoking a well-rolled joint.

There had been two theories about her brother’s murder. And maybe that was why the case had never been solved.

David was playing at a club on the Strip that night. When they found his body, his wallet was missing, along with a collection of CDs he kept in a box behind the front seat of his car. Some believed that he drove to this spot to score and was shot before the deal went down. Others, including most of his fans, thought it had more to do with his girlfriend, Zelda Clemens. Zelda was a rock-and-roll rag doll, clinging to David and trying to hang on for the ride. When she insisted on moving into the house, he dumped her as quickly as he could.

Unfortunately, Zelda wouldn’t go away.

Lena could remember the woman calling the house over and over, and realizing that Zelda had snapped. Over the week before the murder Lena counted 117 calls. If David answered, he hung up. If she answered, Zelda would call her a stupid bitch and order her to put her “lover-brother” on the phone. The night David died, Zelda showed up at the club, drinking herself into oblivion and causing a scene when she saw him slip away with another woman after the last set. The last call.

But in the end, the detectives working the case couldn’t skin the cat. The murder weapon had never been found. And like many witnesses, the woman David left with that night never came forward. Once the various forensic labs finished their reports, the investigation slowed down to a creep and a crawl until it was finally shelved for lack of evidence. Either David was murdered in the midst of a drug deal, or Zelda followed him to Vista Del Mar, saw him in the car with another woman, and pulled the trigger.

The two theories confused Lena as much as they had the detectives. David experimented but wasn’t a user of hard drugs. Still, he could have come here to buy anything. On the other hand, Zelda had reached an emotional froth. She had a
motive and appeared irrational enough to do the crime. Lena spent years thinking about it and couldn’t put her finger on which track made the most sense. Dealing with her brother’s death seemed hard enough and was made all the worse by Zelda’s sudden rise as a celebrity. For better or worse, David’s murder finally gave Zelda Clemens the publicity she had been seeking her entire life. Within a few months she latched onto another musician. And now there was talk that she had become an actress, landing a part in a movie.

Lena shrugged. Maybe it was as bad as it sounded after all.

She took another drag on the cigarette, a deep pull, and started coughing. When she caught the foul taste entering the back of her mouth, she flicked the butt out the window and grabbed her coffee. It wasn’t the smoke. It was the unmistakable flavor of death seeping down her sinuses and working through her tongue. The tastes and smells from the morgue, and a latent reminder of Nikki Brant’s autopsy performed four days ago.

She finished off the cup, squelching the bad taste in her mouth and noticing that her body had finally stopped trembling.

Why did Tim Holt call?

As she thought it over, she understood that this was the real reason why she’d come here. Why was her brother’s best friend trying to reach her?

She started the car, revving up the engine. She felt the push of anger rise up from her belly. She wanted to hit something. Smash it. Kill it. Instead, she turned the car around and drove off.

YOU look great,” Okolski said. “How long’s it been, Lena? Three years?”

Warren Okolski was president of Blue Moon Records, the label that had signed David Gamble and Tim Holt and launched their careers. Okolski produced all three albums, spending a lot of time at the house. And his memory appeared tack sharp. The last time Lena had seen Okolski had been three years ago—a chance meeting on the promenade in Santa Monica that led to dinner and drinks and a game of darts at some out-of-the-way pub.

His face blushed with color and he stood up from his desk. His assistant, a young blonde, seemed perplexed that her boss could be so pleased to see someone who had shown up without an appointment. Someone she didn’t know.

“It’s Lena,” he said to her. “David Gamble’s sister.”

The girl appeared to get it, but something was eating at her. Lena figured that it might have something to do with the gun clipped to her belt, but ignored it and gave Okolski a hug. She liked him. She always had, and it felt good.

“You want anything?” he asked. “Coffee, water, anything at all. You name it and it’s yours.”

She knew from experience that when he said
anything
, he meant it. She shook her head. As his assistant left the room, eyeballing Lena’s open blazer, he told her to hold his calls.

“Sit, stay, talk,” he said.

Lena sat down on the couch, feeling uneasy because she knew that she was about to ruin the man’s day. Okolski
returned to his desk and grabbed a bottle of spring water. Glancing at his computer monitor, he flashed a wide grin.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

“My assistant just sent me an e-mail.”

“What’s it say?”

“You’re armed and dangerous. You’re carrying a big fucking gun.”

They laughed. Lena tried to relax as Okolski slid into the leather armchair on the other side of the coffee table.

“When are you going to give it up, Lena? My offer still stands. You want a job, you’ve got it. Either way, I hope you’re staying for lunch.”

“I don’t think I can.”

Okolski gave her a look, then did a double take as if he just figured out that something was wrong. He was tall, lean, in his late thirties. His eyes were more gold than brown, his face, soft and easy and devoid of any lines. He wore his light brown hair tied behind his back, and Lena had never seen him in anything but a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt. But what made Warren Okolski so successful was his ear. Blue Moon Records was a renegade entertainment company because most of the musicians he developed refused to make music videos and didn’t sound like derivations of somebody else. Unfortunately for music, the industry had declined to such an extent that Okolski’s ideas were seen as unique, even odd. Okolski didn’t care about what an artist looked like on camera. And he didn’t work with pop vocalists or dancers one step away from the cheerleading squad. The only thing that mattered to Okolski was music and pushing the ball forward. Over the years his passion for exploring new sounds had paid off, and his client list quietly became the envy of every major label in town. Okolski had redefined the word
cool
, and listeners of jazz, blues, and alternative rock were eating it up. Lena remembered a conversation she had with him six or seven years ago, when David was still alive. They were working on their third or fourth beer at the kitchen counter, and Lena had just set out a bottle of tequila with two shot glasses. Okolski was saying that it came down
to a matter of style. The more style an artist had, the less substance. He wasn’t interested in working with people who could double as an act in Vegas.

He cracked open the bottle of spring water and took a long swig. When he finally spoke, his voice was so low she could barely hear it.

“You didn’t come by just to say hello.”

She shook her head. “No, Warren. I’m afraid I’ve got bad news.”

“How bad?”

“Bad as it gets,” she said. “Tim’s dead.”

Okolski took it quietly, lowering his head and wiping his eyes. As the stillness deepened within the room, Lena heard the muffled sound of a bus lumbering up the street through the window.

“How?” he managed.

“Looks like suicide.”

An image flashed before her eyes. Tim Holt’s crumbled body in the chair beside the window in his bedroom. She could see the wound above his forehead. The gun in his hand. His dead girlfriend on the bed.

“Things were so good,” Okolski said. “Why would he do that?”

“He saw something he couldn’t handle, Warren.”

Okolski laughed at what she said through his grief. “Tim could handle anything. I was with him last night. We were working on a new album. What kind of fucked-up story is that?”

She started to say something, but Okolski waved her off. She reached in her pocket for her pad and pen.

“Give me a second,” he said.

He got up and started pacing. When he finally returned to the chair, Lena filled him in on everything she thought he needed to know. There had been a series of murders, she told him. Tim had left a message on her machine and wanted to talk about something. At least for now, it looked as if Holt’s girlfriend was the intended victim, and Holt couldn’t deal with finding her body.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Okolski said. “Tell me why.”

“He never mentioned that he called you, but I can tell you this. It wasn’t about reopening the studio. We went through all that more than a year ago. He knew where you were at. Both of us totally agreed that it was cool.”

Hearing Okolski say it only confirmed something she had been feeling since she’d left Vista Del Mar. Holt was trying to reach her. He wanted to talk to her about something that didn’t have anything to do with music or the studio.

“Where were you recording the album?”

“He’d formed a new band, and they were good. So good that he knew he needed to get clean. He checked himself into a clinic in Arizona. While he was away, construction began on a studio of his own. When he got back, they finished up and everything was ready to go. He was proud of it, Lena, just like David. Even better, he was pumped. He’d bought a new house. He was back in business and delivering the goods.”

“You said you were together last night.”

Okolski nodded. “They played a short set over at the Viper Room. I wanted to get a feel for things. See how some of the new stuff sounded live. Tim left sometime around eleven. After the set, I caught a late dinner with some friends over at Pinot and we talked about how it went.”

She lowered her pen and looked at Okolski, slumped in the chair.

“Something else is bothering you,” she said. “What is it?”

“That part about the girlfriend. You said he found her body and couldn’t handle the load.”

“That’s the way it looks. What of it?”

“We were close, Lena. Tim and I talked just about every day.”

“So what’s the problem with his girlfriend?”

Okolski cleared his throat. Their eyes met.

“He never told me that he had one.”