Taking the Fifth(50)
I headed back downtown. Afternoon traffic was moving at a snail’s pace. The closest parking place to the Mayflower Park Hotel was several blocks away. I didn’t call ahead to announce my visit, not even from the lobby phone. There was no sense in giving Jasmine any advance notice.
I had a fleeting sense of déjà vu when I found myself once more pausing outside her door on the sixth floor, once more knocking for admittance.
“Who is it?” she called.
“Detective Beaumont,” I answered. This was, after all, an official visit.
The door flew open without the slightest delay. Mary Lou Gibbon was the one who opened the door. The trademark Jasmine Day wig was nowhere in evidence. The face before me was distorted into a mask of cold fury.
“Why, you no-good son of a bitch! You have the nerve to show up here? The brass-plated balls to come knocking on my door like you owned the goddamned place?”
She was wearing something like a pair of powder blue silk pajamas and matching high-heeled sandals. The angry face that looked up at me had been scrubbed clean of all makeup, creating an incongruous mixture of innocence and rage.
“May I come in?” I asked. “I have to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“Drugs,” I said. “Cocaine in particular. And Richard Dathan Morris.”
“You’re the one who did it, aren’t you!”
“Did what?”
“Started the rumors.”
“What rumors?” I asked, genuinely puzzled.
“Westcoast’s pulling out of the tour. Tonight’s the last concert.”
“Pulling out?”
“Yes, goddamn it. Pulling out. It’s over. Finished. The deal I made with Ed Waverly was that I keep my nose clean. Word got back to California that one of the stagehands was killed and that drugs were involved. They pulled the plug on me just like that.”
Tears welled up in her eyes. “Get out of here, you asshole. Get away from me.”
The tears got to me. They always do. The man and the cop in J. P. Beaumont went to war, the man’s natural tenderness toward a woman he’s bedded battling with the cop’s revulsion toward someone who may be capable of cold-blooded murder. The cop won.
“I’ve got a witness who places you at the scene of the crime,” I said. “Someone who saw you do it.”
“Saw me do what?” she asked.
“Look, Jasmine, this isn’t some simple little possessions scrape that your lawyer can bail you out of and nobody will be the wiser.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The night of the load-in, what did you do?”
“I was here in my room, the way I always am the night before a show. I worked out, I got a good night’s sleep.”
“Was there anybody here with you? Anyone who saw you and would be able to say you didn’t leave the hotel all night?”
She looked at me, frowning, a puzzled expression on her face. The feigned innocence made me furious.
“Jasmine, this is murder. Homicide. I came here to talk to you, to give you a chance to give yourself up and maybe turn state’s evidence. Once all the facts are known, maybe there’s a possibility of a plea bargain, maybe there were extenuating circumstances—”
I never saw it coming, never noticed when she slipped noiselessly out of the sandals. The ball of her foot cleared my face by a hair’s breadth and crashed through the wall board next to me. The wall splintered with the force of the blow.
“Next time, it’ll be your face,” she snarled. “Now get out!”
The next thing I knew, we were standing in the hallway.
“Jasmine…” I began.
“Don’t worry about the damage,” she said icily. “It’ll be a pleasure to pay for it. You’re trying to set me up, aren’t you? What is this, blackmail? Is that what you’re trying to pull?”
Alan Dale came hurrying down the hall. “What’s going on?”
“He’s trying to set me up, to frame me for murder.”
“He’s what?” Dale demanded.
“It’s not bad enough that he’s gotten Westcoast to cancel the rest of the tour. Now he’s trying to frame me for murdering that stagehand, the one who died the night of the load-in.”
“You’d better get the hell out of here,” Dale growled at me. “If I see your ugly face again, I’m liable to flatten your nose or break your balls.”
He took Jasmine’s hand and led her away from me, back into her room. The door closed. For a long time, I stood looking at it. I had just seen a spectacular display of deadly force. Jasmine Day’s brown belt was more than empty words, and she could easily have coldcocked me if she wanted to.