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David Starsky zipped the Torino up Ocean Avenue above the speed limit, screeching to a halt at the curb at the very last minute. The latent violence of his driving gave him perverse pleasure; it was meaningless and subversive, but he didn't care. Breathing in the acrid smell of scorched rubber and abused brake pads was like a whiff of his teen years in his uncle's garage. That the abrupt parking maneuver had startled the rookie on the sidewalk in front of 10291/2 Ocean Avenue was an added bonus.
The kid looked half-petrified, half-thrilled, his freckles standing out on milky white skin. He'd probably shipped out from Kansas or some other podunk place just to be part of the world famous--or was that infamous--BCPD. Bay City ranked first in the nation for deaths per capita; murders occurred every one point two days. At least, those were the current stats quoted by the department's actuaries.
"What we got here?" Starsky asked, slamming the car door with his hip.
"Vanessa." The kid inclined his head toward the carved front door of Venice Place.
"Who . . ." Starsky began, then the name clicked in his head. Gorgeous, rich brown hair sweeping across his TV screen in a commercial for shampoo. Silky stockings highlighting legs literally as long as a house on the billboard across from his freeway on-ramp. Pouty red lips poised in a groin-tightening kiss in a lipstick ad in the most recent issue of People magazine. Those were just her most current advertisements. Vanessa had been a household word for five years or more, ever since she'd been the Bond Girl in Now and For Eternity. "Who found her?"
"Her husband," the rookie replied, puffing out his chest with importance. "He called it in at--" He checked his notepad. "Six forty-five this morning. He says he was out running and when he came back, she was dead."
"You first on the scene?" Starsky started up the narrow staircase.
Freckles nodded. "My partner Jake is upstairs with Mr. Hutchinson."
Partner.
Not allowed to think about that.
Instead, Starsky wondered why Vanessa had been in such a crummy joint so early in the morning? From her pictures in all the celebrity rags, she didn't seem like the type to go slumming. The Beverly Hilton or the swanky Bay Plaza were more her style. He wasn't a regular reader of society columns, preferring the sports page, or even the comics, but something about Vanessa owning a beach house in Malibu stuck in his brain. So what was she doing in a walk-up above a second-rate French restaurant?
The door to the apartment was open, guarded by Freckles' partner, a uniformed cop with the gut of a four-donut-a-day habit. Starsky lazily held up his badge, scanning the room. Old, mismatched furniture, half a dozen trailing plants doing their best to turn the raw beamed ceiling into a jungle, an upright piano in the corner and, just left of a battered sofa, a corpse covered with a cream colored blanket. All the comforts of home.
A blond-haired man was slouched at the kitchen table, his head bowed over crossed arms, the picture of grief. Mentally mulling over what he knew about the husband, Starsky crossed the small living room in two strides and bent down next to the body.
Ken Hutchinson and Vanessa had been married for years, as far as he could remember. Hutchinson stayed in the background, letting his camera-loving wife get all the publicity, but he was no gold-digging hanger-on. He had millions, from family inheritances and the lucky happenstance of penning a number one with a bullet hit about six years before.
The tune to Black Bean Soup was nattering through his head when Starsky flipped back the blanket to inspect the victim. The bouncy tune was all wrong for viewing a dead body, but now he was certain it would pop up every time he examined one for the next year.
Be my love while love will stay and wear your ribbons for me...
Even in death, Vanessa was a stunner. Her long auburn hair fanned out around her head as if she'd been posed for her shampoo commercial. One green eye stared sightlessly upward, but the other was closed. Combined with the way her lips were parted to show a glimpse of perfect white teeth, she looked like she'd been caught winking saucily. No need for a formal ID on such a well-known face. He could have called any passerby off the street and ninety percent of them would have recognized Vanessa.
There was a single bullet wound dead center of her chest with very little visible blood loss. Heart-shot. She was probably dead before she hit the red carpeted floor.
Had Hutchinson written the Black Bean Soup for her? Had he shot her through the heart because her love hadn't stayed?
Dropping the blanket over the woman, Starsky stepped back to give the arriving medical examiner and lab crew access to the crime scene.
One shot implied a certain level of ability with a gun--possibly a pro. Crimes of passion usually were messier, often with the whole barrel emptied into a victim. This was a fairly large bullet hole, probably a .45 caliber, if he was to take a guess. Not the typical weapon of a huntsman or skeet shooter.
"I'd say a .45," Ginny, the M.E. said aloud, as if she'd heard his speculation.
"Thanks, Ginny." Starsky nodded to her, turning away when she brought out her long needled liver thermometer to check the temperature of the body.
That left questioning the husband to him. Every police manual proclaimed that the spouse was always the first suspect in the shooting of one half of a married couple. He'd rarely followed the manual, and wasn't about to now. Start with an open mind.
"Ken Hutchinson?" Starsky approached the table, glancing quickly around the kitchen. Neat and tidy, unpainted wood shelving and an antique stove. The coffee pot was on the front burner, the smell of fresh roasted beans only slightly diluted by the stink of death in the room. No breakfast foods anywhere, two empty coffee cups in the sink.
The blond head raised and glazed, vacant blue eyes turned to the sound of his voice, but Starsky could tell that nothing was penetrating the barricade of shock that had walled him in.
"Detective Sergeant David Starsky." He held up his badge again but it was a lost cause. Hutchinson shuddered and ducked his head again, flattening his palm against the table as if he needed to reassure himself that it was there.
"I'm here to question you about your wife's shooting." Starsky prowled the tiny kitchen to get acquainted with the place. He took a rubber glove out of his pocket to wrap around his fingers when he touched the shelves over the counter, and then eased open a cupboard door just below.
Bingo. Nearly a whole bottle of brandy.
Grabbing a glass from the shelf, Starsky poured a stiff one and set the drink on the table. Hooking his foot around a kitchen chair, he turned it around and straddled the seat so that he could rest his chin on the ladder-back. "Drink it," he urged, pushing the tumbler across the table.
"What?" He looked at the brandy without comprehension, a dark bruise marring one side of his handsome face. Starsky repeated himself, and Hutchinson picked up the glass, grimacing as he took a sip.
Starsky could almost feel the sweet, smoky alcohol sliding down his own throat, burning away the memories and pain, just as it had last night. Alone in his apartment, thoughts of Johnny were too real and too fresh. He'd needed a couple of shots before the sight of his partner lying dead on an anonymous hotel room bed had faded enough to let him sleep.
"What happened?" Starsky demanded.
"The gun's over there," Hutchinson said gruffly, pressing the glass against his upper lip as if to keep himself from talking. It was an oddly vulnerable pose, full of remorse and derision. With an abrupt movement, he tossed back the contents. "I kicked it away from her."
Sure enough, under the edge of the bed, half hidden by the drape of the chenille coverlet, lay a long barreled Python. No huntsman's gun at all, this was the weapon of someone who collected pistols. The metal was gleaming and well cared for, the grip specially contoured for someone with a far larger hand than Starsky's. He motioned to the lab crew who fell on the prize as if they'd found the Holy Grail.
In Starsky's experience, a smoking gun was as often as not just that. Didn't prove the shooter unless there was film of the suspect pointing it at the victim. Even fingerprints could be tampered with--wiped away or another pair superimposed over the top of the original gunman's.
"I didn't . . ." Hutchinson said tiredly, swiveling around to look just once at Ginny supervising the transport of the body. "She was my wife . . ."
"How did you find her?" Starsky asked.
"I always jog right at 6:30 a.m.," he answered, rubbing a circle on his chest as if it hurt to breath, even to talk. "Ask Helene, anyone. When I'm here, I do it everyday. Down Ocean, over to Baywater, up Broadway and around to Ocean again. One mile, takes ten minutes, tops."
"Helene from the restaurant? Did she see you this morning?"
"Helene Dupree," he sighed. "No, I didn't see anyone I knew. This looks bad for me, doesn't it?" Hutchinson shook his head with a derisive twist of his mouth. "My gun, my wife, and in my place." He looked up, catching Starsky's eyes.
There was no way he was going to reveal how naked he felt when Hutchinson's gaze bore into him. The full effect of those blazing pale blue eyes was like a light shining down into Starsky's soul, illuminating all the places he needed to keep shrouded in darkness. Battening down his resolve, Starsky shifted in his seat, glancing at his notes to compose himself. He'd never had such an immediate and overwhelming reaction to anyone before--particularly not the prime suspect. Flirting and teasing at a bar were one thing, but very few people penetrated Starsky's protective armor. Hutchinson had done so in one minute--faster than anyone else, including Johnny.
How did Starsky explain to his captain that he was positive that Ken Hutchinson had not murdered his wife after knowing the guy for all of five minutes?
"I didn't shoot the gun, but my fingerprints are probably all over it," Hutchinson continued. "I was at the shooting range yesterday, and I cleaned it last night."
"So." Starsky forced himself back into cop mode. He was no rookie to be influenced by a tear-filled eye and a sincere smile. "Your wife gets up, starts the coffee and bam? Some intruder comes in and blows her away, then leaves before you even finish your morning jog?" He dug in deep, pulling up all the anger from last October when Dobey hadn't let him work John Blaine's murder because he was too close. Well, damn, he wasn't close now. No way, no how. Didn't know Hutchinson from Adam.
Hutchinson didn't move, his face going hard and still. "I made the coffee," he clarified, "But other than that, that's the way it went down." He spread his hands wide. "Why would I lie? What do I have to gain from Vanessa's . . ." His voice caught on her name, snared in a tangle of emotions. "D-death?" he stuttered.
"Money? Prestige?" Starsky countered. They were getting off the main subject. How the hell had it happened?
"I came into the marriage with an inheritance, she was the one who benefited--until her career took off." Hutchinson snagged the bottle of brandy and poured another two fingers. "You want some?"
"On duty," Starsky said tightly. "So, you went jogging, you came home at . . .?
"She was lying there . . ." He made an effort to hold back a sob and covered it by drinking brandy. "The ficus was overturned, a couple of pillows out of place on the couch but . . .she must not have struggled."
"Did you two fight?" Starsky changed tactics, examining the man's face more closely. He wasn't just bruised on the right temple, there was three distinct scratches like a woman would make defending herself.
Hutchinson compressed his lips to a thin line. "Van was . . .passionate. Yes, we fought, don't all couples?"
Starsky thought about Johnny and his wife, the ever-forgiving Maggie, and shook his head. "Looks like she hit you? You retaliate, maybe shoot her in the chest?" he asked roughly to banish the spirit of his partner. He could almost feel Johnny standing behind him, giving him the support to continue on when everything had gone to shit.
"I did not kill her," Hutchinson said, each word a distinct statement on its own.
"So how did she end up here? Lots like some flop house for a drugged-out musician." That was Johnny's input--Starsky was almost surprised to hear himself say anything at all. Hell, he believed Hutchinson, and there was no earthly reason why he should.
"It once was." He looked around at the whitewashed walls, the small alcove with an unmade bed and streams of light coming through a narrow window set in the back wall as if seeing it all for the first time. "Along time ago. First place I bought right after I came out from Duluth. Used the money I got for my twenty-first birthday to pay for the building. In cash." He gave a dry, unhappy laugh. "Wasted the rest of the money on liquid dreaming, heroin. I was stoned for a couple of weeks before I came to my senses and went cold-turkey. Haven't used since." He jerked up a sleeve, revealing a smooth pale arm. Just barely visible were the tiny scars that branded all IV drug users. "I'm clean, and I don't even know why I told you that. It just builds more of a case against me, doesn't it?"
"No," Starsky said. He had the strongest desire to trail his fingers over that well-muscled arm. "Shows you're honest, or maybe just trying to distract me with extraneous details."
"Extraneous?" Hutchinson raised an ironic eyebrow. "Kind of grandiose language for a low-rent detective, isn't it?"
Damn, the guy had balls. He acted like the mourning husband and still managed to come off as pompous. "So you usta shoot up. Did your wife? Who'd want her dead? Her supplier? Maybe a jilted lover?"
"Vanessa could piss you off in under ten minutes," Hutchinson said, as brittle as eggshells. "Once the news of her demise hits the press, half the people we know and every one of her personal assistants going to be singing that song from The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy drops the house on the witch."
Starsky was a movie buff and it still took him two beats to recall the taunting song. "The wicked old witch is dead . . ." he half sang.
"Starts with a 'B', rhymes with witch," Hutchinson corrected. "She had an innate ability--knew exactly which buttons to push." He touched the bruise on his temple. "This was nothing. A make-up fight, if you want to call it that. We'd been apart as often as we were together in the last year."
"Getting a divorce?" That was news to him. "Wasn't in any of the papers. You two usually generate a lot of press."
"You think I want my marriage dragged across every celebrity rag in the country?" He got up from the table, watching Sanders and Boggs from the lab dust for fingerprints with the expression of someone watching a particularly distasteful display of vulgarity; bear baiting or cock fighting. Just when Starsky was thinking of taking him to Huggy's mouse races.
"California is a community property state. She'd have gotten half of all you make," Starsky reminded.
Hutchinson gave a long drawn out sigh, bitter grief mingled with something else--possibly a sense of guilt. "She would have taken more than that--and I probably would have given it to her, just to . . . settle things. This . .." He swept out a clumsy arm, encompassing the whole apartment in the gesture, and nearly knocked over the brandy bottle. Starsky caught it before it tipped off the table. "Venice Place was where I could get back to my roots, my music. This wasn't Van's scene at all."
Well I've been kicked in the head a few times
But that just made me high —
You know that black bean soup don't lie...
It was so damned easy to picture Hutchinson sitting at the piano, picking out the notes to the song, his eye swollen and black, drug paraphernalia strewn beside him.
Vanessa never made him soup. Hell, Starsky doubted that she could cook. A woman like that had servants, assistants and whatever the hell she wanted. She crooked her finger, and men came. But Hutchinson had loved her anyway.
"Van has a penthouse at the Chateau Marmont. She'd been away on a shoot--in Holland and South Africa, I think." He shrugged, staring at the upright in the corner as if missing an old friend. "She called me up yesterday, said she was back in town, wanted to talk--I knew she was looking for some sex. That's what Vanessa wants when she's had a r-rough . . .day."
"And she likes it rough?" Starsky wasn't an idiot; he'd heard the tension in the single word, the way Hutchinson's whole demeanor changed. He'd shrunk somehow without moving a muscle, his face ghostly.
"Sometimes." He licked his bottom lip, his eyes seeing someone who was no longer in the room, who probably hadn't even been the same woman who was with him last night. "I met her at a neutral place, a dive called The Pits."
Strange coincidence, that was Starsky's usual hangout. Memories of pool and an end of the shift beer with Johnny before he slipped off to his Maggie, had kept him away the night before. If he'd have seen Hutchinson there, been able to verify his alibi, would that have invalidated him from this case, too? Why did he suddenly wish he had gone down to Huggy's joint?
Too involved, Davey, Johnny used to scold him. You care too much for the victims.
Not this time. Not this victim. Vanessa wasn't a woman he'd have ever wanted to meet.
"I know the place. You talk to the owner, Huggy Bear?"
"He served us--Brandy Alexander for her and gin and tonic for me." Hutchinson got up wearily, picking up the glass and brandy bottle. He rinsed out the glass and stowed the bottle back where Starsky had found it. "I went in there knowing--knowing something was up. She never used to go to places like that. They were my refuge." He leaned against the counter wearily. "She was dressed to the nines, fur coat, long brown boots, but she was hurting. I could smell the pain on her."
"She sick?" Starsky asked before he could stop himself. He was getting too wound up in the story. He should have been the bad cop without a good cop to bookend him. Where was all his supposed objectivity? Improbably blown to smithereens by a blond with a damned air of wounded superiority. How the hell had it happened so fast?
"Drugs." Hutchinson said, one word implying so much. "She claimed she had cancer, at first, and I wanted to believe her. Her sister died of breast cancer, so it was an easy lie. Said she wanted a friend for the night before she had a biopsy."
"Which hospital?" Starsky wrote cancer on his notepad, chiding himself because he'd forgotten to jot down more details. Memory was gone without a partner to back him up.
"We can check that out."
"She wasn't . . . hell, I don't know. She might have been, but mostly she needed a place to crash. She was high. On what, I don't know . . . " Hutchinson looked off to the bed. Boggs had bagged the pistol and was taking pictures of the contents of a partially open drawer. "I haven't used coke, but I know people who do. She was speedy, racing and something else . . .scared."
"Of what?"
"I don't know!" he shouted and kicked the cabinet, which bounced the door open. Starsky bounded to his feet, nearly getting tangled in the legs of the chair. It clattered to the linoleum and he jumped clear, one hand hovering near his holstered gun. He hadn't done a thorough sweep of the house; Hutchinson might have another gun in one of the cabinets or drawers.
"I wish I did!" Hutchinson ranted, smacking the countertop. "I wish I hadn't found my wife dead on my floor! I wish I'd been here ten minutes earlier, been here when that fucker came in and . . .sh-shot her!" He gasped, tears running down both cheeks. "I wanted a divorce, but I didn't want her dead!"
"Hey, hey," Starsky soothed, very aware that the cop who'd been guarding the door--what was his name? Jake--had his service revolver out, his jittery stance proving he rarely pulled his weapon. Starsky waved him down which also served to calm the nervous stares from Boggs and Sanders. Ginny had left with the body, only the tape outline where Vanessa had fallen testimony that she had once been in the room.
"If you had been here when the shooter came in," Starsky approached slowly. "You'd'a been dead too, and we wouldn't be having this conversation." And that suddenly mattered very much to him.
"Damndamndamn," Hutchinson moaned, nearly collapsing against the refrigerator. "Had to be something with the drugs. I took her to NA meetings, got her into the Verner Clinic, nothing worked--after a few months, maybe a year, she'd go back. Claimed she needed something to keep the weight off, deal with the pressures . . ."
"You think she had a run-in with a dealer? Maybe owed him money?" Starsky pushed, liking that angle. Anything that gave him another line of investigation and kept the suspicion off Hutchinson himself. There was no logical reason for this absolute surety of Hutchinson's innocence, it was just there.
"She . . ." Hutchinson swiped a hand across his eyes, but one strand of longish blond hair stuck to a wet place on his cheek. Made him look like a debauched angel.
Shut up, Starsky scolded Johnny, and remembered when he'd said the same exact thing to Starsky just before . . .
"She took the foreign assignments because she could --" Hutchinson stopped, his face once again remote, carved from some impenetrable marble, all trace of grief gone. "If I tell you something, will I be involved, uh, implicated?"
"Only if we can prove you weren't," Starsky answered, not exactly sure what he'd just promised. If the evidence was against Hutchinson, could he arrest him? He could feel the ghost caress of a calloused hand down his spine and shrugged it off, perching on the edge of the table to keep Hutchinson in his sightline. Spencer walked past them, carrying plastic bags full of small objects he'd taken from the bedside drawer and the brown leather overnight bag beside the bed.
"I want to reiterate, I hadn't been with Van in . . .years really," Hutchinson said. "We'd show up at the same social functions when the situation warranted, charity balls . . . . sit together for the sake of appearance." He took an awkward step, his knees coming up too high as if an inexperienced puppeteer was controlling his strings. His jerky walk came to a halt when the toe of his sneaker touched the tape outline on the red carpet. "Four years, six months and twelve, make that thirteen days."
"What?"
"Just something she said." He touched the bruise by his eye, eyelashes startlingly pale against the ugly coloring. "She went out of the country regularly lately. To places where drugs were easy to come by. Amsterdam more than once, I know, because she told me she bought a house there. Near Anne Frank's hiding place. She liked Anne Frank--I think she knew that she didn't have any compassion, and kept looking for it in other people."
"Like you."
Hutchinson snorted inelegantly, raising his hands hopelessly. "If she needed money, I always gave it to her. Tried to help her--to fix her."
"Did you kill her?" Starsky asked, just because he wanted to hear it one more time. To look up at the man and know that he'd lost something he never really had. Just like Starsky. They were both broken halves who had never fit perfectly into the whole.
"I did not kill my wife," Hutchinson said, conviction and truth ringing in his voice.
"I believe you." Starsky held out his hand, smiling just a little when Hutchinson took it in a strong, warm grip.
All I want is black bean soup
And you to make it with me
The End