Pie A La Murder by Melinda Wells

hide,” I said.
    John started up the front walk. “If that’s true, then you’re the only two people in the world who don’t,” he said.
    The medical examiner’s van made a U-turn and headed down Bella Vista toward Sunset Boulevard. I walked toward my newly accessible Jeep, but looked over at the patrol car. All I could see was the back of Nicholas’s head leaning against the rear seat. Officer Downey stood guard on the sidewalk.
    As I made my own U-turn, I saw that Redding’s neighbors—one or two in front of nearly every house on the block, with a few peering out through windows—were giving what they could see of the proceedings their rapt attention.
    Most of the houses had satellite dishes on their roofs—metal disks that brought much of the world right into their homes. But in spite of having more than 150 channels to choose from, they seemed to prefer the real reality of neighborhood drama to the fake “reality” that came through their receivers.
    I felt the same kind of contempt for them that I feel for people who slow their cars in order to rubberneck at crash scenes. Years ago I was the car just behind a fatal collision: a convertible T-boned by an SUV that ran a red light. So much blood . . . I never wanted to see carnage like that again.
    Half a block above Sunset Boulevard I saw a dark van with antenna rigging on top turn up Bella Vista. On the side, in bright yellow letters against dark blue, it said “Channel 4.”
    The first of what was certain to be a parade of TV cameras had come to join the watchers.
    As I turned east onto Sunset Boulevard, the direction that would ultimately take me to the West Bureau Station on Butler Avenue, I forgot about nosy neighbors and TV news and began looking for a restaurant.
    I wasn’t hungry.
    Restaurants had working pay telephones.
    It had been a long time since I’d seen a public phone on the street that hadn’t been destroyed by vandals, and I needed to make a call before I got to the cop shop.

13

    There were no restaurants on Sunset Boulevard near Bella Vista, so I had to go down into Westwood Village. From a wall phone at the first restaurant I saw, I dialed the office of criminal defense attorney Olivia Wayne and reached the answering service. I gave the operator my name, and said it was an emergency. In less than twenty seconds the operator connected me to Olivia.
    As was her usual practice of eschewing small talk, her first words were, “What kind of trouble are you in?”
    “Not me. It’s Nicholas D’Martino. He may be charged with murder, but he didn’t do it.”
    “First, give me the bottom line. Details later.”
    “Nicholas and I went, separately, to the home of photographer Alec Redding and found him dead. Murdered. Before we could call nine-one-one, we heard a police siren and two uniformed officers arrived.”
    “So someone else called it in.” She was quiet for a moment. “You said Nick is under suspicion. If you both were there, why not you, too?”
    “The preliminary time of death rules me out. I was doing a live TV show and couldn’t have got there in time to kill him, even if I’d had a motive, which I don’t. Nicholas arrived at Redding’s house before I did, and he’s refusing to cooperate with the police. He insisted John O’Hara—he and his partner are the homicide detectives on the case—read him the Miranda warning.”
    I heard a grunt of disgust on her end of the line. Then: “Do you remember a few months ago when you gave me a one-dollar retainer?”
    “Yes, of course.”
    “You haven’t dismissed me as your attorney, so our relationship is still in place. Anything you tell me is confidential. We won’t discuss it in this call, but I got it when you said that you have no motive. Where are you and Nick right now?”
    “I’m at a pay phone on Westwood Boulevard. When I left Redding’s a few minutes ago, Nicholas was sitting in the back of a patrol car. John O’Hara told me to go to the Butler Avenue