“To know which ones are hostile, which are friendly?”
“Exactly.”
“Nonverbal,” I said. “Interesting. Was Hope Devane’s Rottweiler easy to read?”
He looked at his feet. Flipped his hair. “We’re going to get right into it?”
“Any reason not to?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Oster says I should talk freely to you, but he’s just a P.D.”
“You don’t have confidence in him?”
“He seems fine, but . . .”
“You don’t trust him?”
“Sure I do. Twenty feet farther than I can throw him.” Another white-toothed grin. “Which is about fifteen feet more than I’d trust most lawyers—actually, he’s smarter than I expected from a civil servant. And what’s my choice? I am a starving actor.”
I jotted down notes, looked back up at him.
“The Rottweiler,” I said. “How’d you handle her—she was a bitch, wasn’t she?”
“Very much so.” Smile. “Gave her some meat sprinkled with paregoric.”
“Through the gate?”
He nodded.
“She just took it from you?”
“Just like that,” he said. “Amazingly easy. Because I’d driven and walked by the house when she was out in the yard and she barked plenty. But she must have smelled the meat because the minute I started up the lawn, she quieted. And by the time I got to the gate, she was sitting there with her tongue out. Lapped it up.”
“Was this during the day or at night?”
“At night. Maybe eight o’clock.”
“The night Professor Devane was killed?” Use the passive voice, keep him at ease . . .
Nod.
“Was anyone home?” I said.
“They both were.” Big smile. “That was the beauty of it. The street was so dark, those big trees, no one walking. I leaned my bike against the tree, walked up their front lawn, gave the meat to the dog, and just rode away.”
Long silence.
Finally, he said, “So easy.”
I nodded. “You came back later?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Around ten.”
“Because that was the time of her nightly walk.”
The smile dropped off. “She walked between ten-thirty and eleven-thirty. Same route, black sweats one night, gray the next. Black, gray, black, gray. Like a machine. I didn’t know if she’d walk without the dog or call it off. But she did—does that tell you the kind of person she was? The poor Rottie’s barfing its guts out and she just goes about her routine? If she’d veered off-schedule, who knows, I might never have gone through with it.”
“Really?”
He stared at me. Broke into the widest grin yet. “Nah, eventually it would have happened.”
“In the script, huh?”
He looked down at his feet again. “Yes, that’s a good way to put it.”
“If you don’t mind, let’s back up a bit, Reed.”
“To what?”
“Mandy Wright.”
“Mandy who?”
I smiled, crossed my legs. “She bothers you? More than Devane?”
“No.” He exhaled. “What do you want to know?”
“Tell me what happened. How she set you up.”
He cracked his knuckles loud enough for the deputy to turn around. Flipped his hair, combed his fingers through it, let it cascade around his handsome face and flipped it once more.
The deputy turned again, frowned, faced the wall.
Muscadine said, “Whew . . .”
“Still hard to talk about,” I said.
“Yeah . . . you hit the nail on the head. The basic issue is the setup. That fucking committee hearing.”
“The blood test.”
“Exactly. Devane hated my guts for whatever reason, must have decided right then to harvest me. Incredible, isn’t it? Like a bad dream—for months I was walking around in a nightmare.”
“Tell me about it.”
“The nightmare?”
“Everything. Starting with Mandy.”
“Mandy,” he said. “Mandy the working cunt. She told me her name was Desiree.”
“Did you know her before you met at Club None?”
“No, but I knew hundreds like her.”
“How?”
“L.A. woman,” he said. “Like that Doors song.”
“Did she pick you up?”
“In retrospect, she must have. At the time I thought I was picking her up.”
“Where?”
“Club None.”
“You go there often?”
“Once a week or so. I was taking some night acting classes in Brentwood, used to drive home on Sunset. Sometimes I dropped in and had a beer. They must have been watching me. Stalking me.”