The Medical Examiner Read online

  But in Claire’s opinion, Joan had shot Peter in self-defense. Those shots had saved her life and probably Claire’s, too. She must be in shock. That was understandable. But now that a man’s life was on the line, Joan had to snap out of it.

  Claire yelled, “Joan! Call an ambulance!”

  “Okay,” said Joan. But she didn’t quicken her pace. She just continued to stroll up the soft, grassy lawns toward the house.

  “Joan, they don’t call this a matter of life and death for no reason! If you don’t hurry up, Peter could actually die!”

  Joan turned and seemed to give Claire’s words some thought. Then she shrugged her shoulders and said, “There’s a landline in the pool house.”

  “Make the call,” Claire said. “Damn it, Joan! Run!”

  Claire’s mind was reeling. She obviously couldn’t count on Joan to do what needed to be done, and she didn’t know if she could count on Robert to help her, either. Claire was surrounded by eccentrics when she needed an ambulance filled with professionals and a platoon of cops.

  She went back to Robert and Peter. Robert had completely lost his cool. As far as Claire could tell, he wasn’t acting. Clearly, he cared a lot about the man in his arms—and that man was currently pale, sweaty, and losing consciousness. She told Robert, “Joan is calling an ambulance.” Honestly, she couldn’t be confident that Joan had listened to her, but she hoped the news would calm Robert down.

  Claire walked toward the street and looked out over a grassy hillock and the stone staircase that led toward the drive, the gates, and the street.

  She was completely unprepared to see a woman’s body sprawled out on the stairs, her head facing toward the bottom.

  Oh, my God. Peter had killed someone.

  Of course. She and Joan had heard shots at breakfast, and they had been fatal. Claire ran toward the body, and once she got closer, her heart almost stopped.

  It couldn’t be true, but it was.

  The woman on the steps had a blond mop of curls and her entire outfit was baby blue. It was Cindy.

  And she was lying motionless on the ground.

  Please. Don’t let her be dead.

  Chapter 27

  Claire knelt down beside her friend. There was blood at Cindy’s temple. A head wound. But Claire could see the gentle rise and fall of Cindy’s chest. Her friend was still breathing.

  Claire felt her pulse. It was strong. Thank you, Lord.

  “Cindy, can you hear me? It’s me, Claire.”

  She gently turned Cindy’s head and looked for the source of the blood. She was covered in it. It was running from her temple, down her neck, and into her sweater. Had Cindy been shot in the head?

  But then Claire found it. Four inches behind the temple, at the back of her head, was a bloody gash. Not a hole. Claire parted Cindy’s hair and saw that the laceration looked like it had been caused by Cindy’s fall. She must have hit her head on the edge of a stone tread.

  Claire put her hands on Cindy’s shoulders.

  “Cindy. It’s Claire. Can you hear me?”

  Cindy groaned and Claire said, “Thank you, God.”

  “Claire? What happened?”

  “Put your arms around my neck.”

  Cindy reached up, and Claire helped her friend into a more comfortable position. She sat her on a step, and leaned her back against the edge of the wall.

  “How do you feel?”

  “My head hurts. And I think I twisted my ankle.”

  “Aw, Cindy. I’m here. I’m here.” Claire patted her friend’s back.

  Claire saw Cindy’s handbag below the steps, lying on the grass. She ran down to get it, opened the hobo bag, and poured out the contents. She pawed through the litter of purse junk until she found it.

  Cindy’s cell phone. She checked the battery. The phone was charged.

  Next, she dialed the radio room at the Hall and let out a breath of relief when she got the voice of dispatcher May Hess. May knew every cop in the Southern Station. And she knew everyone in the ME’s office, as well. Claire was in good hands.

  “May, this is Claire Washburn and I’m reporting an emergency. I need an ambulance pronto to 420 El Camino Del Mar. We’ve got a man bleeding out from multiple gunshots. And we have another victim here with a head injury. When I say pronto, I mean it. Get everyone moving at the speed of light.”

  When she clicked off with dispatch, Claire called Richie, cursing silently when the call went to voice mail. “Rich, I’m at Joan Murphy’s house. Cindy is here. She’s taken a fall and is a little shaken up, but she’s going to be okay.

  “Also, Rich, the pool boy who goes by the name of Peter was about to fire on Joan but she shot him first. Twice.

  “An ambulance is on the way. Listen, Rich, I think Robert Murphy might be involved with Peter. And it seems that Peter may have knowledge of the Warwick Hotel shooting. He might tell you what he knows. But on the other hand, there’s a good chance he might die. And soon.”

  Chapter 28

  Claire listened for the sound of sirens.

  Only four minutes had passed since she’d called dispatch, but each minute was critical. She needed to get Peter into emergency care alive.

  Robert was still cradling Peter’s head in his lap. He was also holding his hand, stroking his hair, and telling him that he would be fine. But as the soothing words left his mouth, Robert shot a questioning look at Claire, looking for verification that Peter would survive.

  She nodded but couldn’t fully commit to her answer. The man’s shorts were soaked with blood. Despite the tourniquet, Peter was hemorrhaging. He could very easily bleed out if help didn’t arrive soon.

  “The ambulance will be here in a minute. I’ll be right over there with the other victim.”

  She walked back to the staircase where Cindy was reclining against the stone wall, breathing normally. Her bleeding had stopped. Thank goodness.

  Claire wrapped her in a big, comforting hug, saying, “Richie is on his way.”

  Cindy smiled and said, “Oh, good.” But then her face crumpled and she started to cry. Claire hugged her friend more tightly and then pulled back to look into her face. Cindy’s sobs had turned into laughter that was now verging on hysteria.

  “What’s going on, Cindy?”

  “I’m just overwhelmed,” Cindy admitted. “What if you hadn’t found me here? Who knows what would have happened to me.”

  “I know, Cindy, I know,” Claire murmured, patting Cindy’s back some more.

  But then Cindy shook her head and put on her tough face. She wiped her tears and said, “How is it that I missed all the action? Can you tell me that?”

  “You’re alive, dummy,” Claire said. “Could you just be happy that you’re alive?”

  Their playful exchange was interrupted by a woman’s voice that said, “Claire?”

  It was Joan. She was walking down the steps, looking cute and unconcerned. It was almost as if she had a new role in a movie and had just walked out onto the set, thinking she could wing her lines.

  “Wait, is that Cindy next to you?” she asked.

  Cindy said, “Claire, help me up.”

  “Stay where you are, sweetie. It’s better if you sit still until the paramedics arrive. Unlike me, they have medical equipment and will be able to check you out properly.”

  Joan said, “Cindy, what happened to you?”

  “A man up there tried to shoot me. I ducked, but then I also tripped and fell down these steps. It was silly, really. Claire says I’m going to live.”

  Joan groaned and said, “Oh, that freaking Peter. He’s a maniac.” She sat down next to Cindy and took her hand.

  She turned her head up to look at Claire and said, “I wanted to tell you that those gunshots jogged a memory. Sam Alton. I remember him now.”

  With those words, she instantly had Claire and Cindy’s avid attention.

  “I guess you could say he was my boyfriend. We didn’t use our real names with each other. I called him Butch
ie. He called me Princess. We kept each other company from time to time, but it wasn’t love between us. Our relationship came out of pure and simple need, on both of our parts.” She cleared her throat and sighed, saying, “Still. He was very kind and he didn’t deserve to die. I’m so very sorry that he’s dead. I never saw who shot him, but I know that Peter has to have been involved. I wish I had seen Butchie’s killer. I wish I knew how it happened.”

  Sirens wailed, amped up, and stopped as an ambulance drove up to the service gate at the bottom of the steps.

  Joan and Claire both stood up.

  There were the sounds of panel doors slamming and voices shouting. Claire ran down to the driveway and helped the team by opening the gate for them so they could carry a stretcher through.

  “Hurry,” she yelled. “We need you up here.”

  Chapter 29

  Inspector Richard Conklin was conducting a bedside interview at St. Francis Memorial Hospital for the second time this week. But this time, it was more than that. This interview was an official interrogation.

  Peter Carter had gone through surgery, had cleared the recovery room, and was now settled in his private room. Hours earlier, his surgeon had pronounced him in stable condition.

  Conklin had arrested Carter for his attempt on Joan Murphy’s life. If the force was with Conklin, the dangerous fool in the hospital bed was going to admit to being part of a conspiracy to murder Joan Murphy—twice—as well as the plan to murder Joan’s friend and proven lover, Sam Alton.

  Right now, Peter Carter was in a talkative mood. His hand was cuffed to his bed rail. His eyes were closed, and the sheets were pulled up under his arms. His leg was in a cast and in traction. Prior to this interview, Conklin learned that this man was a person who couldn’t shoot straight without his glasses. To Conklin, Peter Carter looked like an ordinary and even pleasant man.

  “Feeling okay to talk?” Conklin asked.

  “Only if you promise not to judge me,” the man said.

  “I’m not like that,” said Conklin. “I just want to clear up a few things. Before we start, though, I want to make sure you understand your rights.”

  “Okay. I told you already. I understand them.”

  “Fine. And I’m going to keep recording our conversation on my phone.” He showed the phone to Carter, then set it down on the tray table.

  Carter said he understood his rights and Conklin believed him. He also believed that Carter was desperate to be understood and forgiven so that he could return to something like life as he had known it.

  But that wasn’t going to happen.

  Conklin said, “I want to start in the middle, Peter. Look, you should know that Arthur O’Brien is dead. He overdosed in his apartment.”

  “No way. Are you shitting me?”

  “Sorry. I know he was a friend. We have his cell phone and have the phone records. He called you many times while you two planned the hit on Joan at the Warwick. What I don’t know is how it all went wrong.”

  Carter sighed. “Damn it. I told him to always call my prepaid phone. I guess I didn’t realize that he’d called me on my cell.”

  At Carter’s words, Conklin silently congratulated himself. He hadn’t been positively sure of the connection between these two men until this minute. Thanks for confirming the conspiracy, bud.

  He said, “People can get rattled. Sometimes they make mistakes when they’re doing something they’re not used to doing, right?”

  Carter agreed. He said, “Artie was an old school friend. I knew I could trust him. He needed the money. He isn’t, you know, a professional.”

  “Sure. We get that. So he was supposed to kill Joan and keep the jewelry, right? But why kill her? Help me to understand.”

  “I didn’t have a choice. Robert doesn’t love Joan. He’s told me so many times that he loves me, but I know he’ll never leave her. I thought if she just happened to die while she was on a date with someone else, he’d be a free man. He’d own the house and we…”

  Carter trailed off. Conklin didn’t want him to fall asleep. Not now. “Peter. Peter, I’m still here.”

  Chapter 30

  Conklin reached over and shook Peter Carter’s arm, keeping him awake before he slipped into a post-operative slumber.

  His eyes opened. “Oh. It’s you. What was I saying?”

  “You were saying that you got Arthur to kill Joan?”

  “Well, yeah. Better him than me. I wanted to have a clean conscience. A clean enough conscience, anyway. I mean, if I didn’t actually shoot her…”

  He winced from pain, looked at the water glass on the tray table. Conklin handed it to Carter and watched while he drank, sputtered, then handed the glass back to Conklin.

  Conklin asked, “And what about Samuel Alton? Was killing him in the original plan?”

  Carter nodded.

  “That’s yes?”

  “Yes. It wasn’t anything personal. He was just collateral damage. It had to be done.”

  “I see. I understand all that. You had to kill the witness, right?”

  Carter nodded, winced, and then closed his eyes.

  Conklin said, “Peter. Is that a yes?”

  “Yes. For God’s sake, are you thick? I think it’s time for me to take a nap. Where’s Robert?”

  Conklin didn’t want to answer that one. Because Robert Murphy was a material witness, Conklin’s team had him in lockup. Sac and Linden were questioning him, but charges had not yet been brought to the table.

  Meanwhile, Conklin pressed on with his interrogation. “Peter, Robert will be in to see you later. I’m sure of it. But for now, we have to finish here. Understand?”

  “Go ahead, then,” Carter said. “I’m in a lot of pain, man. Let’s get this over with.”

  “Good,” said Conklin. “Two more minutes. That’s all.”

  Peter asked, “What was the question?”

  “The key card,” Conklin said. “We have the key card to Joan’s hotel room. It was in Artie’s possession. How on earth did Artie get that?”

  “Right,” said Carter. “That was easy. I went to the Warwick. I paid off the guy at the front desk and told him I just wanted to take pictures. I showed him my camera, and I said, ‘One picture is worth a thousand buckaroos.’ I didn’t have to ask twice. The guy made me a key and even put on this big show of welcoming me to the Warwick. Ha!

  “Then I handed that key card off to my buddy Artie. An hour later, he calls and tells me that he’d done the job and that it had gone off perfectly. He was in and out in three minutes. It was such a relief. I figured that after that call, it was all over, except for the funeral, of course. But then, Joan comes home with gunshot wounds. She walks. She talks. She seems to be just about as good as new.”

  “Huh,” said Rich. “That must have been a shock for you.”

  Carter went on. “She completely wrecked it, man. Everything I’d worked so hard to coordinate. Hey, what’s your name again?”

  “Conklin. Inspector Richard Conklin.”

  Carter waved his hand as if Conklin’s name was unimportant, after all. He was into his story, though. He wanted to complain.

  “The whole situation between me and Robert worked for two years—but then all of a sudden, Joan wouldn’t allow it anymore. Like, who gave her the right to say whether the relationship between me and my boyfriend is okay or not? Look, if you really want to know who was behind all this, it was Joan herself. She was the one who started it. She should have left us alone. Okay? Are we done now?”

  Conklin knew it was now or maybe never again. The answer to this question was critical.

  “So, Peter, you’re saying that Robert had knowledge of this plan to kill Joan?”

  “No, no. I didn’t tell him about that. You gotta be kidding me. She caused it, but it was my plan all along. I figured with Joan out of the way, Robert and I could be happy. I never wanted him to know what I’d done to Joan. Correction, tried to do to her. Honest to God, that’s the whole truth. Robert h
ad absolutely no part in it.”

  “Okay,” said Conklin. “I believe you.”

  “What happens next?” Peter asked.

  “Get some sleep. And then you’ll want to get a good lawyer.”

  “Call Robert, will you?”

  “Sure.”

  Peter Carter had relaxed back into a dopey, angelic post-operative doze when Conklin said, “Take care.”

  Then he left the room with the taped confession in his pocket and said good night to the two officers on guard outside the door.

  Chapter 31

  Cindy was in an excellent mood.

  Her editor, Henry Tyler, had been so happy with “A Miraculous Life.” It was her first-person account of Joan Murphy’s ordeal. In fact, Henry had liked the article so much that he’d ceremoniously presented her with a little statuette from the fifties that he kept in his office called the Smith Corona. The bone-china figurine depicted a high-stepping young woman in a business suit who wore a typewriter as a hat.

  “This, Cindy, this is how I think of you.”

  She’d laughed and thrown her arms around Henry. She told him that getting the Smith Corona was better than getting an Oscar. And it was. She surrounded the statuette with a forest of candlesticks on the sideboard.

  In a couple of hours, she and Rich were having a special dinner in their small, ground-floor apartment to welcome home Lindsay and Joe, who had just returned from their vacation yesterday.

  They decided to make the theme of the party “Thanksgiving dinner,” because the meal was so good that they didn’t want to wait until November to enjoy it. In preparation for their version of turkey day, Cindy had asked Claire to bring cranberry sauce, a vegetable side, and stuffing. Rich had stepped up to make his Thanksgiving specialty of the house since childhood: a yam casserole with marshmallows on top.

  Brady had said, “Do not worry about wine. I will take care of the alcohol course, trust me.” And Yuki had added, “I can bring garlands with popcorn and cranberries. Believe it or not, I think I saw some of them out at the market this week. Even though it isn’t November, we have to make it look festive.”