Because the prints were related to a murder in the LAPD’s jurisdiction, Truesdale had SID, the department’s Scientific Investigation Division, run them through the AFIS database. She got back a Christophe Nolent, convicted of a misdemeanor assault on a girlfriend back in the early nineties. A search of court records revealed that the charge had originally been felonious assault, but his attorneys had somehow been able to get the charges reduced and their client probation, a fine, and anger-management courses.
Christophe Nolent’s name also generated a DMV photo with an address in Bel-Air. But the license, like the conviction, was more than ten years old, although a check of the property’s address revealed the title was held in the name of the Solange Nolent Family Trust.
The name didn’t ring a bell with Truesdale when she called Steve on Friday afternoon to share her findings, but Steve knew it well. “My ex used to buy that Solange shit all the time,” he said, tapping the mother’s and son’s names into the “search” feature on his computer’s browser. “Little dresses like the one you were looking at in Tiffany’s place, expensive perfumes, and purses that cost a small fortune. I never understood the appeal, but when a woman’s got to have it, what can you do?”
Truesdale was silent on the phone for a moment, although Steve could hear the sound of pages being flipped. “You know that dress was one of the things she bought the day she died.”
Steve got back more than a million hits on the names search. Scanning the list, he randomly clicked on the fifth link and started reading about Solange Nolent’s car collection. “My gut tells me we should pay Christophe Nolent a visit.”
IF HE HAD followed his gut, he never would have let them in. They’d stood outside the gates in their nondescript car, peering into the surveillance camera and talking as nice as pie, so sorry to disturb your Saturday. The curly-haired man seemed clearly aware of whose Saturday he was disturbing, as he meekly identified himself as Steve Firestone of the Simi Valley Police Department and his cohort as Billie Truesdale of the LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division. They had traced him through a credit-card application and they had taken the liberty of calling on him on a Saturday because they needed his assistance on a case they were working.
“And to give you your change,” the woman named Truesdale had chimed in.
Ignoring his gut, he’d invited them in anyway, had the housekeeper set them up with green tea in the kitchen, and listened politely as the two of them rattled on about how they found him because of the saleswoman at Bloomingdale’s and the change he forgot to take, and how they, these two poorly dressed cops, had been working with a task force to capture a ring of boosters who’d been ripping off stores all over the Southland for tens of thousands of dollars in merchandise.
He knew he hadn’t used his real name on that application, but he went along with their little game, just to see where they were headed. “‘Boosters’ sounds like a group of cheerleaders.” He’d tried to laugh, but the sound caught in his throat. “So you think I’m one of these booster people?”
Detective Truesdale gave him a mirthless smile as the other cop, Firestone, explained that they were talking to customers in all the departments the thieves hit, and something he may have seen in the store last Tuesday, no matter how small, could help them hook up these criminals. “You were in the lingerie department, correct?”
“That’s right.”
“You visit any other departments?”
“Just fragrances and women’s accessories.” When Detective Firestone raised an eyebrow, Christophe added, “I was on a mission.”
Detective Truesdale shifted in her chair. “Mission?”
“Yes. I was looking for a gift.”
“Do you remember anything unusual as you were shopping for this gift?” Firestone prodded. “Anything unusual the women were doing?”
“Just shopping, like women do.” But Christophe remembered everything about one particular woman, down to the repellent perfume he saw her trying on in the fragrance department. Dense, cloying, artificial, his keen sense of smell identified it immediately as Chanel No. 5. His mother had told him the story about the millions of women who bought it after Marilyn Monroe claimed two drops of it were all she wore to bed. The losses his mother’s company suffered in both perfume and lingerie sales had almost put her out of business all those years ago, a fact she never stopped yammering about, even on her deathbed.
“How about the woman you spoke with in Lingerie?” Detective Truesdale had prompted. “Yustina Flores? Was she doing anything unusual?”
Watching the pale Latina beauty sample and buy that hideous fragrance had aroused him then, just as thinking about it was doing now. He had imagined a girl like that would wear something evanescent, something floral and innocent. He had almost passed her by when the Chanel called out to him, taunting him. Dazed, he had followed the scent through three departments in Bloomingdale’s, wanting to be certain she was the vehicle through which he’d fulfill his divine mission. Flustered, he turned away from the detectives in his kitchen and asked if this Yustina person was involved in the booster ring, needing to say something to distract himself from his growing erection.
The room was silent for a moment, then Firestone said, “You say that like she’s dead, Mr. Nolent.”
“I didn’t intend to,” Christophe replied, exhaling all at once. “I just assumed two detectives coming here on a Saturday morning wasn’t just because she stole some clothes.” When they didn’t reply, he decided to take another tack, and made a show of racking his brain before remembering an Afro-American guy hanging around one of the racks, mumbling something as the women walked by. “Maybe he was controlling Yustina and the others.”
Truesdale fixed him with an off-kilter gaze, asked if there was any reason he’d remember that particular Afro-American guy. “He called me a faggot,” he’d replied, the childhood memory of his mother taunting him with the epithet adding some heat to his response.
After a few more questions about where else he shopped in the mall and how he spent the rest of the day, they seemed to be satisfied, when suddenly Truesdale asked to use his bathroom. “Too much tea,” she’d explained. As the housekeeper directed her to one of the downstairs powder rooms, Christophe watched Firestone go to the sink and deposit their earthenware cups, the detective’s beefy hands violating his collection of antique iron teapots and the sushi knives in the wooden block. “You have a lovely home, Mr. Nolent. I like the Japanese theme, right down to the accessories. It’s, I don’t know what to call it . . .”
“Peaceful? It took quite a bit of effort to transform it after Mother died.” And a lot of his mother’s money, which made the effort that much more enjoyable.
“Well, you’ve done an outstanding job, and I gotta tell you, I’ve seen some nice houses in my days as a detective.” Firestone gazed out the window, past a jumbled collection of ceramic pots and a grove of Japanese maples that led to the garages. “Do you keep your mother’s car collection on the property?”
“Some of it,” he’d replied, impressed that this hick cop would have heard of it. “There are over a hundred cars, all totaled. We couldn’t possibly store them all here.”
Firestone wheedled out of him that there were a dozen scattered in three garages on the estate before he asked about the 44 Roadster, the one everyone wanted to see.
“Actually, my mother owned three Bugattis — a ’27 Bugatti 44 she bought after her company went public and a couple of T-57 Cs she bought to celebrate her divorces.” Besides the money, the cars were the only aspect of his mother’s estate Christophe enjoyed, as much for the power and status they conferred on their owners as for their design or performance. And the Bugattis were the ne plus ultra of cars, like the three-hundred-dollar sushi dinners at Urasawa or the Divine Droplets, a sake the chef there kept for him that cost more than a bottle of Dom.
“I’ve never seen a Bugatti,” the detective said wistfully. Seeing Christophe’s hesitation, he pleaded, “Just a peek,
man. I’ll tell Detective Truesdale to wait in the car. Chicks just don’t get cars the way us guys do, you know what I’m saying?”
Reluctantly, Christophe escorted Firestone to the garages, where the detective whistled at and ogled the cars like they were those murdered women, suddenly brought back to life. But twenty minutes later, he was still at it, time enough for Detective Truesdale to get tired of waiting and wander into the garage, where Firestone crouched near the 44 Roadster, admiring its pristine running board. “Christophe here — you don’t mind if I call you that? — was just showing me his mother’s Bugattis. Tell her about the yellow one.”
Christophe began reciting the car’s features and the races it had won over the years. Firestone asked him to show her the others in the adjacent garages while he went to stand under the maple trees between the house and garages to make a call. He caught up with them a few minutes later, dropping his phone into his pocket and buttoning his jacket. “I need to get back to my office,” he announced. “There’s been a break in the case.”
Worry pricked at the nape of Christophe’s neck. “So you don’t need me to provide a description of the guy in the lingerie department?”
“I can come back later for that.”
Truesdale cast a look at Firestone, then said, “There is one question you can answer for me, Mr. Nolent — who’d you buy the nightshirt for?”
“Uh . . .” The question had caught Christophe flat-footed. What should he say?
“Let’s go, Detective,” Firestone said.
“It was for a friend, uh, a girlfriend’s birthday.”
“That’s odd,” Truesdale replied, consulting her notes. “The salesperson swore you said it was for your mother. But that couldn’t possibly be, could it? Your mother’s been dead for six years now.”
Christophe suddenly felt light-headed. “I think you should both leave now.”
“Let’s go, Detective,” Firestone repeated, flapping his hands in his jacket pockets to urge Truesdale along.
He’d gotten her into the car and her door was almost closed when she asked, “And your girlfriend’s name is . . . ?”
Christophe crossed to Firestone’s side of the car, as far from her prying questions as possible. “I’d rather not say.”
Firestone leaned out the driver’s-side window and grasped Christophe’s suddenly damp hand. “If I had a girlfriend in the habit of wearing dowdy nightshirts like that saleslady showed us,” he whispered, “I wouldn’t say either. I’m a silk-teddy man myself.”
Looking back on that interview in the days and weeks that followed, Christophe decided his wealth and breeding had made him an enemy of the two detectives, fueled their middle-class rage, and started a vendetta against him that had almost cost him his freedom. But as the Bentley pulled into Christophe’s mother’s, no his, estate, he thanked God it had all backfired, and in such a spectacular fashion that he knew they would never bother him again.
“I CAN UNDERSTAND your defending your client,” Steve muttered as Michelle Dunn passed him on her way inside the jail, “but did you have to ruin my reputation in the process?”
Dunn shrugged, raindrops dripping off her eyelashes. “It wasn’t personal, Detective. We had to get that nightshirt excluded from the evidence. Our focus groups indicated that Yustina Flores’s and Tiffany Rutherford’s DNA on that nightshirt were enough to get our client convicted, regardless of his family’s brand-name recognition.”
Steve spat on the ground in front of her. “Criminal trials are like making movies or selling cars — nobody makes a fucking move without their focus groups.”
Dunn took the insult calmly. “That’s why I’m getting out of defense work. Retire and open a yoga studio or something.”
Tall and lean, she didn’t seem old enough to retire, but he didn’t give a shit about what she did from here on out. “How can you live with yourself, knowing you put a twisted fuck like Nolent back on the streets?”
She took a step toward him. “The better question is — how can you, knowing if you hadn’t removed evidence from Nolent’s home and tried to replant it later, he might be on his way to death row?”
As Dunn click-clacked her way back inside the jail, Steve asked himself again what the hell he was supposed to do. He’d glimpsed some strips of fabric he was pretty sure came from that nightshirt — the brown stains almost obliterating the pink fabric beneath — behind some ceramic pots near the maples in Nolent’s garden, and was faced with a dilemma: should he identify the fabric right then and there, take Christophe Nolent in, only to have him claim they belonged to his gardener or his driver? Nolent was a smart guy. Smart enough to have an alibi prepared for every moment of his morning, noon, and night on the day Yustina Flores was murdered, as he would, Steve knew, for that of Tiffany Rutherford and any of the other murders they might accuse him with. And if Steve had left those scraps of nightshirt behind, how long would it take for Nolent to destroy them after the way Truesdale went after him on the girlfriend lie? Faster than Truesdale could get a search warrant signed and be back at the house to discover them, that was for damn sure.
So he knew he’d done the right thing — stuffed the fabric into his inside jacket pocket and got the hell out of there. It was a bit trickier convincing Truesdale to file a request for a search warrant, finally having to lie and tell her he’d seen but not touched the evidence they were seeking that would hook up this pervert for good.
How could he have known that Nolent’s housekeeper had seen him remove the fabric from the pots and then replace it hours later when they officially searched the premises? Or that Michelle Dunn would hire a private investigator to dig into his background, dredging up the ten-year-old sexual-harassment beef brought by those bitches he worked with in RHD, or that the stories would surface of how he’d tried to get them both out of the way when things got a little messy? And if he’d set up his own partners, Dunn’s argument had gone, what would he do to show up the department that had dumped him all those years ago?
It was gone now — his reputation, his chance of a promotion, maybe even his job with the Simi PD — all because some trust- fund baby knew the right attorney to hire. He was just about to call his second ex-wife when Michelle Dunn emerged from the jail, a black leather sketchbook clutched in her hand. “Where you headed now?” she asked.
“To a bar somewhere to drown my troubles. Or at least teach them how to swim.”
“That’s a good one.” She dropped the sketchbook she was holding at Steve’s feet as she opened her umbrella against the intensifying rain. “Oops! Menopause can make a woman as clumsy and forgetful as a teenage girl. Here I was, opening my umbrella, and I dropped one of the sketchbooks Christophe doodled in during the trial.”
Steve stared at her for just a moment before scooping it up. Ornate three-color ink drawings seemed to spill from its pages, scenes from the courtroom, Truesdale defiant and Steve sitting stone-eyed under cross-examination. Little dresses danced across the next two pages, and square bottles spilled drops of what looked like blood. He flipped to another page to find mountain peaks rising above a Japanese inn, the lake beside it offering up sushi from the bodies of fish and mermaidlike creatures that looked disturbingly like Yustina Flores and Tiffany Rutherford.
“The DA did the right thing, going after my client for two of the eight murders,” she whispered. “They were the strongest cases, but they weren’t the only ones.”
“What are you suggesting?”
She pointed at the sketchbook. “Maybe you can make it right with this.”
“Why would you do this?” he said softly. “You could get disbarred!”
“As I said, I’m getting out of the game. You, on the other hand, are still in it. You still care.” She gave his arm a friendly squeeze. “And if this doesn’t help, you can always waylay him at Urasawa for a little talk. A little birdie told me he’ll be there celebrating later tonight.”
“Thanks, Ms. Dunn.”
“Michelle.”
> “Okay, Michelle. I don’t know what to say.”
“Just get him off the streets.”
Serial Killer
By Jon L. Breen
Parking the unmarked squad car in a space reserved for the president of North End Community College, Detective Berwanger said to his partner, “I always wanted to do this.” Detective Foley resisted pointing out that it was an empty gesture: they knew the president was on vacation in Hawaii.
It was a cool early-fall evening, half an hour before night classes were scheduled to begin, and the campus was relatively quiet. Entering the administration building, the two plainclothesmen reported to the evening director’s office, where a pretty Latina student assistant sat behind the counter. She looked up from what appeared to be a math textbook and smiled. “Can I help you, gentlemen?”
Berwanger showed his identification. “Yes, ma’am. I’m Detective Berwanger, city police. This is my partner, Detective Foley.”
Her eyes widened. “I’ve heard of you.”
“Yes, ma’am. Lots of people have. I wonder if you could help us find someone.”
“A suspect, Detective?”
The two cops exchanged poker-faced glances. “For now, ma’am, let’s just say somebody we need to find. It’s just routine. Nothing to be alarmed about.”
“Of course I’d like to help you,” the student said. “Can you describe this person?”
“Yes, ma’am. He’s a male Caucasian, about six-four, weighs maybe two eighty. Looks like an interior lineman that’s let himself go a bit, but still not someone you’d want to mess with. He commonly has what I can only call a menacing demeanor. Usually shabbily dressed, maybe in an old sweatshirt and jeans. If he’s wearing a short-sleeved shirt, you’ll notice some elaborate tattoos on his biceps. Marine Corps haircut, stubbly unshaven look, just about always has an unfriendly scowl on his face.”
The young woman shivered. “Sounds scary.”