Laura Herdlevaer, the property developer’s wife smiled now, one that was suddenly on my side. She could change gears so quickly. “Come, I invited you to lunch. I did that because I want to tell you a story. It’s an interesting story, I promise. You may treat it as an entertainment, or as assistance with your case. I won’t even ask you which.”

She turned and looked up into the mountains, as if searching for something. Then refaced me and said, “I do hope you like salmon.” She kept the “l” in.

I was still gazing down at the Fortress, spooked about the murder there. Then a metallic scraping sounded from behind me. I turned to see a large man dragging a glass top table, umbrella and stand and all, back toward the pool house. From a tray he set two places in the shade of an umbrella he’d cocked against the sun.  

The waiter came back with wine in a bucket. After he’d placed it on the table, he stood waiting for further instructions, towering over us, a gentle giant of a man. Giant? He must have been close to seven feet. I had to crane my neck to meet his brown eyes. They were turned off, neutral.

“Ya’ev this is my new friend, Jim Shalabon. Ya’ev is a poet, one of the biggest in LA.”

Ya’ev nodded, exchanged looks with his employer and ambled away, his eyes up in the mountains as if considering a hike. 

“We have many friends in what they call here, The Business. Why, you would have met some of them at our reception. The top guys they hate it that I have a Jewish help. 

A large silver tray held a mini buffet of smoked salmon, pumpernickel bread, cheeses, ham, two kinds of quiche, olives.  

“Ya’ev is here to protect me. Hal insists on it.”

“Protect you from—”

“Oh, falls.” She gave me a poker face, which meant we were playing poker. “I am assuming you are open-minded and European enough for me to serve French wine.” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Nothing upsets a native Californian more than being forced to forsake their overrated wine.”

She poured from a half bottle of Puligny-Montrachet, raised her glass, but didn’t drink from it. “We must go back fifteen years to 1987, to a town in West LA. It is an area of light industry and modest houses. In one of them lived a twenty-seven-year-old contractor, his twenty-two-year-old wife, and their eighteen-month-old daughter. The couple had been married for almost three years. That of course meant that the wife married at eighteen, straight out of high school. So not surprising that the couple had their problems. Have some of this gravlax. I buy it from a Swedish specialty store on Melrose.” She paused to fork a thick slice of the marinated salmon, held it in the air for a long moment before slipping it between her lips.  

“The husband’s solution to his bad marriage was decisive. He killed his wife and buried her in the foundation of an office complex his construction company was building at the time.” She picked up her wine glass, swirled it, took a perfunctory sniff, then a sip. “You see, every problem has a simple solution. Unfortunately, it’s usually illegal.” She smiled, a fleck of the salmon on her lower lip. She noticed me noticing and tongued it with reptilian quickness, then smiled.

I took a sip of wine, then dipped the glass to her. “Vive la France.” 

“The husband had bragged he could bury his wife where no one would find her, but you couldn’t call that a clue. You see, there was no evidence. She was gone without a trace. Those Star Trek people must have beamed his wife up. What could the family of the poor victim do? They were certain their daughter was in the foundation. There was not enough evidence to allow for a detailed inspection, and by this time the building was already far along in its construction.” 

We ate in silence for a time, but not a comfortable one. Laura Herdlevaer was not a woman you could relax around.

“As I said, this happened fifteen years ago. The husband was never charged. His dead wife’s family is destroyed. The office building is fully occupied. As they say, the beat goes on.”

“How do you know he did it?”

“Allow me to tell this my way. What do you think of the wine? Nice? I think wine should be like sex, to enjoy it there must be a little dirt in it. The French call this terroir. Such an un-American concept. Here it all must be extra virgin, natural, lemon-scented boredom. You ride an American woman and she squeaks—like a new saddle.” 

She showed me an aggressively neutral face, then went off to see about coffee. I couldn’t help venturing out of the shade and looking down again on the Fortress. It was starting to haunt me. It couldn’t be that Victoria de la Torre was the missing housewife. She would have been sixteen in 1987.

“I did not know about our murder until this year,” she said as we re-seated ourselves. “In fact, it was Victoria de la Torre who told me the story.”

“Really? How did she know about it?”

“I didn’t ask her.”

She poured more wine into my mainly full glass, then held her glass to her small turned up nose. “Ummm. Elderflowers. Melons. A hint of grapefruit.” She broke into a wild, nearly unlimited laugh at her pretentiousness. 

“I work with my husband on many different development projects, malls, residential, a few office buildings. For every project that comes to be built there are fifteen or twenty that fail at various stages. It really is unpredictable; there are so many things that have to go right. When I heard Victoria’s story, I decided to be just a tiny bit naughty.” She speared a strip of gravlax, held it before her mouth, then slid the oily pink meat between her lips. Even eating was a multi-level performance. “I started a project to turn an entire block of Long Beach into a multi-use development. There would be two small towers and a lot of retail space. One of the towers would be offices, the other also offices but the first five floors were to be a tech innovation and incubation center.” She grabbed my arm here. “I tell you, I’ve never had such fun in my life. I just wildly made the whole thing up. A complete work of fiction. I think I’d read an article about incubation centers and threw that in just for some strong detail.” 

“Your plan called for the guilty building to be torn down?”

“Yes, exactly.” She grabbed my arm again. “Now you must understand this was simply a little fun, a few thousand dollars to our architects and for a consultant to approach a few of the property owners about buying up their stores. It was so easy. Soon, all of Los Angeles was talking about the mighty Herdlevaer empire and its plans to redevelop Long Beach.”

Ya’ev arrived with a tray holding a silver pitcher of coffee with the usual accoutrements.  

“Normally I don’t invite people here. It is my own private space where I can be free. I know, why did I invite you? It’s because looking down on the murder house might suit my purposes. Do you want to cool off? There are spare trunks in the pool house.”  

“No, thanks. I don’t believe in drinking and crawling at the same time.” 

She shook her head, more about rearranging her hair, disturbed in a light gust from nowhere. “Two things happened that I could never have predicted. The first is that—and I still can’t believe this—my idea for the Long Beach project took on a life of its own. The City of Long Beach is eating out of my delicate hand; local businesses the same. Large grants and even larger tax incentives are talked about in a way that is near to an offer. A large Asian investment company is enthusiastic. Articles in the paper. Herdlevaer plans massive commercial district. My God, Hal didn’t even know about it. He lets me do small projects, off my own balance sheet, as he calls it. That is unpredictable event number one.”

“And event number two?” I asked obediently when her pause kept going.

“Victoria was murdered.” 

Detective Chief Inspector Parkes was an older man, surely too buoyant and relaxed for a homicide detective. He had a way of aiming his wire-frame glasses, so his eyes were lost in the glare. He started out by appreciating my house, scanning the rows of books in my downstairs lounge as if sifting for clues. 

Parkes dealt his questions apologetically, as if he knew this was a futile exercise. In fact, his questions were so oblique that I wound up narrating my story: my routine, my walks, the encounters with Grace Cricklewood. In short, the truth.

“It’s a matter of discipline and persistence,” I explained, answering his question about routine. “Perhaps you recognize that in your job?”

He smiled.

“Are you any closer to solving it?” 

“A murder case is like a kidnapping one. With kidnapping it’s the first twenty-four hours that are crucial. For murder it’s longer, some say forty-eight hours. The point is the odds grow longer with each tick of the clock. After a time, the process becomes rather passive. We must wait for the right person to be arrested for other reasons, or somebody remembers something. Now, tell me why you entered Shaftsbury Mansions, climbed four flights of stairs, and stood in front of the victim’s door?”

“I was in shock, I hardly knew what I was doing.” 

“You heard the news, late, so it came all at once, and in shock you sleep-walked to the crime scene?”

“That sounds like a reasonable summary. ‘Sleepwalking’ is overdoing it a bit.”

“Then perhaps you can explain why you infiltrated the Mansions twice?”

“I did?” I had forgotten my first incursion, the one that stopped at the lobby, the one that could be explained by my shock story. “I didn’t do it. It’s hard to explain.”

He waited me out.

“You’re not going to understand this,” I started. “It’s all about a writer’s imagination. As I told you, I never met Grace—met to talk to anyway. She was more alive in my imagination. I guess that meant her murder was alive there too. The biggest mystery was that door, how the killer got through it. I’ve obsessed over that entry. If I could just see that door, all the details of it, it might calm me down. Nothing limits imagination like facts. Even a few details such as what her apartment building and her door looked like, the stairs she climbed, the area she lived in, help to hem in my stories about her. Each fact is something that can’t explode into a welter of permutations. This exact door and not wild speculation of a hundred types of doors. I don’t expect you to understand.”

He accepted my offer of tea, no doubt to snoop around while I was in the kitchen. He was talking on his phone when I returned. Requesting the paddy wagon, no doubt.

“You say you have an active imagination. What is your best story that explains this murder?”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “It will simply be a story.”

“I presume you bother to fit the facts of the case into your story?”

“The few that I know.” Was it a trap to go into my imaginings? Or was it a way out of a trap: by showing my detective skills I would be moving toward rationality and away from an unbalanced obsession that had me lurking around the murder flat. I blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “She didn’t know him well so I’m thinking an early romance.”

He was quiet, so I added. “You see, having seen that her door, the fisheye lens—”

“I’m rather confused here. What you appear to be doing is exactly what I do in my job. In other words, you appear to be acting as a detective. We’ve also been working on that as a main line of attack.” 

“Line of attack,” I muttered to myself, then to him, “Really?”

He nodded, the light off his lenses hitting me. 

“But you have so much more. You know all her phone calls and online searches, and who knows what else? I’m simply playing around with crumbs.”

He took a slow sip of tea. “I can’t give you privileged information, your facts, but I suppose I can go as far as saying her internet activity is a jumble of contradictions.” 

I thought about my internet searches, few of which related to me. I might trawl for a girl’s school in Somerset, not because I’m a perv but because I’m building the biography of one of my characters. Types of knives because another character is a chef and I need telling detail. Real searches on behalf of fictional characters in made-up worlds. I explained that to Parkes.

“You identify with the victim rather closely.”

“I identify with her profession, which is my profession. As I told you. I didn’t know her.”

“Have you read any of her books?”

“Not all the way through. They’re rather long and my free time is short.” 

He cleared his throat. “You’re saying that if we find something that feels out of character, way out of character, it might be down to fictional characters, that it may not be about her… proclivities?”

“You must have the book she was working on. If it doesn’t correlate to a character in it then you could be zeroing in on her character.”

I agreed to give a DNA swab to eliminate me from their “enquiries.”

At the door I was expecting the Colombo prod, the one incisive question he’d been saving for the end. Instead, he said, “What are your books about?”

About to make me a few thousand pounds. About 300 pages. It’s one of those lazy questions that writers bristle at. “Near dystopian satire,” I said, borrowing from one of my blurbs, which in turn was quoting a review in the Times Literary Supplement. 

I shut the door with one word ringing in my head. Proclivities. It felt as if Parkes had popped up like a jack-in-the-box, said that one word, and then went back into his box.