11th hour

Chapter 41

I pressed the bell marked T. L. OLIVER at number 4, one of the four identical six-story brick houses on Ellsworth Place that bounded the mansion on its west side.

“Mr. Oliver?” Conklin said into the intercom. “This is the police.”

T. Lawrence Oliver buzzed us in and we climbed the flights of stairs up to the top floor and found Harry Chandler’s driver waiting for us at his front door.

He was forty-something, white, looked like he could bench-press three hundred pounds. He wore jeans and a print shirt, earring in his left ear, which in the nineties would have meant he was straight. Now it only meant that he liked earrings.

We took seats in the run-down apartment with no view of the back garden, and Conklin started asking the questions. Oliver answered, but he was edgy. He fidgeted with a watch; it looked like a gold Rolex.

“I take time off when Mr. Harry is away,” he told us. “So I dropped him and Kaye off at the boat on Thursday afternoon, then I drove to Vegas. I was gone the whole weekend.”

“Where’d you stay?” Conklin asked.

“The Mandalay Bay. I played a lot of blackjack. I didn’t win and I didn’t lose, but I did get lucky,” he said.

“Write down the name of that lucky person for me, will you?” Conklin said.

“Aw, jeez. Her name was Judy Lemon or Lennon, something like that. She’s a cocktail waitress at the casino. Oh. Wait. I have her phone number.”

He wrote down the number for Conklin, then said, “Anything else?”

“Relax, Mr. Oliver. We’ve got a lot of questions.”

“Can I get you a beer? Mind if I have one?”

Oliver was drinking at nine in the morning. What did he know? What had he done? He dragged a kitchen chair into the living room, and Conklin and I took turns throwing questions at him.

He told us that he had worked for Chandler since long before the trial. While Chandler was in the system, Oliver had taken a job in LA driving for a friend of Chandler, a TV producer. He’d come back to the Ellsworth compound when Chandler was acquitted.

He said he knew nothing about the severed heads except that it was creepy, and his vote for Most Likely to Commit Murder was Nigel Worley, although he couldn’t come up with a motive.

He also didn’t recognize our Jane Doe.

Oliver said good things about Chandler, how generous he was, how there was no way the movie star had ever killed anyone. He said Chandler’s only vices were women and nice things.

“He gave me this watch when he got tired of it,” Oliver said, showing off the seven-thousand-dollar Rolex.

I didn’t like Oliver, but was he a killer? I told him we’d be checking out his alibi and I gave him my card. He wanted us to leave so badly that I pushed back one more time.

“Mr. Oliver, if you had anything to do with this crime, you should tell us now, before it goes any further. My partner and I can help you. We can say that you came to us voluntarily.”

“No, no. I haven’t done anything like that. I came back from Vegas and saw all the cop cars outside the main house and thought, Aw, shit.

“Listen, I drove Mr. Chandler’s Bentley to Vegas. I’m not allowed to. I don’t want to get fired. Please don’t tell him. Check it out with the garage at the hotel. There’s a time-stamped record of the Bentley going in and out all weekend.”

I told Oliver we’d check out his story and that I wasn’t making any promises about what I would say to Chandler. I told him that if he had any thoughts about what happened inside the walled garden to call me any time.

“I have a thought right now. Do you know LaMetta Wynn?”