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“Janet told me it was just a fling and that she didn’t hold that against Mr. Chandler. She was married. He was married. It went on for a couple of months.
“She said that she still loves him in a funny way.”
“That’s the word she used? Funny?”
“She said odd. Do I think that she killed people and dug up their heads? Honestly, I don’t see it.”
“And Nigel?”
“Nigel has a temper and he’s not subtle. If he was going to kill someone, he would just freakin’ kill him. And I think first up would have been Mr. Chandler.”
Perez showed us the gate that opened onto a narrow concrete walkway on Ellsworth Place and he showed us the lock for the gate. He said that he had the only key.
It was a simple lock, could have been picked, but there was no evidence to show that it had been tampered with.
I took out the sketch of Jane Doe.
“Do you know this woman?”
Perez took the drawing, looked at it for a long few seconds.
“Is she one of the victims?”
“Yes.”
“Her head was cut off?”
“Do you recognize her?”
“She looks familiar, but I don’t know her. It’s like, maybe I saw her in a coffee shop or something like that.”
He handed the drawing back to me, then said, “You know who you should talk to? Tom Oliver, Mr. Chandler’s driver. He’s been with Mr. Chandler for about twenty years. He’s gonna be your expert on Harry Chandler. And maybe he’ll recognize this woman.”
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.”
