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“Axel Devereaux,” I said.
Butterworth nodded. “He was mixed up with the Aryan Brotherhood.”
“How do you know that?” Bailey said.
“Some of them tried to get jobs as extras with us,” he replied. “Devereaux sent them. He had prostitutes working for him. Five hundred dollars a night. He thought he was going to be a friend to the stars.”
“What was your connection to Devereaux?” I asked.
“I didn’t have one,” he replied. “I wouldn’t let him on the set. Desmond banned him, and Lou Wexler walked him to his car. We had to do your job.”
“Get started,” I said to Sean.
I put my hand under Butterworth’s arm and walked him into the bedroom. I pulled up a chair for him to sit in while Sean began opening drawers and placing the contents on the bed.
“You have a phone number for Bella Delahoussaye?” I asked.
“You don’t?” he said.
“Say again?”
“Cut the charade, Detective,” he said. “You took her home.”
Bailey looked at me.
“That’s right, I did,” I said.
“I suspect she was giving you a guitar lesson,” he said.
“Y’all had better take a look at this,” Sean said.
I didn’t know whether Sean had deliberately interrupted Butterworth. Butterworth had gotten the knife in. My face was burning, my wrists throbbing. I saw the shine of disappointment in Bailey’s eyes.
“What do you have?” she asked Sean.
He dumped a hatbox onto the bedspread. A pair of sheep-lined leather wrist cuffs fell out, along with a purple hood, a flagellum strung with felt thongs, a black leather vest, and women’s undergarments. A hypodermic kit and several bags of dried plants or herbs followed.
“These are yours?” I said to Butterworth.
“I’ve used a couple of items in intimate situations. Actually, they’re stage props.” He studied a spot six inches in front of his eyes.
“How about the spike?” I said.
“My medicines are homeopathic in nature. There’s nothing unlawful in that box.”
“I think your sense of reality is from the other side of Mars,” I said.
“You wear your hypocrisy nicely,” he said.
“Let me clear up something for you,” I said. “I took Miss Bella home in an electric storm. I took her to her front door, and then I drove to my house. I have the feeling she told you that, but you used the information to embarrass me and to cast doubt on the integrity of this investigation.”
“I couldn’t care less about your peccadilloes,” he said. “The issue is otherwise. You’re trying to degrade me while pretending you’re not.”
“Did you put LSD in the food of a housemaid so you could film and ridicule her?”
Then he surprised me. “Yes, it was unconscionable. I’ve done many things I regret.” His gaze fixed on me, then he looked away, detached, as though he had gone somewhere else.
Sean removed stacks of books from a shelf and placed them on the bed, then began searching the closet. The books included titles by Lee Child, Frederick Forsyth, Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, and a history of the Crusades. But the one that caught my eye was an ostrich-skin-bound scrapbook stuffed with photographs and postcards and handwritten and typed letters, yellowed with age and pasted to the pages.
