“Terry is very plugged into the LAPD, and he has taken an interest in Long, since he learned he’s a stockholder. His lawyer talked to Long’s law firm yesterday.”
“I see.”
She fidgeted for a moment. “There’s more,” she said. “Someone knifed Long during the dinner hour last night.”
Stone decided to play dumb. “Is he all right?”
“He had surgery last night at Cedars-Sinai; I haven’t heard the result yet.”
“Why are you telling me all this, Carolyn?”
“You once said to me that if I needed legal advice to come to you.”
“That’s right, I did, but you don’t appear to have done anything wrong-not from what you’ve told me, anyway.”
“It’s not that,” she said. “Yesterday, quite by accident, I picked up the wrong phone line and heard Terry order Long’s murder.”
“Did he say that: ‘Murder James Long’?”
“Not exactly.”
“What did he say, exactly?”
“He said something like, ‘It needs to be done tonight; tomorrow could be too late.’ ”
“He could have been talking about getting a haircut. What made you think he was ordering a murder?”
“Terry called me and told me to bring in the file on a project we’re working on. I was with him for a good four hours before we finished. Shortly before I left, he got a phone call, and I answered. It was a man named Carter, whom I knew from other calls; he works at Parker Center. Terry took the call, and I pretended to go through the file while he talked. He said, ‘Is it done?’ Then he said, ‘Did Long have an opportunity to sign any papers today?’ I think the answer to the first question was an explanation of what had happened to Long, and the answer to the second question was no. He hung up, and I asked if everything was all right. He said he wasn’t sure; a friend was having surgery at Cedars, and he wouldn’t know anything until morning.
“I had some dinner with a friend, and when I got home I heard on the news that James Long had been stabbed at the jail and taken to Cedars-Sinai. It was easy to put two and two together.”
“And,” Stone said, “since you put two and two together only after the fact, you had no reason to call the police yesterday.”
“That’s right, and I’m not sure that what I could testify to is enough to get Terry tried and convicted.”
“I think you’re right about that,” Stone said.
Manolo brought breakfast, and they began to eat.
“Tell me, Carolyn,” Stone said, “do you have any idea what happened to Terry’s driver, Alexei?”
“Only what I read in the papers,” she said. “Terry brought up the subject, but he seemed to be as mystified as I. The man hadn’t come to work the day before, and when I called his apartment there was no reply. No reply to his cell phone, either.”
“What about Jennifer Harris? Any ideas about her death?”
“Who?”
“That was in the papers, too. She was the daughter of Eddie Harris, who used to run Centurion, and she had inherited his stock in the studio.”
“Now that you mention it, I think I saw something about her in the papers, too, but I didn’t connect her with Terry’s attempt to get control of Centurion.”
They finished breakfast, and Carolyn got up to go. “What should I do?” she asked.
“Nothing, for the moment, just keep an ear to the ground. Although what you’ve told me isn’t enough for an arrest, it could be very useful at trial in conjunction with other evidence that might be found in an investigation.”
“Stone,” she said, picking up her handbag, “why did you tell me at the Bel-Air Hotel party not to mention to Terry that Mrs. Calder has an option to buy some property adjoining her estate?”
“I can’t tell you that right now, but it’s better for you that Prince doesn’t know. You’ll have to trust me on that.”