The 8th Confession (Women's Murder Club 8)

“Could it be six?”

“Yes.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah. They’re rich, thin, beautiful, and dead.”

Claire then gave me the usual disclaimer: she wouldn’t say anything official until she’d done the posts.

“But here’s what’s unusual,” Claire told my partner and me. “Two dead folks, the rigor is pretty much the same, the lividity is pretty much the same. Something got these people at the same time, Lindsay.

“Look at them. No visible trauma, no bullet wounds, no bruising, no defensive wounds. I’m starting to think of poisoning, you know?”

“Poisoning, huh? Like maybe two homicides? Or a homicide-suicide? I’m just thinking out loud.”

Claire shot me a grin. “I’ll do the autopsies today. I’ll send out the blood. I’ll let you know what the labs come back with. I’ll tell you what I know as soon as I know it.”

Conklin and I worked the top floor of the Baileys’ museum of a house while Clapper’s team did the kitchen and baths. We looked for signs of disturbance and we looked for notes and journals, found none. We confiscated three laptops: Isa’s, Ethan’s, and the one belonging to Christopher Bailey, age nine, for good measure.

We methodically tossed the closets and looked under the beds, then searched the servants’ quarters so the staff could return to their rooms when they got back from the Hall.

I checked in with Claire as the deceased were being zipped into body bags, and she looked at my frown, said, “I’m not worried, Linds, so relax yourself. The tox screens will give us a clue.”

Chapter 30

“HERE WE GO,” said Conklin, nodding in the direction of the fortyish, sandy-haired man in shorts and a hot-pink T-shirt waving to us from a tiki hut, one of several similar cabanas grouped around an oval-shaped pool.

If there was ever a place where Conklin and I stood out as cops, this was it. The Bambuddha Lounge had been the epicenter for hipster-richies since Sean Penn had held a party here after wrapping his Nixon film. As we crossed the patio, eyes shifted away, joints were snuffed out. I half expected someone to shout, “Cheese it, the fuzz.”

“I’m Noble Blue,” said the man in pink.

We introduced ourselves. I ordered mineral water to Noble Blue’s mai tai, and when we were all comfortable, I said, “I understand you had dinner with the Baileys last night.”

“Can you imagine?” Blue said. “They were having their last meal. In a million years, I would never have guessed. We were at the opera before dinner. Don Giovanni,” he told us. “It was terrific.”

The word “terrific” got caught in his throat, and tears spilled down his tanned cheeks. He grabbed a tissue and wiped them away. “Sorry,” Blue said. “It’s just that Isa and Ethan saw so many of their friends there. It’s almost as if they’d had a big night out because they knew…”

“Could they have known?” Conklin asked. “How did they seem to you?”

Blue told us that they were “a hundred-percent normal.” Isa had flirted at dinner with a man at a nearby table, and, as usual, that made Ethan wild.

“How wild?” I asked.

Blue smiled, said, “I don’t mean violent, Sergeant. It was part of their foreplay.”

Conklin asked, “Can you think of anyone who might have wanted them dead?”

“No. I mean, not in my wildest. But people felt snubbed just as a matter of fact. Everyone wanted to be around the Baileys, and it just wasn’t possible.”

Blue brought up committees that Isa chaired and people who were slighted by that. He spoke of other big-name couples and the not-so-friendly competition among them to see who could be mentioned most often in the Chronicle’s lifestyle pages.

And he went into a kind of rhapsody as he described Isa’s thirtieth-birthday party in Paris, what she had worn, the fact that Barbra Streisand had performed and that their three hundred guests had been treated to a week of exorbitant luxury.

Conklin had been taking notes, but the three-hundred-name guest list stopped him.

“There’s a list of the guests somewhere?”

“Surely there is. I think it was published. You could Google it?” Blue said helpfully. He blew his nose, sipped his drink, and added thoughtfully, “Sure, people hated them. Ethan and Isa attracted envy. Their money. Their fame. And they were both so hot, they perspired pearls.”