It's Not a Pretty Sight (27 page)

The entry in question would have meant little to Mimi had she come upon it, but Gunner was not so shortsighted. He recognized the import of the entry immediately. It may not have been the reason someone feared Nina enough to murder her, but it had that potential.

And it answered one question, at least, that Gunner had been getting nowhere trying to answer on his own.

“Tell me about Alvin Bascomb,” Gunner said.

He hadn’t given Trini Serrano any time to gear up for his visit, hadn’t called ahead to say he was coming, or bothered to say hello when he came through the door; he’d just shown up at her Hollywood studio for the second day in a row and dropped Bascomb’s name like a greeting, watching her face for fireworks. He didn’t get fireworks, but he did get recognition, and the minute she realized she’d shown him that much, she knew the jig was up. Telling her he’d read Nina’s diary had almost been unnecessary.

Still, she didn’t say a word about Bascomb until she’d asked some questions of her own. More to satisfy her own curiosity than to stall for time.

“Where did you find it?” she asked.

“At her mother’s,” Gunner said. He could have told her it didn’t matter where he found it, just to keep Mimi Hillman out of the picture, but he thought it might help her to be straight with him if he demonstrated a willingness to be straight with her first.

“Do you have it now?”

“No,” he lied. Being straight with her was not synonymous with telling her everything.

“Then—”

“Don’t worry about where it is. It’s somewhere safe, that’s all you need to know.”

Serrano nodded her head, conceding the point.

“Tell me about Bascomb,” Gunner said again.

“Tell me first what Nina wrote about him.”

“I think you already know that.”

“I know what I told her about him. I know that. But how much of what I said she actually wrote in her diary …” She shrugged. “I can only guess about that.”

“I’ll put it to you like this; The salient points are in there,” Gunner said. “What’s missing are the details.”

“And the salient points are?”

“A dead man, a wife who confessed to killing him, and a shutterbug friend of the wife who actually
did.
Do I need to go on?”

Serrano’s face fell, all hope that Gunner had been bluffing suddenly gone.

“I didn’t think so,” Gunner said.

“All right. So the skeleton in my closet has finally seen the light of day. What happens now, Mr. Gunner?”

“I just told you. Now I want the details.”

“The details? What for? So you can have even more dirt to blackmail me with?”

“Who said I wanted to blackmail you?”

“You didn’t have to tell me. Not being as stupid as I look, I figured that out all by myself.”

“Well, you figured wrong. I’m no blackmailer. But I
am
the man holding Nina’s diary, and I’ll be more than happy to turn it over to the police if you don’t stop hemming and hawing and start talking to me. Right now.”

“But I still don’t understand—”

“I’ll give you two minutes, Ms. Serrano. Take it or leave it.”

She took it, but not before all of the allotted 120 seconds had come and gone.

“Alvin Bascomb was a terrible man,” she said. “One of the most sadistic people I’ve ever known. He was big, and he was ugly—about six seven or six eight, at least three hundred pounds. He was a bear. And he towered over Doreen, his wife, like a skyscraper over a toolshed—she was just as tiny as he was huge.

“Anyway, I met Doreen one night I was doing a ride-along with the police out in Culver City, taking pictures and talking to the victims whenever a domestic disturbance call came in. Bascomb had beat her up pretty bad and she’d called the police on him. I’ll never forget her face that night. She had this giant gash over her left eye that wouldn’t stop bleeding, and when they asked her how she’d gotten it, she told them her husband had hit her over the head with a stereo speaker. Can you believe that? They found it sitting on the living room couch, the wires still hooked up to it, and everything.”

“Where was Bascomb?” Gunner asked.

“In the bedroom. Asleep,” Serrano said. “That was apparently his pattern. Drink heavily, beat Doreen silly, then pass out.”

“They take him in?”

“Yes. Of course. It was either that or kill him. Those cops were almost as furious as I was, and that was before they woke him up and he started acting like he hadn’t done anything wrong. Like it was the most natural thing in the world for a man to beat his wife with a stereo speaker before retiring for the evening.”

“He do any time?”

“Three months. He was sentenced to twelve, but nine were suspended.” Serrano hesitated, having reached the part of the story she was most reluctant to tell. “We became friends, Doreen and I. I liked her. She wasn’t very smart, but she was sweet. Very kind, very generous. I devoted a whole section of one of my books to her. But then Alvin got out of jail.”

“And she took him back.”

“Yes. It was crazy. Insane. I tried everything I could to talk her out of it, to persuade her to leave him before he was released, but she wouldn’t do it. They had three underage children in private school, and she was only working part-time. She needed his financial support.

“When he came back, I tried to spend as much time with Doreen as I could, thinking he wouldn’t touch her as long as my camera and I were around. And for a while, I was right. He didn’t like my being there, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. He knew if he ever messed with me, I’d have the pictures to prove it. Then one night—he’d been home about three weeks, I think—he lost it. Big-time. Something at the garage he owned in West L.A. had set him off and he came home already drunk and in a rage. He walked through the door and went straight for Doreen, too angry and shitfaced to even notice I was there. He had her down on the kitchen floor before I could blink, choking her with one hand and punching her with the other. When I tried to pull him off, he turned on me. He threw me backward and I fell. He came after me and I reached out for something to hit him with …”

“And found a knife instead.”

Serrano nodded. “Yes. I’d knocked down an open drawer when I fell and spilled utensils all over the floor. I grabbed a knife and I stabbed him, once, in the chest. I didn’t think about it, I just did it. It was instinctive, not premeditated. We called the paramedics for him, but he died before they could get there.”

“Where were the kids?”

“‘The kids weren’t there. They were over at a neighbor’s that night.”

“So they didn’t see anything.”

“No.”

“Whose idea was it to let Doreen take the blame for Bascomb’s death?”

“It was hers. I know you won’t believe that, but it’s true. She’s a very beautiful person, like I told you. She knew I might have trouble getting the police to believe I’d killed him in self-defense, so she offered to tell them she’d done it. She had the bruises to prove he’d attacked her. I didn’t.

“At first, I was against the idea. I didn’t like the thought of lying to the police about a homicide. I wasn’t afraid anything would happen to her—one look at her and I knew they’d accept her story without much of an argument, especially considering Alvin’s long history of abusing her—but I was worried there could be complications later, our lie was ever discovered. So I told her no, let’s just tell the truth. Say what really happened, and take our chances.”

“But that’s not what you did.”

“No.”

“You changed your mind.”

“Yes. I changed my mind.”

“Why?”

“Because at the last minute, I thought about my career. I considered what might happen to it, word got out I’d killed the abusive partner of one of my photo subjects. Self-defense or no self-defense.”

“You mean that you’d be ruined.”

“I don’t know about ruined. But getting the same access to people I’d been accustomed to getting would have certainly become more difficult for me, if not outright impossible. I get invited into the homes of abused women because they trust me to
record
their lives, Mr. Gunner, not interfere in them. If I’d admitted to killing Alvin, I might never have been trusted by anyone that way again. So I decided to go along with Doreen’s suggestion. We told the police she’d killed Alvin, not me, and they believed it. They had no reason not to.”

“Any regrets?” Gunner asked.

“To tell you the truth? No. Not until this very moment.”

She shook her head and smiled.

“How did you end up telling Nina all this? What made you decide to confess to her?”

“I don’t know, really. It just happened. We were close, like I told you earlier. I trusted her. One day we were going over one of my books together, and she was asking me to talk about each segment. You know, give her some background on the people involved—who was who in this shot or that, what was going on at the time it was taken, et cetera, et cetera. Anecdotal stuff, in other words.”

“And when you got to the segment on Doreen Bascomb …”

“I told her how Alvin had really died. Yes.” She shook her head, recalling her folly. “It was a stupid thing to do, of course. But I wasn’t really sorry I did it. Not until—”

“Until you found out she was keeping a diary,” Gunner said.

“Yes. I never knew. She never had it out around me. I didn’t know she had one until one night out at the house, I caught her writing in it. I’d gone up to her room to say good night and surprised her. She rushed to put it away, but it was too late; I’d already recognized it for what it was.

“I didn’t think anything of it at first, but then I remembered what I’d told her. About Alvin Bascomb. And I began to worry. I knew she’d never tell anybody about it, but if she’d written about it in her diary, and somebody at the house happened to get their hands on it … The thought of that started to frighten me.”

“Did Nina admit she’d written about Bascomb’s death in the diary?”

“No. She wouldn’t admit anything. She wouldn’t even admit she
had
a diary, even though I told her I’d seen it. All I wanted her to do was promise me she’d destroy any entries she might have made mentioning the Bascomb affair, but she wouldn’t do it. She denied everything.”

“Leaving you no choice but to find the diary and delete the offensive entries, if they even existed, yourself.”

“Yes.”

“And that’s what you were looking for in her room when she caught you. Not the bracelet you told me about, but the diary.”

“Yes.”

“The bracelet never actually existed. Did it?”

“No. I’m afraid it didn’t.”

Gunner didn’t say anything for a minute. “You want to tell me the rest of the story now?”

Serrano looked at him, her eyes blank. “The rest of the story? I don’t—”

“When you couldn’t find her diary, and Nina wouldn’t agree to edit it, that left you in kind of a tough spot. Didn’t it? I mean, what you said earlier is true: Word gets out you took an active role in the affairs of a photo subject like Doreen Bascomb, nobody’s going to trust you to be nothing but a sideline player ever again. And if they can’t trust you to stay on the sidelines … you probably don’t get in the front door. And if you don’t get in the front door—”

“What are you trying to say, Mr. Gunner? Spit it out, please.”

Gunner waved a hand around the room, said, “Well, this is your livelihood we’re talking about, isn’t it? All of this isn’t a
hobby
of yours. So you lose your ability to do this kind of work, you’re not just losing a little. You’re losing a lot. You’re losing damn near everything, I’d imagine.”

“And that leads you to conclude what? That I murdered Nina to keep her silent?”

“You make it sound like an impossibility.”

“It
is
impossible.”

“Not from where I sit.”

“Then you’re sitting on your
brains.
I couldn’t have killed Nina even if I’d wanted to.”

“And why is that, Ms. Serrano?”

“Because I was in Eugene at the time, Mr. Gunner. Almost a thousand miles away.”

“Eugene?”

“That’s right. Eugene. It’s in Oregon. Ever hear of it?”

“But you told me it wasn’t true. That what Wendy Singer and the others at Sisterhood said about your being out of town at the time of Nina’s death—”

“I told you that that wasn’t the reason I was no longer spending time there, Mr. Gunner. That’s what I told you. I also said I hadn’t been anywhere on the East Coast, which I hadn’t. That was the specific question you asked me, had I been anywhere on the East Coast when Nina died? Had you asked me simply whether or not I’d been out of town at the time, I would have told you yes, I was. I was in Eugene, Oregon, for six days, starting the Friday before Nina was killed, to the Wednesday afterward, and I have the photographs to prove it. But that’s not the question you asked. You check your notes again, I believe you’ll see that.”

Gunner did.

And she was right.

His notes weren’t detailed enough to reflect that, but the more he thought about it, the more he seemed to recall that it had happened just the way she described it. He’d asked the wrong questions, and she’d answered them. Nothing more, and nothing less.

“Guess I owe you an apology,” he said.

Serrano folded her arms across her chest and waited for him to get started.