Jonathan Kellerman_Petra Connor 01 by Billy Straight Page B

drop limply. “I’m Greg Balch, Mr. Ramsey’s business manager—”
    Ramsey wheeled around suddenly. “Did it have anything to do with drugs?”
    A second of silence, then Stu said, “Did Mrs. Ramsey have a drug problem?”
    “No, no, just a while back—actually she’s not—wasn’t Mrs. Ramsey anymore. We got divorced six months ago and she took back her maiden name. It was friendly but . . . we didn’t see each other.” He shielded his face again and began to cry. Big wracking baritone sobs. Petra couldn’t see if there were any tears.
    Balch put his arm around Ramsey, and the actor let himself be guided into the house. The detectives followed. A moment later, when Ramsey made eye contact, it was with Petra, and she saw that his eyes were dry, steady, the whites unblemished, the sky-colored irises clear.
     
    The house smelled of bacon. The first thing Petra noticed once she got past the fifteen-foot ceilings and the junk art and all that endless cream furniture—like being dropped into a vat of buttermilk—was the five-door garage.
    Because a wall of plate glass offered a view from inside the house. This was a garage like da Vinci was a cartoonist.
    Fifty by twenty, with true-white walls, mega-buffed black granite floor, black track lighting. Five spaces, but only four were filled. And no limo. These were all collectibles: tomato-red Ferrari roadster with a predatory nose; charcoal-gray Porsche speedster with racing numbers on the door; black-and-maroon Rolls-Royce sedan with wonderful swooping fenders, a gigantic, ostentatious chrome grille, and a crystal hood mascot, probably Lalique; bright blue early Corvette ragtop, probably 1950s—the same blue as business manager Greg Balch’s silk shirt.
    In the fifth space, only a gravel-filled drip tray.
    On the walls were framed racing posters and airbrushed depictions of penile cars.
    Stu and the sheriffs had stopped to look. Men and cars. Petra was one woman who actually understood that syndrome. Maybe it was four brothers, maybe her sense of aesthetics, an appreciation of functional art. One of the reasons she’d hit it off with Nick was because she was able to stroke his ego and mean it. No stretch; the bastard had no soul, but he could carve masterpieces. His favorite was the ’67 Stingray, the apex of design, he called it. When Petra told him she was pregnant, he looked at her as if she were an Edsel . . .
    Greg Balch was a few feet ahead, squiring Ramsey into the next room, as the detectives pulled themselves away from the glass wall. Balch sat Ramsey down on an overstuffed cream silk loveseat and the actor remained hunched as if praying, head down, hands laced together on his right knee, bulky neck muscles tight.
    The four detectives took places on a facing nine-foot-long sofa, moving around pastel throw pillows to find space. One cushion ended up in De la Torre’s wide lap, and his stumpy brown fingers drummed the glossy fabric. Banks sat calmly, not moving. A coffee table composed of a granite boulder with a slab of glass on top marked the space between Ramsey and the cops. Balch took a side chair.
    Petra scanned the room. Grotesquely big. She supposed it was a den. It looked into three equally cavernous spaces, each with the same pale overscale furniture, bleached wood accents, huge, terrible pastel abstractions on the walls. Through glass doors she saw grass and palms, a rock pool with waterfall, a four-hole putting course, the grass mown to the skin, nearly gray.
    De golf.
Two chrome irons lay on the nubby grass; behind the green was the corral and a cute little pink barn.
    Where was vehicle number five? Hidden so it could be cleaned, scrubbed of blood?
    And they couldn’t even ask about it. She’d seen how long it took the techs to go over a vehicle carefully. If the investigation ever got to the point where they had a search warrant, just doing all the Ramsey wheels would require a major crew for days.
    Her eyes drifted back to the corral.