Chapter 23 #2
The black sharpie was right there on the table, so Jules picked it up and added info that he’d just obtained: The employment dates of the final three of the four different housekeepers—Cathy who he’d marked with a large number two, Paula number three, and the fourth and final housekeeper, Rene, whom they’d met at Devonshire Place.
The OG housekeeper, Helen, AKA number one—her departure date was the same as the date of the old man’s stroke, so he made a note of that on Sam’s paper towel roll, too.
Just an hour ago, Jules had woken up with a gasp, heart pounding. As he’d scrambled to his feet, he at first had no clue where he was.
But Robin was right there, sitting on the floor near him, and Sam was sitting across from them in an easy chair, and it all clicked into place.
Rental house. Los Angeles. Finding Emily Johnson. Milt Devonshire the Junior changed his name to Mick O’Rourke after serving time for vehicular manslaughter. Gavin LaCrosse in a now undeniably suspiciously timed body bag. Car accident, gardens, birds and ashes...
“How long have I been asleep?” he’d asked digging for his phone to check the time. “Shit, I wanted to call the housekeepers again. I have so many questions after talking to Rene.”
“We can do all of that in the morning,” Sam interrupted. “It’s okay to take a night off.”
But it wasn’t even eight o’clock. Which wasn’t too late to make those calls.
Jules had gone upstairs, splashed water on his face, and called Paula, Cathy, and Helen—calling back again, several times each, for Paula and Cathy. He’d had more and more follow-up questions for them as the batshit craziest idea in the known universe swirled and then started to gel in his head.
But right now he gestured down at Sam’s timeline. “This is really great,” he reiterated. “To be able to see it laid out like this...”
Sam had dug through the financial records and included the date that Gavin LaCrosse had first appeared on Devonshire’s personal payroll—it was just a few weeks after the hit-and-run.
As was the date that LaCrosse had started producing and directing his own soon-to-fail projects. Hard to believe that was a coincidence.
“So, what’s batshit crazy?” Robin came over to see what Jules had added to the timeline.
Jules pointed to the dates he’d added for the four housekeepers.
“I got into the weeds with the women,” he said, as Sam pushed himself to his feet and joined them at the table.
“I asked for the exact dates they started and stopped working at Devonshire Place because... Well, a question that’s been bugging me is, why was the housekeeper turnover rate so high?
And okay, it’s a hard job and the pay probably sucks, but when I asked, none of them left by choice.
Well, Rene left because Devonshire died, but Helen, Cathy and Paula?
Harper terminated their contracts—and gave them very generous severance packages—which raised even more questions. ”
“Like what the fuck?” Sam suggested.
“Pretty much,” Jules said. “So I dug into it with Cathy and Paula, who were housekeepers two and three. Helen, Devonshire’s longtime housekeeper, told us she was let go because her bad back didn’t fit with the old man’s mobility issues—his need for a walker or a wheelchair.
But Rene—the final housekeeper—was adamant that Devonshire was bedbound from the very start.
So I asked Cathy—housekeeper number two, who was employed immediately after Devonshire’s stroke—and she confirmed that yeah, he only left the bed for his weekly excursions into the garden, and it was a whole big production to get him into the wheelchair. As for using a walker? Nope.”
“So Harper lied to Helen, probably because he wanted to get rid of her,” Sam said. “He probably knew he could pay someone else a lot less.”
“Yeah, but he didn’t,” Jules said. “Their salaries were comparable, if not higher. And since everyone got severance pay...? Harper wasn’t saving money here.”
“So maybe he just hated Helen,” Sam said. “And Cathy. And Paula. I mean, we know he hated Rene—maybe she was about to get the boot, too.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Jules said, but he didn’t think so. “Look at the dates of employment of all four housekeepers.” He’d marked the exact dates that Helen had left and Cathy had started, when Cathy had left and Paula had started, and so on until Devonshire’s death—all laid out clearly on the timeline.
Sam and Robin both leaned in to look.
“There are gaps,” Robin noted.
Sam did the math. “There’s a three day gap between Helen and Cathy—housekeepers one and two, two days between Cathy and Paula, and twenty-four days between Paula and the final housekeeper Rene.”
“Did he have extended hospital stays at those times?” Robin asked.
“That’s what I was thinking, too,” Jules said.
“So I called Cathy and Paula back and asked—as gently as I could—why they were let go. And both women told me that Devonshire had some kind of medical incident. In Paula’s case, he was going downhill fast—a natural expectation for someone of his age—but he apparently was suddenly in pain—and she never found out exactly why.
Cathy told me that he had a bad case of the flu, possibly pneumonia—which at that age can be deadly.
However, both women followed protocol and called the security head, Clayton Spencer, who called a private ambulance, which apparently is a real thing. ”
“We are in LA,” Sam said.
“Actually, it’s everywhere these days,” Jules corrected him.
“But okay, I was thinking what you thought,” he looked at Robin.
“Devonshire’s whisked off to the hospital for an extended stay.
But it felt... wrong that he was only in there for a few days both for his initial massive stroke and a bad case of the flu, while random pain gets more than two weeks?
I asked Paula, who was the housekeeper before that big twenty-four day gap, if her nursing staff had had any idea what the problem was, and she told me her day nurse was convinced that Devonshire was dying.
And when I circled back to Cathy, she said the exact same thing. ”
“He was a million years old,” Sam pointed out.
“Yeah, well, I’m trying to make it make sense, and as I’m talking to them, I keep thinking about the garden.
I know, weird, right?” He aimed his words at Robin since Sam had seen the place.
“So here’s the batshit part. See, the last and final housekeeper—Rene—gave us a lengthy monologue about how someone planted petunias and put down fresh mulch in the garden, right before she arrived.
She was... a tad judgmental about the fact that it was mid-August and the flowers—”
“Oh, they were DOA,” Robin said. “In LA? I mean, their life expectancy was a day, maybe two at most in that kind of heat. That’s not crazy.”
“No,” Jules said. “Rene’s Rene. The crazy’s all me.
The crazy is, well, how do I say it...?” He took a deep breath.
“I strongly suspect that more than petunias were put in that garden, and not just in August, either. I think, with Mick’s permission to search the estate, we’re gonna find three bodies buried out there. ”