The legal term for what I am about to share with you in this first chapter is “hearsay,” meaning I didn’t witness any of it myself. I’ve cobbled together this pivotal event in Edison Bixby’s extraordinary life from what I was told by people who were there, what I’ve read on the internet, and what I’ve imagined. But I assure you it’s 99 percent accurate, because I’m an actor with an intuitive ability to create full-bodied characters from the slightest scraps of information.
Like so much in Bixby’s life, it all began with a murder.
Let me set the stage, because what happened was like a play that Agatha Christie might have written . . . if she were on crack.
The location was the ballroom of the grand old Belmont Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, where five hundred of the city’s elite gathered for a luncheon honoring Grant Murdock—the talented chef, successful restaurateur, hard-partying metrosexual playboy, and unapologetic narcissist—as businessperson of the year due to the extraordinary success of Slop, his new Michelin-starred restaurant.
But they never got the chance. Murdock dropped dead at the table of honor after taking one sip of his gumbo, which, to add insult to fatal injury, was his own signature dish, though I’m sure fast-acting poison wasn’t in his recipe.
The Belmont’s savvy manager, who’d dealt with plenty of celebrity overdoses, suicides, and murders in the hotel over the years, immediately ordered the entire property sealed off by armed security guards.
Not a single person, employee, napkin, or spoon was allowed to leave the building.
The first LAPD detective on the scene was Bridget McGregor, wearing the same off-the-rack pantsuit and blouse that she’d worn the day before and sporting a carefree hairstyle created by her bed pillow. It didn’t take her long to establish the facts of the murder and to assess the tricky context in which it had occurred.
Some of the most politically connected people in Los Angeles were in that ballroom, four of them at the table where Murdock was face down in his soup. They were important, angry, and demanding a quick solution to the murder. And, to her credit, McGregor knew that she couldn’t give them one.
But she knew someone who could.
McGregor took out her phone and reluctantly called Edison Bixby, the LAPD’s top homicide detective, who undoubtedly would’ve been assigned the case if it hadn’t been his day off.
Bixby pulled up to the Belmont thirty minutes later in a matte-black Bugatti Chiron with a flashing red bubble light stuck on top. It was brash and ridiculous, with a touch of self-deprecation, designed to make Bixby come across as charming rather than obnoxious, which wasn’t an easy feat to pull off. But, somehow, he did it.
He drove under the hotel’s vast portico past the medical examiner’s wagon and the crime scene unit’s van and took the open spot directly in front of the lobby doors.
The Chiron’s driver’s side door opened and Bixby effortlessly emerged in a perfectly tailored Tom Ford suit, a flower in his lapel and his badge wallet open over the breast pocket of his jacket. He might as well have been wearing a tuxedo. Frankly, I’m surprised that he wasn’t, since he was obviously going for a Bruce Wayne vibe. He was thirty-one years old, but looked much younger. He had a smattering of curated stubble on his cheeks and his hair was artfully askew, as if he’d just arrived from the makeup chair at a Vanity Fair photo shoot, which, incredibly, was exactly where he was coming from.
Bixby smiled and handed his key to the bewildered valet. “Don’t press the wrong button or you’ll activate the ejector seat.”
The multimillionaire detective, and LA’s most eligible bachelor, strode into the lobby with a dancer’s grace, as if he might break into song or bust a move at any moment—then he saw medical examiner Rosalind “Rosie” Okamoto and some CSI techs milling around, killing time.
Bixby went up to Rosie, a stout woman in her forties, who was leaning against a pillar and checking her email. She looked up as he approached and he gestured across the lobby to the ballroom doors, where two uniformed police officers were standing guard.
“Isn’t the body in there?” he said.
“Yes, and I got a quick look at him, but we got shooed out by McGregor. We were told to wait on you before doing our work,” Rosie said. “Terrific entrance, by the way. Shame there were no photographers here to see it.”
“If you’re going to arrive,” Bixby said, “you should arrive.”
“I wish I could, but I don’t have a $3 million sports car, a $6,000 suit, and a personal trainer to keep me slim.”
He leaned close to her ear and whispered: “It’s not the money. It’s the attitude.”
“What’s yours?”
“This job is so much fun and I’m great at it.”
“Every day we see dead bodies and meet people experiencing the worst moment of their lives,” she said. “What’s fun about that?”
“Solving mysteries, fixing problems, and making the world a better place.”
Bixby said it without a trace of sarcasm, cynicism, or any ism. It was an honest response.
Rosie stared at him. “You can’t be for real.”
“You have to embrace life, Rosie. But first, tell me why Grant Murdock can’t anymore.”
“I obviously haven’t done an autopsy or any toxicology tests yet, so don’t hold me to this, but I’d say he was killed by a fast-acting poison, probably cyanide or strychnine.”
Bixby tugged the flower out of his lapel and gently slipped it into Rosie’s hair. “Don’t get too comfy. I’ll only be a few minutes.”
“You’re awfully sure of yourself.” He winked at her. “Awfully.”
Bixby strode to the ballroom, where the uniformed police officers standing guard opened the doors for him like he was royalty. And, let’s face it, that’s exactly what he was, at least at the LAPD, where he had an unprecedented 100 percent case-closure rate.
His arrival in the ballroom created an immediate buzz. People discreetly slipped their phones out of their pockets or their handbags to snap a picture of him as he weaved among the tables toward the table of honor in front of the dais.
I’m sure he noticed the phones because he’s a man who sees everything without appearing to be looking at anything. He also noticed the banquet tables, the place settings, the flower arrangements, the chandeliers, as well as minutiae like the knot on someone’s shoelaces, a dirty fork on the carpet, fresh crumbs on a tablecloth, and the hairs on a passing fly’s ass. I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
He stopped just short of the table of honor, where Murdock lay face down in his soup and the four other table guests stood near their former seats, radiating their social stature and their withering impatience. Detective Bridget McGregor stood off to one side, interviewing a nervous male server.
Before McGregor could approach Bixby, one of the guests, a middle-aged woman with a Botox-tightened face and collagen-swollen lips and wearing more diamonds than most jewelry stores have in stock, cut him off.
“The great detective has finally graced us with his presence,” Edith Gotsford said. “How much longer do we have to stand here watching Grant decompose in his gumbo?”
“You could look the other way,” Bixby said.
“She can’t.” This snide comment came from a much younger woman than Gotsford, but also a devotee of plastic surgery. Her name was Lake Blue, but prior to leaving Oklahoma for Hollywood to pursue a career as a supermodel, social media influencer, actress, or, if all else failed, the wife of a very rich man, her name was Harriet Glick. She was too thin, thanks to injections of black-market Ozempic, and top heavy, thanks to surgically enhanced breasts, which were very much on display in a low-cut summer dress.
“She’s loving it,” Lake continued. “I’ll bet she already took a selfie with his corpse.”
“And I’ll bet you’ve lifted his wallet.” Gotsford glowered at her, then shifted her glower to Bixby. “I’d frisk that gold digger if I were you.”
Lake smiled at him. “I’d like that. Be thorough. Pro tip: It could be in my cleavage.”
Gotsford took a glance at her bosom and sneered. “You could hide a duffel bag between those enormous basketballs. Pro tip: Don’t get your boob job at Dick’s Sporting Goods.”
Bixby ignored them both and walked around the table, shouldering past a man to get a closer look at Murdock’s body.
The man was Roger Fitzhugh, the Southern California car dealership tycoon, who smelled heavily of breath mints and alcohol, which he sucked on to hide the smell of everything he’d been drinking, fooling no one. His rheumy eyes, the spider veins on his bulbous nose, and the drops of red wine on his tie were some of the subtle giveaways. I’m sure Bixby spotted even more.
“At least Grant’s last meal had a Michelin star,” Fitzhugh said. “He would have wanted it that way.”
Bixby glanced at Fitzhugh’s bowl of soup and the other dishes on the table. It appeared that Murdock’s death had ruined everyone’s appetites. Nobody had touched their soup, which was totally understandable. I wouldn’t have, either. Even the basket of bread hadn’t been disturbed.
“It’s restaurants that get stars,” Bixby said, “not individual dishes.”
“It’s the dishes that make the restaurant, monsieur,” said Pierre Delcourt, another of the table guests, who wore a tailored chef’s jacket with his name embroidered on it, even though he wasn’t cooking anything that day and hadn’t been in an actual restaurant kitchen in years, not counting the fake ones on his Fox Network cooking competition shows, of course. The jacket was his brand, like Colonel Sanders’ white suit and black bow-ribbon tie, though he’d hate that comparison.
“If you say so.” Bixby plucked a piece of bread from the basket and sniffed it. “Mmmm. Sourdough. I love the smell.”
Gotsford snorted. “Are you sure you’re capable of solving this murder? Frankly, you don’t seem up to it to me.”
Before Bixby could respond, McGregor grabbed him by the arm and led him away from the table.
“Excuse us,” she said, and practically dragged him over to the wall beside the dais.
Bixby turned his back to the table to face her. “What a lovely group of people.”
“And they each have a motive for killing Murdock.”
“Of course they do,” he said, taking a bite of the bread.
“Edith Gotsford was Murdock’s first wife. He married her for her money and social contacts, exploiting them to the max to boost his career, while also having an affair with Lake Blue, who is now his second wife, and he’s cheating on her with the eighteen-year-old star of a Disney sitcom, if you believe the tabloids.”
“They’ve always been accurate about me.”
“Because they lavish you with praise, treating every case you solve like you’ve achieved cold fusion in your kitchen using Elmer’s glue and a bag of ice.”
“Do you know what cold fusion is?”
“I don’t have the slightest idea.”
“You could have fooled me,” Bixby said.
She studied his face. “Are you wearing makeup?”
“Just a little,” he said. “I didn’t have time to wash it off after the photo shoot. Does it make me seem self-absorbed and obsessed with my appearance?”
“No more than the usual,” McGregor said. “Getting back to the murder, Chef Pierre Delcourt was Murdock’s mentor, who taught him everything. Murdock repaid the favor by stealing his recipes, including the gumbo he died in, to make himself famous. Roger Fitzhugh invested heavily in Murdock’s much-hyped frozen-food venture, which bombed because of terrible quality control, by which I mean none at all. People got violently ill eating that shit. Murdock diverted most of Fitzhugh’s money into renovating his beach house, which he claimed was the company’s headquarters. None of the four are making a dime out of Slop, his wildly successful new restaurant. The place is booked solid for two years. It’s easier to get a reservation at Buckingham Palace.”
“You will definitely be needing these soon.” Bixby reached into his pocket and handed her a set of handcuffs. “You left them locked to the bedpost this morning.”
She snatched the cuffs from him and jammed them into her pocket, looking around to see if anyone noticed. Nobody did. “I knew it was a mistake bringing you down here.”
“Then why did you do it?”
“Because Grant Murdock was murdered in front of everyone at his table, and hundreds of other people—including most of the Los Angeles City Council, two Oscar winners, and the man most likely to be our next mayor—and I have no idea how it was done.”
Bixby glanced over his shoulder at the table, turned back to her, and shrugged. “The murder doesn’t seem that complicated to me.”
“It’s impossible.”
“I don’t see why.”
“The seats at the table were reserved for specific guests, but the actual seats themselves were unassigned, so nobody could have known ahead of time which seat Murdock would take or which bowl he would eat his soup from,” she said. “Moreover, the guests at the table had no way of knowing which server, or which tureen of soup, would be used at that table. Not only that, but the server couldn’t have poisoned him, because none of the other people he served at that table, or any previous table, from the same tureen were poisoned. On top of that, the server doled out the soup before the diners at the table were all seated.”
While she was telling him all those important details, Bixby ate his piece of bread and studied the ceiling, which she found very distracting.
“Did you hear a word that I just said?” she said.
“I heard you say ‘soup’ a lot.” Bixby shifted his gaze from the ceiling to her. “Isn’t gumbo more like a stew than a soup?”
“I think you’re missing the point.”
“I haven’t missed anything.”
She knew that was probably true, which was why she’d called him, so now she studied the ceiling, though she had no idea what she was looking for. “What do you see up there?”
“Get the hotel manager over here right away.”
“You think the poison was dropped into Murdock’s soup from the ceiling?”
“Go,” he said urgently, then turned his back on her, and studied a row of identical light switches on the wall.
She left to find the manager and, as soon as her back was to him, Bixby took a black Sharpie out from inside his jacket and began drawing a big square on the wall above the row of light switches. He then put X’s in each interior corner and two in the center. He was still working on it when McGregor returned with the hotel manager.
“Detective Bixby, this is the Belmont’s manager, Jack Porter.”
Porter was short, with an epic comb-over that drew long hair from the sides of his head that would have otherwise entirely covered his hobbit-like ears and hung down to his shoulders. “Are you drawing on my wall?”
Bixby pointed his Sharpie at the row of light switches. “Do you know which of these switches controls the chandeliers?”
McGregor groaned to herself.
“No, I don’t,” Porter said. “But I could get our tech guy down here.”
Now it was Bixby’s turn to appear incredulous. “You’re the manager of the hotel and you’re telling me that you don’t know how to operate the ballroom lights?”
“It’s not my job,” Porter said.
“Your job is to assure that your guests have a pleasurable experience in your hotel.”
“It’s just the lights—”
Bixby interrupted him. “Lights are crucial, and how to turn them on and off should be obvious to anyone, including you or a guest, without having to call ‘the tech guy.’ But it’s not. It’s totally unclear from this row of switches which one controls which light.”
McGregor spoke up, her impatience giving her voice an edge. “What do the light switches have to do with the murder?”
“They are the only thing in this ballroom that’s impossible to understand.” Bixby tapped his Sharpie against his drawing on the wall. “This is a map of the chandeliers on the ceiling. Install a light switch where each X is—that way anybody who walks in here will instantly know which switch controls each chandelier. Problem solved.”
McGregor had to practically grit her teeth to keep her anger in check. “The lights aren’t the problem you’re here to solve, Bixby. It’s the murder.”
He waved off her objection. “Oh, I did that the instant I walked in the room.”
“You did?”
“The answer is in the design.”
“You always say that.”
“Because it’s a fact of life.” Bixby glanced at Porter. “Don’t go anywhere. I’m not finished with you yet.”
And then Bixby went to the dead man’s table, McGregor and Porter following along. He addressed the four guests, who still stood impatiently by their seats at the table.
“The layout of the room, the arrangement of the tables, the placement of the dishware, and the system for serving food are all designs that combine to determine what can and can’t be done in the space. Unless you are very smart and figure out a way to use the design against itself. But that didn’t happen this time. This murder was stupid.”
McGregor said, “Are you saying I’m dumb?”
“I’m saying they are.” Bixby swept an arm toward Edith Gotsford, Pierre Delcourt, Lake Blue, and Roger Fitzhugh. “They killed him.”
Everyone except Bixby appeared to be stupefied by the pronouncement, but it was McGregor who asked the obvious question.
“How did they do that?”
“Look at the table,” Bixby said, and McGregor did. “None of the guests touched their spoons or tasted their gumbo. That’s because each spoon is coated in poison.”
McGregor nodded, the pieces fitting together for her now. “Since they didn’t know which seat Murdock would take at the table, they simply poisoned every spoon.”
“Simple, but stupid.” Bixby looked right at Gotsford. “Not exactly the work of a criminal mastermind, is it?”
And with that, he was done and shifted his attention to the astonished hotel manager. “Come with me, Mr. Porter. I want to see your hotel rooms. I’m sure the switches in there are a mess, too.”
Bixby turned his back to Gotsford and started to walk away, the murder and the killers already forgotten. The light switches were more important to him.
“Don’t you dare turn your back on me,” Gotsford shouted.
Bixby looked over his shoulder at her, a bemused grin on his face. “Who are you again?”
“You sanctimonious prick.” She thrust her hand into her Birkin bag, yanked out a small gun, and shot Edison Bixby in the face.
That should have been the end of his story. But it wasn’t.
It was only the beginning.