Night Night, Sleep Tight Read Online Free PDF

shrugged. “All I know is she was here. She said she had a meeting with him. She freaked out when the police arrived.”
    “I’ll bet she did.”
    “Don’t be mean. I remember, you liked her.”
    “Sure I liked her,” Henry said. “We had fun. Fooled around. But it was never serious. I haven’t talked to her since she killed—”
    “Supposedly killed.”
    Henry stood at the glass door and looked out into the yard. “Hey, she confessed.”

 
    Chapter 5
    T he story had made national news— DAUGHTER KILLS STAR’S BOYF R I E N D .
    It had happened on a night when Deirdre was sleeping over at the Nichols’ house, late after one of Bunny Nichol’s lavish parties. Bunny’s boyfriend, Antonio “Tito” Acevedo, was stabbed to death in her bedroom.
    Deirdre didn’t find out about the murder for days after because she was in the hospital. Her father—he and Gloria had been among the guests at the party earlier—had come back in the middle of the night to take her home. He’d carried her, half-asleep, out to his car. On the way home, his car skidded off the road and she was thrown out.
    She’d spent weeks in Northridge Hospital—Arthur had insisted the ambulance take her there because of their excellent reputation rehabbing Vietnam vets. After multiple operations, skin grafts, and physical therapy, the doctors finally conceded that the damage to her femoral nerve was permanent. She’d never be able to move her hip or bend and straighten her leg. She’d never feel heat, or cold, or pain, or even a gentle touch on the front of her thigh. Over time, the muscles would atrophy.
    No one had warned her how much she’d come to cherish what she’d once been—unremarkable and nearly invisible. Instead, her mere presence would attract uneasy stares.
    Desperate for anything to distract her from the pain and uncertainty of her ordeal, Deirdre had found a newspaper someone had left in the hospital visitors’ lounge and read about the murder. After that she watched the nightly news, first from her hospital bed and later from the living room couch, as the story of the murder, photographs of the crime scene, and the lives of Bunny and Joelen Nichol and Tito Acevedo were endlessly dissected and fed to an audience ravenous for every sordid detail. Later, when Deirdre was strong enough to visit the public library, she surreptitiously tore news articles from the public copies of the L.A. Times and stole away with them so she could read and reread their accounts of the murder and inquest that followed.
    The cause of death was a single knife thrust to the solar plexus; apparently Tito had dropped like a stone. “I did it,” Joelen had told the police, who must have arrived at the house after Arthur drove off with Deirdre.
    At the hearing, the coroner made a big deal about the lack of defensive wounds. Why hadn’t he tried to protect himself? But that didn’t seem at all far-fetched to Deirdre. Tito Acevedo, who carried a roll of hundred-dollar bills and a silver monogrammed gun-shaped Zippo lighter in his trouser pocket, would never have seen it coming. He wouldn’t have been the slightest bit afraid when Joelen came at him, all of fifteen years old, a hundred pounds, dressed in that flowered cotton granny gown she wore whenever Deirdre slept over.
    “He ran into my knife,” Joelen told the coroner’s jury.
    That ten-inch kitchen knife was scrutinized, as was the nightgown Joelen had been wearing. An expert who testified was skeptical. Why wasn’t there more blood? he wanted to know. From the wound Tito suffered, there should have been more.
    But far more compelling than the presence or absence of blood evidence or defensive wounds was the dramatic testimony of Joelen’s tearful movie star mother. Bunny Nichol sat in the witness box wearing a dark suit and a blouse with a ruffled collar that swathed her neck like a bandage. Her jet-black hair was pulled back in a severe French twist. In the black-and-white television