Seaside Lies

by Sherryl Woods

  “Probably not,” she admitted. “But neither does Veronica.”

  “We’ll see,” he said. “We’ll see.”

  * * *

  An hour later, after they’d sampled several appetizers at an upscale Middle Eastern restaurant, Molly and Michael took the elevator up to Veronica’s suite. Jeffrey Meyerson greeted them at the door, his expression unwelcoming.

  “We need to have a talk with Ms. Weston,” Michael told him.

  “Now’s not a good time,” Jeffrey said. “Couldn’t you come back later? Maybe tomorrow.”

  “No,” Michael said. “We need to see her now.”

  “It’s okay, darling,” Veronica called from the bedroom. “Let them in.”

  Jeffrey looked unhappy, but he stepped out of their way and gestured toward the living room. A room service tray held coffee, cups, and half-eaten chicken salad sandwiches on croissants. A pale pink rosebud—a lover’s gesture or a hotel nicety—provided a festive note to the skimpy meal. An empty vodka bottle had been upended in the trash can and a fresh bottle, its cap still off, sat on the wet bar. Obviously Veronica had given up any pretense of being on the wagon.

  Jeffrey rinsed out the cups, dried them, and offered coffee. His hand shook as he poured the still-steaming liquid into two cups. Either he was hung over from the luncheon champagne he’d finished off or very nervous. Molly wondered again what Jeffrey Meyerson had to be nervous about. His gaze kept darting to the manila folder Michael had placed on the credenza.

  It was fifteen minutes before Veronica joined them. During that time Jeffrey kept up a constant barrage of inconsequential chatter, like a host making small talk with strangers at a dinner party arranged by his wife for her friends.

  Veronica swept into the room at last, her trademark chiffon billowing behind, this time in a shade of pale yellow that erupted into brilliant orange at the hem.

  “I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting,” she said as she waved in the general direction of the bottle of vodka. Jeffrey took the hint and poured a double shot over ice. He handed the heavy crystal glass to her and served up a warning look at the same time.

  “What can I do for you?” Veronica asked. Nothing in her tone or her manner betrayed any hint of nervousness.

  “I’d like you to take a look at this, see if it means anything to you,” Michael said, handing her the folder. Jeffrey looked as if he wanted to snatch it away from her.

  Veronica took one look at the hospital record and birth certificate made out in the name of Francine Weatherly and turned the shade of library paste. She crumpled into an armchair, the swirls of chiffon settling around her.

  “Are you okay?” Molly asked, concerned by her lack of color.

  “No,” Veronica said flatly. She stared at Michael. “What does this have to do with anything? Why would you dredge up something like this after all these years? It can’t possibly have any bearing on the case.”

  Before Michael could respond, Molly stepped in. She sat beside Veronica and held the woman’s hand as she said gently, “Look at the birth certificate again, the date. Remember when we celebrated Greg’s birthday?”

  “What are you saying?” Veronica whispered, her eyes wide with shock.

  “I’m asking you if there is any chance, any chance at all, that Gregory could have been your son.”

  “Oh, my God,” Veronica said, tears spilling down her cheeks. “Oh, my God.”

  Jeffrey looked as if he wanted to murder the pair of them. “Why did you have to blurt it out like that? Leave us alone,” he demanded. “Just leave us alone.”

  Michael regarded him apologetically. “I’m afraid we can’t do that. If it’s true, this could have a material bearing on this case.” He turned a compassionate gaze on Veronica. “Is there any chance?”

  Her hands covering her face, Veronica nodded. “It’s possible, but I didn’t know. I swear to you I didn’t know.”

  “We think that Greg did know.”

  “He did,” Jeffrey said, defeat in his voice. “I spoke to him on the day he died. I had always thought there was something a little odd about the way he fought so hard to keep Veronica on this film. At first I thought it was simply that he liked her work, wanted to give her a chance to redeem herself, but as time went on, I saw that it was much more than that. I did a little investigating of my own.”

  Veronica regarded him incredulously. “You knew? You knew and you never said a word to me? How could you, Jeff? How could you do that to me?”

  “I had to, my dear. Can’t you see that? I didn’t want to tell you until I knew for certain. When I found out, I asked Greg about it. He admitted it. We both agreed that I should be here when he told you. That’s why I flew in on Saturday, to be with you when you found out that he was your son. When I got here and discovered that he’d been murdered, I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t sure what the implications were.”

  “So you never said a word to anyone?” Molly asked.

  “Not one word,” he confirmed.

  “Did anyone else know?”

  “To my knowledge, no.”

  “But someone must have,” Molly said. “Someone who would have benefited from Greg’s will, but only if he had no living relatives.”

  “Exactly,” Michael concurred. “I hope to hell Jenkins can get his hands on that will tonight.”

  Molly’s gaze was fixed on Veronica. She looked shattered, as if nothing in the world made sense to her anymore. Molly guessed she needed to talk, to say out loud what she had hidden for all these years.

  “It just can’t be,” she said over and over. “It would be too bizarre, too awful.”

  Michael said, “It’s probably not necessary now that we know he admitted the truth to Jeffrey, but I’m trying to get Gregory’s adoption records unsealed. What I have so far indicates that he was adopted by a wealthy Santa Barbara family. The birth date matches.”

  Veronica kept shaking her head. “I never knew,” she said sorrowfully. “I never understood why he wanted so much to work with me, why he fought the studio. You think it was because he knew even then, months ago?”

  “Friends of his adoptive parents told police in Santa Barbara that he’d been looking for his natural mother for several years. They said he knew it upset his parents, so he’d never told them whether he’d traced her. They both died not knowing if he’d succeeded.”

  “Why did you give him up?” Molly asked, hoping that she was doing the right thing in trying to get the actress to open up. “In the sixties no one would have condemned you for having a child without being married.”

  Veronica shook her head. “You’re wrong about that. My son wasn’t illegitimate. I was married when he was conceived, but my husband was a real bastard. I didn’t want him near my child.”

  Molly was shocked. “There’s never been any mention of a marriage in any of the bios I’ve read, not back then.”

  “The studio kept it hushed up. I was barely eighteen when we got married and just getting a reputation as some sort of sex goddess. The studio and my husband, who’d directed my first two films, agreed it would spoil the image if the marriage were made public. Everyone was very paternalistic about it, and I was too naïve to argue.”

  “Then what happened?” Molly prodded, when Veronica seemed uninclined to go on. “Why did you give up your baby?”

  Veronica took a deep breath. She kept her gaze fastened on Molly as if she couldn’t bear to face anyone else in the room.

  “When things fell apart, I tried to get a divorce, but by then my husband was convinced his fate was linked to mine. It was hard enough battling that without telling him about a baby. He would never have let me go.”

  “But he did let you go,” Molly said.

  “In a way. I told everyone I needed to get away, to get my head together. Then I went into hiding for the last few months of the pregnanc
y. I arranged for a private adoption so there would be fewer official questions. I couldn’t risk anything leaking out in the press. It was best all the way around to give up my son, but I never forgot about him. Never. I regretted it more than I can say, but it was the only way I could think of for both of us to survive.”

  Again tears welled in her eyes. “Do you know the real tragedy of all this? I saw that Greg cared for me. Underneath all the fighting, all the screaming over the script, I could see that he really cared what happened to me on-screen. I didn’t understand why it mattered so much to him, but it was there, always. The caring. The demand for every shot to be perfect. I thought it was simply that he was a perfectionist. He knew I was his mother and he loved me, but he never knew, never, how much I really loved the son I gave away.”

  As Veronica wept over the loss of that son, over the harsh words they’d exchanged in the brief time they’d had together, Molly and Michael slipped out of the suite. In the elevator, Molly saw the haunting pain shadowing Michael’s eyes and realized that memories of his own childhood must have been stirred by Greg and Veronica’s tragedy. The years he had been alone in the U.S., his mother still in Cuba.

  She silently slid her hand into his. At first he resisted. She could feel his muscles tense. Then he relaxed and curled his fingers around hers. He said nothing as they walked away from the hotel. He didn’t need to. Even without words, she had never felt closer to him.

  CHAPTER 17

  “I still can’t figure out how we’re any better off now than we were before we found out about the connection between Veronica and Gregory,” Molly grumbled, trying to speak loudly enough to be heard over the sidewalk café’s reggae band. “Knowing about the relationship, it would make more sense if he’d been furious over her abandonment and had killed her.”

  “Think about motive,” Michael said patiently as his gaze automatically scanned the crowd. “Who has the best motive?”

  Watching him, Molly wondered if he ever fully relaxed or if his cop instincts were always at work. She had a hunch that if she asked an hour from now he would be able to describe to the last detail what the patrons around them looked like, their mannerisms, and any visible idiosyncrasies they had.

  “Are you listening to me?” he asked, when she’d gone a full five minutes saying nothing.

  “Hmm?” Molly blinked, then wondered exactly why it was that they were possibly the only two people sitting here on a moonlit night with something other than romance on their minds. Maybe because murder had a dampening effect on the libido. She dragged her thoughts back to the gist of his question.

  “I’m listening,” she said.

  “Okay, then. Would the relationship between the star and the director have given someone else a motive to kill him?”

  Michael sounded like an instructor trying to make a point to a rather dull, dim-witted student. Oddly enough, she didn’t resent it. At least he was sharing information with her, treating her insights with respect, forcing her to be analytical rather than emotional. Personally, she thought a good blend of gut instinct and a keen eye for the facts were exactly what made him such a good detective. He, however, seemed unwilling to admit to the conclusions he reached intuitively. She slowly sipped her wine and gave the question the consideration he obviously expected.

  “Yesterday, before we found out about his background, I would have said Jeff Meyerson,” she admitted. “He’s engaged to Veronica. Or so he says. She doesn’t seem all that committed. At any rate, if he’s planning to marry her, maybe he didn’t want a son in line as an heir to her estate. I should have known it would be too tidy and too obvious.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up over it. You had the right idea, just the wrong person, at least on that basis. From everything you told me, Veronica doesn’t have much of an estate. She needed this job just to survive, right?”

  “Yes. She told me as much.”

  “And he has a fortune.”

  “So we discovered. Then we can scratch Meyerson off the list?”

  Michael shook his head. “Not so fast. What if he thought Greg was likely to ruin his relationship with Veronica, that she’d become so caught up in her newfound son that she would no longer spare any time for him? If he’s obsessed with her, that could drive him to murder the competition.”

  Molly was shaking her head before he’d finished. “No way. If he truly loves her, he’d never rob her of the chance to know her son.”

  “I mentioned obsession, not love.”

  “If you’re going for that angle, then I like our Italian photographer better. He’s obsessed with the gorgeous, nubile Francesca.”

  “You just don’t want it to be anyone you know.”

  “Maybe,” she conceded. “It’s no fun considering the possibility that someone you know is capable of pulling a gun and shooting down a friend, or at least someone who probably considered him or her a friend.”

  “Who’s your choice, then? You know all of the players better than I do. Hank Murdock benefits from Kinsey’s death because he’ll get a shot at finishing the movie. Spice that with a professional rivalry and you have a decent motive.”

  “But he was in the production trailer with witnesses.”

  “All right, then, Duke Lane. What’s his stake in this?”

  “None I can imagine. Laura Crain might have pressured Greg into hiring Duke in the first place because of his box-office status, but he and Greg got along. He doesn’t need all the publicity the murder has generated. Every female in America already knows who he is. Besides, from what I hear, he wants this picture wrapped in a hurry so he can get on with the next one. I wouldn’t have given the man a lot of credit for brains a few days ago, but since then we’ve talked a couple of times. He’s smart. He has to know that a murder at the least will delay production.” She shook her head. “I think we can eliminate Duke.”

  “Too bad,” Michael grumbled.

  Molly grinned. “You just hate having a suspect who gets more press attention than you do.”

  He regarded her indignantly. “You’re treading on thin ice, sweetheart. I can get you back on that suspect list faster than you can say ‘Lights, camera, action.’”

  Molly shook her head confidently. “I don’t think so. You want to be out of Miami Beach and back on your own turf too badly to waste time trying to make a case against me.”

  “Maybe so,” he said, sliding his sunglasses down a fraction to level a look at her. “But Otis Jenkins is just itching to take you on.”

  Molly decided this would be an excellent time to divert Michael’s attention in another direction. “How about Daniel Ortiz?”

  “If he gets a bigger stake in GK Productions, maybe. Besides, witnesses place him on the set at the time of the shooting. He was setting up for the next shot.”

  Playing devil’s advocate, Molly countered with, “He could have slipped away. Things are so chaotic between scenes, no one would have noticed if he’d left for a minute or two. Face it, that’s all it would have taken to slip over to Veronica’s trailer, wait for her to leave, then shoot Greg and count on Veronica’s being blamed.”

  “If that’s the scenario, then it had to be someone who didn’t know she was his mother. No one would expect a mother to be blamed for shooting her son. How about Laura Crain? What do you think of her as a suspect?”

  “Opportunity? Probably. She claims she was back at the hotel, but no one else was there with her.”

  “No one saw her on the set either.”

  “Which doesn’t mean she wasn’t there,” Molly argued. “Again, everyone who’s actually working has a lot going on between takes. Maybe they’d notice a stranger, but not someone connected with the film, someone they’re used to seeing around all the time.”

  Something was troubling her, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She tried to envision the way events that night had unfolded, at leas
t as they knew them.

  Greg and Veronica had been inside her trailer, arguing over the script. Then, as she’d been leaving, Francesca had barged in, furious because Greg didn’t want her to stay in America with him. Giovanni had come after her, and the two of them had left together, or so he had said. With all that happening and only a limited time period between their departures and the discovery of the body, surely one of them should have spotted the killer, even if they weren’t aware of it. Especially if the gunman had stood outside the trailer and fired.

  Good Lord, that was it! No one in his right mind would have stood on the sidewalk and fired a gun, not with off-duty policemen at each end of the block and other members of the cast and crew all too likely to come along at any second. Greg’s killer had to have been inside. She tried to recall the angle of his body in relation to the door, but her memory failed her. She hadn’t wanted to remember the way he had looked.

  Her excitement began to fade. What difference did it make? They already knew that in all likelihood Greg had been killed by someone who knew him. Anyone in the cast or crew could have traced him to Veronica’s trailer, waited for him to be alone, and then gone in on some pretext or another.

  “What are you thinking?” Michael asked.

  Molly’s head was reeling and it wasn’t from the wine. “How do you do this? From what I can see there are still a solid half-dozen people with either motive or opportunity.”

  “You just keep narrowing things down, until there’s only one possible conclusion. Then you pray you can come up with enough solid physical evidence to cinch the case.”

  “Let’s talk about the physical evidence a minute. Was there anything odd inside the trailer?”

  “Odd in what way?”

  “I’m not sure. It just occurs to me that anyone who tracked Greg down in Veronica’s trailer, then went in to shoot him may have had some sort of cover story, maybe script notes he needed to see, checks he needed to sign. I don’t know. Was there anything in that trailer that shouldn’t have been there?”