“I really don’t see this as his style.”
“See this as his style,” Laura said, thinking there was always a reliable way of knocking Marino’s legs out from under him. “This being murder. This, actually, being Holt’s death. He fell down dead, very much like a bodybuilder died a few years back. A very unfortunate accident, but an accident nevertheless. And just like after that death, you, or anyone else who has so far been involved in these cases, just cannot offer any kind of a credible reason to believe that a murder has been committed.
“Look, I’m sorry, Gunnar. I don’t mean to start getting antagonistic with you, but the things you tell me…well, they just simply baffle me. I mean, I just can’t make any sense out of any of this. If you don’t believe that Quartello was involved in Holt’s death, well, then I think you just eliminated any reasonable cause to make anyone believe that a murder even took place.”
“Well,” Marino said slowly, sounding somewhat cautious but still undaunted. “There is a minor problem that bothers me.”
“A minor problem.”
“Yes. It was something I found at Holt’s cabin. Something I can’t really explain. The reason I was so glad you called. I was hoping you could help make sense out of this somehow.”
“What is that?”
“A candy wrapper. Or I should say a power bar wrapper.”
Laura thought a cold, icy blade just slid between her ribs and punctured her heart.
“It’s a used wrapper of an Ultra Fuel bar I found in Holt’s trash can in his cabin.”
“One of our power bars, you mean,” Laura said evenly.
“Yes, it was in Holt’s trash can in his Big Bear Lake cabin. Now the unfortunate thing is that the entire can somehow got some water in it and the fingerprints on it are nearly all gone. However, this is a significant find, wouldn’t you say?”
Laura had just gone from terror to euphoria. She remembered the leaking faucet, the spilled water, and Holt’s reams of paper towels used to clean it up. They had all gone into the garbage can to ruin the fingerprints on the candy wrapper. Marino had nothing!
“Of course, you see my obvious problem,” Marino said. “How can an Ultra Fuel power bar be there? For one, Holt told you, told everyone, that he was up there alone. But for this power bar to be there, someone else had to have been up there with him. Right? Holt was in the final brutal phase of his dieting. He wouldn’t have been eating a power bar like this. This is incredibly high in carbs, in sugar, in calories. Someone we can’t account for, someone who ate an Ultra Fuel power bar, was in that cabin with Holt. But that’s only the first problem. You told me what the second problem is.”
“What’s that?” Laura asked.
“There is actually a pretty small field of people who have been eating that power bar. It’s not in stores yet, right? The general population—”
“But we’ve been test marketing it,” Laura relished the opportunity to jump in. “Dozens upon dozens of people have been given free samples.”
“Oh, that’s a possibility,” Marino conceded.
“Indeed, it is. So perhaps Holt didn’t tell us the truth. I can believe that. He was up there with someone. Someone visited him. Maybe he had a girl up there. Maybe…what’s her name, that woman on the poster….”
“Oh no, she says that she was—”
“She says? And can you be absolutely certain?”
“Well, I guess not absolutely.”
“You can’t,” Laura said. She couldn’t help but feel more than a bit self-satisfied.
Marino nodded at last. “However,” he then added, “we also have the people of the WBBF.”
Laura couldn’t believe he was going there. “The WBBF?”
“A lot of your employees here have access to the bars, correct?”
“Yes, I suppose,” Laura said simply.
“Would it be possible to know who might have seen Holt in his final days when he was supposed to have been alone?”
Laura’s frustration was flaring again. She had enough of this. “But what would be the point?” she asked. Sharply perhaps, she realized.
Marino just raised his eyebrows, a maddeningly puzzled look on his face.
“What would be the point?” Laura repeated and leaned forward across the table. Marino had absolutely nothing, and she was not going to tolerate any more of his pointless fishing expeditions taking up her time. “Look, I’m sorry if it sounds like I’m snapping at you, but I’m just at a point of complete frustration.”
“I’m sorry?”
“It’s just that I’m completely confused here. I really don’t understand this line of questioning. I wanted to contact you about the information we came across about a connection between Holt and Quartello’s drug operation. Then these people actually attack you, they kidnap you, they threaten you, and yet you still persist with these questions about the WBBF. And candy wrappers! And who was at Holt’s cabin! Now I’m sorry, but none of this has anything to do with Holt’s death. And I’m saying Holt’s death because there is just nothing here, nothing at all to suggest that a murder has taken place.”
“Actually, maybe there is,” Marino said abruptly.
“Like what? The coroner—”
“There’s something the coroner doesn’t know about.”
“Like what?” Laura was shocked by the sound of her quickening pulse in her ear.
“Remember, Brad collapsed backstage. Then he was given liquids, and he was actually back in decent shape.”
“Not that decent.”
“He was doing well enough to go through the mandatory poses and qualify for the finals.”
“And?”
“During the intermission, he probably rested and drank some more. It’s just strange that he would die after all that.”
“Strange, perhaps, sure,” Laura mused, fighting hard to keep her composure. “But not impossible.”
“No, technically, not impossible.”
“Look, Gunnar, I want to help you with this case. This—I don’t know—fishing expedition into how Brad Holt spent his final days. But you keep insisting on pursuing these unfounded, unprovable hypotheses of yours about murder. You keep bringing up these insinuations about a WBBF hand in this hypothetical—”
“Oh, no!” Marino cut in.
“Please, Gunnar.”
“Really, I don’t want to be misunderstood. I’m not making accusations. I just—”
“You just have problems with details, right? Candy wrappers and visitors to the cabin and completely pointless minutiae.”
“I was just curious about your opinions.”
“Well, you have my opinions,” Laura said as firmly as she could without blowing up and screaming at Marino.
Marino nodded at last. “Could I ask for one last favor then? I think you addressed the candy wrapper issue the best way possible.”
“What favor is that?”
CHAPTER 40
The dumbbells crashed against the rubber-padded floor.
“You were taken where?” Erika gasped and sat up on the bench.
On second thought, Gunnar realized it might have been unwise to detail the morning’s misadventure aboard Mr. Quartello’s yacht while Erika was in the middle of doing dumbbell presses with a sixty-pound weight in each hand. Returning from his meeting with Laura Preston, he saw she had come to the Foundry after work, proceeded to get a three-month membership, and decided to get a quick chest workout done until he returned. She was dressed in a pair of knee-length pink and black-striped leotards, sneakers, a weight-lifting belt, and an oversized T-shirt reading BEAST MODE in bold black lettering.
Gunnar was taken by her gesture, actually. What they had the other night was something real. It was incredible. He was reconnecting with something that had been the most important thing in his life years ago. It was a relations
hip that had been the most important thing in his life in all the subsequent years, despite the fact that he had tried to go on with his life by extinguishing all he had felt for Erika. Now she had taken this step to be closer to him every day.
After tossing the weights onto the floor, Erika turned to confront Gunnar, but they were disturbed by screaming from several feet away.
“Outta control! Outta control!” A shattering bellow emanated from a squat rack where a lifter studied a 450-pound barbell with the glare of a madman bent on violence. Gunnar remembered him as a librarian from Culver City who made the trek down to Venice three times a week to work out on the “hallowed grounds of Arnold-era bodybuilding.” “Come on, man! You gotta send me there!” the big man roared and turned to Gunnar.
“Hold on a sec!” Gunnar told Erika and faced the athlete. When the big man neared him, Gunnar cocked his right arm and delivered a punch into his mouth.
The bodybuilder was momentarily stunned by the assault. Then, with a glazed look overtaking his eyes, he began chanting like a Far Eastern ascetic reaching enlightenment through pain. “I am the way! I am the way! The way is here!” Spinning around, he lunged at the squat rack, got in position, and went into a frenzied torture session of lowering and exploding upward with the gigantic load of weight across his back.
“We gotta talk,” Gunnar heard Erika saying as he watched the lifter complete a four-repetition set of squats.
“I was taken to the punk’s boat anchored just outside of Marina Del Rey,” Gunnar explained in his office after he settled himself into the chair behind his desk, and Erika gave him back the cell phone he’d left at her house. He removed, but did not light, a Braniff Golden Label cigar from the box he picked up on the way back from Century City.
“And this is a flip attitude to take when you’ve just been ordered off the case!” Erika reprimanded. She paced the office in front of the desk.
But Gunnar’s blood rushed with a combination of pure physical desire for her and enchantment at the way she worried for his safety. On the one hand, he wanted to tear off her workout clothes and feel each of her blood-pumped muscles with his lips and tongue. On the other, he wanted to put his arms around her in an embrace as tender as he could give and thank her for being the angel, the beauty, this wonderful being who would be a part of his heart for the rest of his life. It made his head swim, spin crazily away from all the minutia of the case, from Laura Preston, Diane Holt, and Mr. Quartello.
“I wasn’t ordered off the case, remember?” he said at length. “He argued the point that he wasn’t responsible for Holt’s death.”
“While holding you at gunpoint. It may be persuasive at the time, but I wouldn’t exactly take his word,” Erika said and sat in the chair facing the desk.
“I think what he said makes some kind of sense,” Gunnar said, toying with the cigar.
Erika looked up, eyebrows raised in alarm. “Oh?”
Gunnar explained why Quartello’s claims about not hurting Holt seemed logical.
“So how did Laura react to—?”
“The dismissal of the Quartello theory?” Gunnar asked as he began reassembling his Sig Sauer automatic pistol.
“Well, that, and the fact that you’re insisting on staying a general pain in her ass.”
Gunnar considered Laura’s demeanor. “She was well-controlled,” he said and snapped the handgun’s slide into place.
“Well-controlled?”
“Sure, she was obviously pissed,” Gunnar said with a shrug, “but she held it under control like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Impressive,” Erika said quietly.
“She can afford to stay cool. The fact is that I’ve got nothing on her, and she knows it. If I went to the cops with this, they’d throw me out in the street.”
“Well, that’s quite true,” Erika said even more quietly.
“But get a load of this,” Gunnar said and studied her face. Her eyes were distant, glazed over. He knew she was blaming herself again for helping sweep a possible murder under the rug. It might as well have been tattooed across her forehead in bright red ink.
Then she looked up at him. “Get a load of what?”
“She’s doing me a little favor.”
“A favor?”
“I’m taking a little trip to Full Eclipse Productions tomorrow. I’ve been given full access to all the video footage shot at the contest. The key to catching a break in this case now, I think, is to focus on what went down at the Sun State. I’ve got Amy poking around the hotel already.”
“You were right about Laura,” Erika said. Her tone was somehow more impressed than surprised.
“How’s that?”
“This woman is quite sure of herself.”
“Looks like it, doesn’t it?”
“Hell, she’s as ballsy as any career criminal, I’d say.”
“Maybe.”
“Do you think you’ll find anything?”
“I don’t know. Although today I already have to give a report to Diane about the case.”
“What are you going to tell her?”
“The facts. That, and I’ll ask a few important questions.”
“About whether Holt—”
Erika was cut off when the office door was swung open, and Joey Reigert’s blocky physique occupied the opening.
“Hey, boss! Don’t tell me your employees ain’t earning their keep!” Joey said with a grin as he strode inside and pulled the door shut behind him.
“Why don’t we take the time for a little target practice?” Gunnar said, eyes narrowing and left hand going for a full clip of 9mm slugs. He slammed the magazine into the weapon, forced a round into the chamber, and swung the barrel toward his employee’s head.
“Hey, man! What’s the deal?” Joey recoiled.
“I’m just pissed I gotta run an operation where my own people put me in danger!” he boomed, keeping his weapon trained on the bodybuilder. “People who didn’t listen to a word I said about surveillance! Who trumpet that I’m looking for information on a bunch of psychotic drug dealers.”
“Hey, put the gun away, man!”
“And they’re stupid enough to go using my name. Do you know what the hell happened to me today?”
Joey stared ahead in shock.
Erika watched with calm fascination.
“I was kidnapped and thrown in the ocean because you went asking questions as Gunnar Marino, you idiot.”
“You okay?” the ersatz Gunnar Marino wheezed.
“Oh, I’m okay!” Gunnar said with a menacing glare as he lowered his weapon. “But, let me see, do they have a wheelchair division at the Southern Cal this year?”
“Come on, Guns—”
“Don’t worry, I’ll break both your legs, so when you get back to exercising a year from now, you won’t be asymmetrical.”
“Come on, man, just listen to reason. You’re obviously okay because you can handle situations like that. You’re trained, man. See, if they would have come after me, I wouldn’t have known what to do.”
“He’s got a point, you know,” Erika said, a grin moving onto the left side of her face.
“A three-hundred-pound ox wouldn’t know what to do?” Gunnar wasn’t about to let Joey off the hook.
“What am I gonna do against guns, man?” he pressed his logic.
“He’s absolutely right,” said Erika.
“Look, I’ve got something that’ll cheer you up,” Joey said.
“What’s gonna cheer me up?” Gunnar asked.
“Bo Sullivan.”
“Who the hell’s that?”
“Amy told me to pass the word along. Something about him working the doors or something at the Sun State.”
“I’m not cheerful yet.”
“Well, Amy was like, ‘this guy’s got informatio
n relating to Laura Preston and how she left the contest early.’”
“Tell Amy to get back here and give me the full story by this afternoon, and I’ll stop fantasizing about hearing your bones snap,” Gunnar said and stood up.
“I’ll call you,” Joey promised.
“You do that,” Gunnar said and motioned for the door. “Now I gotta get ready to leave, so be on your way.”
Joey nodded and opened the door.
“Look, Joey,” Gunnar called after him. “You can cease the gym surveillance for good, okay? You and Amy both.”
CHAPTER 41
Laura took the day off early and drove straight home. She knew it was an irrational move, but considering what she had to do, it made her too uneasy to do it even in her own office.
She needed to meet with David “Monty” Montgomery in private. “Monty” Montgomery was a surveillance and wiretapping expert who had rigged Laura’s own office with recording devices.
Since Bob Holbrook could conceivably access the controls of the entire network of WBBF bugs—and Laura always suspected he could—she didn’t want to have this particular meeting with Montgomery in such a vulnerable spot. Logically, she knew Holbrook had no reason to be listening in on her meeting, but Laura knew there were times when it couldn’t hurt to indulge the proverbial willies, the hairs on the back of one’s neck, the little voice, to be paranoid beyond all reason.
Laura was going to welcome Monty into her den because that was a room he had also outfitted with a bit of high-tech security. A scanner system would be able to detect and alert her to any hidden electronics Monty might be carrying. She had told him she was expecting him with an off-turned cell phone.
Almost like clockwork, Montgomery arrived at Laura’s West Hollywood house. His precise punctuality had always impressed her. That, along with his dapper, suave nonchalance, his slightly graying, retired male model looks, his smooth delivery, his taste in Italian cars.
Superficialities, Laura admitted to herself as she saw the security man into the den and offered him some brandy. More than anything, she considered Montgomery a sleazebag. His patrician, Brooks Brothers looks and style, she was sure, masked a cunning bottom-feeder. The DEA-agent-turned-Hollywood fixer specialized in making many a power players’ headaches, and embarrassments go away. Whether someone had been victimized by an extortionist crying sexual assault because she didn’t get a promised screen test, or someone needed to be threatened into taking a generous sum of cash to get an abortion and get out of town, Montgomery did whatever he was paid to do, no ethical considerations. In fact, Montgomery sold his absolute loyalty as his special brand of an ethical code.
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