“You’ve kept all of Kate’s secrets.”
I gave her a steady look. She held it for a moment before turning away.
“I think it’s time you tell me,” I said. “Tell me about Kate’s past. About Kate’s husband.”
It was a guess, but Monica swallowed, squeezed her eyes shut, and nodded.
I held my breath until she spoke.
“Kate Winslow wasn’t her real name,” Monica said. “She chose it when she was staying in a shelter in Winslow, Arizona.”
I held myself back from asking questions. She would tell me in her own way.
“It was the last in a network of shelters she’d stayed in, moving across the country, relying on good people who risked their lives to help women like her escape.”
I made a small sound. Monica glanced at me and nodded.
“She was running,” she said. “Running for her life. I don’t know where she was running from, but it didn’t matter. She was running from the man who would have killed her if she’d stayed.” She looked straight ahead. “From her husband.”
I swallowed.
“She’d been in shelters and safe houses for two years by the time she got to Arizona, and the people who ran the network believed she was finally safe. They gave her new paperwork, a new identity, and told her to build a new life. She built it here.”
Monica looked me in the eye. “You cannot understand what it’s like to live with that fear. He becomes superhuman in your mind. He’s every monster in every movie you’ve ever seen, and he’ll never stop looking for you. When he finds you, he will hurt you beyond imagining. Over and over again. Until he kills you.”
This is why Kate dodged having her picture taken. This is why she’d passed on high-profile opportunities to promote the theater. She couldn’t let herself be seen. She couldn’t let herself be found.
“He beat her,” Monica said. “He burned her. He tried to carve his name into her flesh.”
I felt sick. The Z scar Callie had told me about. It hadn’t been from removing a skin cancer.
“He would have killed her if she stayed,” Monica told me. “It was just a matter of time. I know it.” Her eyes burned into me. “Do you hear what I’m saying? I know it.”
I gripped her hand, feeling her whole body tremble. I understood what she was saying. She knew what Kate had been through. Knew it firsthand.
“I didn’t come here through a network,” she said. “I wasn’t that lucky. But when Kate and I first met we saw it in each other.” She smiled grimly. “Like knows like.”
She turned to me, her words fierce. “What we did, we did to help,” she said. “There was so much money, and it could do so much good.”
My eyes widened. “You’ve been giving back.”
She nodded. “We have. Supporting the safe houses and shelters that are helping other women escape. We didn’t even have to launder that money. I had cash and Kate knew how to funnel it to the network. Together we’ve saved lives. The lives of women and children. The lives of women like us.”
When I got out of the hospital I pulled my phone from my backpack with shaking hands. I sent a text to my husband.
Ted. We should talk.
He had cheated on me and publicly humiliated me. But there were worse things a husband could do. I shuddered, thinking of everything Monica had told me.
My marriage was over, but compared to Kate and Monica and millions of others, I was a very lucky woman.
Chapter 29
Back in the office, I thought long and hard about calling Detective Jackson. Did he already know that Kate had been living under a false identity? Did he know her real name, or her husband’s? Because Monica didn’t. Kate had never told her, and Monica had believed the past should stay in the past.
But what if it hadn’t? What if the past had gotten Kate killed? Because if I was right about the cryptic list of movie titles she’d left, husbands killing their wives had been on her mind. Had Kate’s husband finally found her?
“Allora,” I muttered, pulling out my phone to call the detective. “Allora, allora, allora.” I was stumped. And admitting it felt better in Italian.
“Now you sound just like Kate.”
Once again Trixie’s sudden appearance just about made me jump out of my skin. She was as bad as Marty’s early-morning overture. I didn’t know if I’d ever get used to either of them.
Trixie was standing near the door. “She used to do just that,” she said. “Sit in front of the contraption and talk to herself. On a good day it was “Fa bene, fa bene, fa bene.”
I’d seen enough Italian movies to know that fa bene meant something along the lines of “it’s all good” or “everything will be fine.” I hoped Kate had had a lot of those days.
“But on other days it was allora.” Trixie came over and alighted in one of the chairs facing the desk.
“Say that again,” I said, something clicking in my mind.
“Allora?” Trixie asked. “You had it right. Your accent is a little—what are you doing?”
I was opening the laptop. Because I had a crazy idea. Kate had muttered to herself in Italian while working on her laptop. Kate had muttered to herself in Italian.
I clicked on the email icon and was presented with the login prompt. I typed Kate’s email address as the user name, and then held my breath as I typed “allora” in the password box.
Nope.
“Allora.” Capital “A.”
Nothing.
This was stupid. Even I knew that most passwords required a number or some sort of special character somewhere. But, since I’d come this far, I tried “fabene.”
The email opened. I was in.
An hour later, rethinking everything, I went looking for Marty. I found him in the projection booth, scrolling through his phone while onscreen, in Dial M, Grace Kelly struggled for her life with the man her husband had blackmailed into attacking her. The struggle, I knew, would not end well for him.
“Hey.” I stood in the doorway, hugging Kate’s laptop to my chest.
Marty jumped at the sound of my voice. “Don’t do that!” He put the phone down in disgust. “And you know that blog I told you about? Don’t bother. He hasn’t updated it in weeks.”
What? I hadn’t thought anything could distract me from my news, but this did.
“He?” I said. “I thought you told me the blogger’s name was Sally.”
“Did I? Well, not that it matters now, since he’s obviously given it up, but that had to be a fake name—Sally Lee?” The look he gave me was a now-familiar challenge to my classic film knowledge.
I shook my head.
“That was Eleanor Powell’s character in Broadway Melody of 1938,” he said smugly. “Eleanor Powell, who Fred Astaire said danced like a man?’” He raised his eyebrows, his case made.
“Cool,” I said, not pointing out that Astaire had meant that as high praise. I had other things to discuss. “So, do you want to know what I found in Kate’s emails?”
He goggled. Which I have to say I enjoyed.
“How did you…?”
I put the laptop on one of his tall tables and opened it. “I’ll give you the highlights,” I told him. “I didn’t find any Swiss bank accounts or stashes of Bitcoin. We’re still no closer to figuring out what Kate bought. But I did find out something else.”
I paused, mainly to irritate him. Which it did.
“What?” he finally demanded.
“Todd Randall was telling the truth.”
Hi Kate,
My name is Todd Randall and I’m writing because I’ve heard that you’re the go-to person in San Francisco if I want to put on a classic film festival. I’m tentatively targeting early next year, and since this is my first attempt at something like this, I’d love to get the thoughts of an expert. Would you mind letting
me pick your brain sometime?
Best,
Todd
Marty stared at me after reading this first of many emails that Todd and Kate had exchanged. “That isn’t possible,” he said.
I showed him the whole thread. “He first wrote about six months ago. It started out all about the festival, but he was charming and flirty, and it was clear that she liked him. Over time the emails get more personal.”
Marty had started shaking his head almost as soon as I spoke. “No,” he insisted. “She would have told me if she was planning a film festival.”
“Not if he asked her not to.” I found an email from near the beginning of their exchange.
Dear Kate,
I’m sure your staff is amazing, and I’m looking forward to meeting them (though not as much as I’m looking forward to meeting you). But for now, do you mind keeping this under your hat?
I hope you don’t think I’m being too presumptuous, but I can’t help feeling that I’ve found a kindred spirit in you. And maybe something more…? This festival feels like our baby right now. Do you mind if we keep it just ours for a while longer?
With affection,
Todd
“She’d suggested introducing you to him,” I explained when Marty had finished reading. “And this is how he convinced her to keep it a secret.”
“Kate was no fool,” Marty said. “She would have looked up that bogus website. She would have found him out in five minutes.”
“She was no fool,” I agreed. “But he had answers for everything.” I opened another email. “Here. He asks her to forgive the state of his website. His web designer’s kid had just been diagnosed with cancer, and Todd was giving him all the time he needed, because as much as he cared about his business, he cared about people more.”
“Ugh,” Marty snorted. “So he isn’t a liar and a fraud. He’s a humanitarian.”
“And here,” I clicked again. “When he said something about Edward Everett Horton in Topper—”
“Ah ha! That was Roland Young!” Marty exclaimed, breaking his cardinal rule about no raised voices in the projection booth.
“I know. And when Kate called him on it he said…” I scanned the email. “‘Of course! How silly of me. I’ll never be able to match your encyclopedic knowledge. This is why I need you so much. Why I’m so glad you’ve come into my life.’”
“Pardon me while I throw up.” Marty shoved the laptop away, a pained look crossing his face. “How can Kate have fallen for this schmuck?”
“He’s got a good line,” I said. “If I hadn’t caught him in the office, I might have fallen for it myself.”
Todd had set off my warning bells when he’d flirted with me in the lobby the other day, but I’d chalked that up to my newly-maybe-available jitters. But with time, if he hadn’t broken into the office? If he hadn’t confronted me in the break room? Who knew?
With Kate he’d taken the time he’d needed. He’d let her keep her distance, which would have been crucial for earning the trust of someone with her abusive past. He’d made her feel safe and appreciated. And then he’d reeled her in.
“He’s clearly a con man,” Marty had gone back to the emails. “And, by the way, I don’t see any mention here of him giving Kate a deposit for anything, so that was a lie. But what was he after? It’s not like Kate had—”
He broke off from the screen to stare at me.
“The MacGuffin?” I said.
“How could he have known?”
I shook my head. “No idea. But a con man doesn’t string someone along like this without a goal in mind.”
He sank onto a stool, squeezing his eyes closed and rubbing his forehead. “How did I not know? How could I not have noticed? Was this guy wandering around the theater for the past six months without me even—?”
“No,” I said. “It all happened over email. He said he lived in Chicago.”
Marty looked confused. “Are you saying they never met?”
“He planned a trip out here,” I said. “They made a date.”
Marty looked at me sharply, hearing something in my voice.
“It was for the day after she died.”
Chapter 30
Talking to Marty hadn’t shed any more light on anything, mainly because he didn’t have all of the pieces of the puzzle that I did. He didn’t know Kate had fled from an abusive husband. He didn’t know about the money laundering. He didn’t know how Raul fit in, or if Hector was still a criminal mastermind.
To be fair, I didn’t know those last two things either.
Marty had leapt to the conclusion that Todd had targeted Kate because he was after the money she’d “saved.” He didn’t know about her past, but did her past matter? The only thing that tied in the idea of her husband coming for her was the cryptic list of movies I’d found. And I might be wrong in my interpretation of it. I’d been wrong before. At least three times just that day.
One thing was for sure: I couldn’t hang around in the office stewing all night. I tucked the laptop back behind the couch again, swept everything off the desk into my backpack, and headed down the lobby stairs, where I found Albert and told him I was leaving. I didn’t want everyone worrying about me again. Although it was kind of nice that they worried.
Then I got lucky. I’d planned to slink out the alley door again, but it turned out I didn’t have to. Because the 4:15 of Dial M had drawn the biggest crowd I’d ever seen at the Palace, a good sixty people, and they were all mingling with those arriving for the 7:30 Gaslight as I said goodbye to Albert. I just attached myself to a group of middle-aged women who were swooning over Grace Kelly’s dresses and left with the crowd, counting on Hector being more focused on the windows upstairs than the moviegoers spilling out into the dusk.
I blended in with the women until I got to the corner, then broke off and turned uphill. I had three goals for the evening: Buy a change of clothes, as I had no intention of going back to Robbie’s guest house alone until the murderer was behind bars. Walk until I was sure I wasn’t being followed and then find another hotel for the night. Figure out who had killed Kate.
Two out of three should be easy.
I walked back toward the busy shopping area around Fillmore, where I’d been the night before. I went into a boutique, bought what I needed, and then asked them if they had a back door I could use to leave. I hadn’t watched every Humphrey Bogart movie ever made without learning a thing or two about not being followed.
Then I kept walking, generally heading east while gaining an increased respect for San Francisco’s hills. Eventually I arrived at a giant cathedral on top of a steep hill. The church was beautiful, but more interestingly, it was across the street from Kim Novak’s apartment building from Vertigo (1958, Novak and Jimmy Stewart). I may not have known my new city, but I knew my Hitchcock movies. I took it as a sign and got a room at the huge Fairmont hotel next door.
I’d left Kate’s computer back at the Palace, and my computer at Robbie’s house, so I used the hotel’s writing paper to gather my thoughts. There was a lot to gather. I had about a million theories zinging around in my head, so I picked my top three and started trying to make sense of it all. Sometimes just seeing things in an outline form can help.
Scenario A: Todd is a con man
He knew about the money laundering and was after the moneyBut how did he find out about it?
He used a fake name because duh, that’s what con men do.
He avoided meeting Kate in person for months.Because it’s classic catfish behavior.
Because it let her imagination do a lot of his work.
He killed her because she wouldn’t give him the money.Or maybe she threatened to turn him into the police? Or to the Acosta brothers?
Or maybe he didn’t intend to kill her, but she fell when he chased her up Strawberry Hill? But why was she
there in the first place???
He killed Raul because…???Raul tried to defend Kate? This is pure speculation.
Raul saw him kill Kate and had to be eliminated? More speculation.
He attacked Monica because…???He found out about the money? Again, how?
He acted all interested in me because…???He found out about the money and thinks I have it? How? How? How?
Starting to get freaked out by all the unanswered questions, I abandoned that theory and moved on to the next one.
Scenario B: Todd is Kate’s husband
He’s about her age, so that fits.
He somehow found her after more than twenty years.
He used a fake name when he contacted her, obviously. His real name starts with “Z,” based on the scar on her neck.
He avoided meeting Kate in person for months.Because he enjoyed toying with her.
Because as soon as she saw him the game would be over.
He killed her out of hatred, not over money. But if he didn’t know about the money, why was he still in town looking for the MacGuffin?
And if he did know about the money, how did he find out?
He killed Raul because…???Same speculation as with Scenario A.
He attacked Monica because…???He’s still looking for the money.
He acted all interested in me because…???He’s still looking for the money.
Okay, once again I had way more questions than answers. And there was still another strong possibility.
Movie Palace Cozy Mystery Boxed Set: Books 1-3 Page 20
