The Big Keep: A Lena Dane Mystery (Lena Dane Mysteries)

by Melissa F. Olson

  “Oh, yeah, that was really towards the end there,” she squeaked. “I think that was Nat’s book – Natalie Patton. She retired to Canada.”

  “Do you remember anything about the author?”

  “I did meet him briefly,” she replied. “Now we do everything via email and phone, but back then, there was more contact. I think he came off as a little...how shall I put it...pretentious as hell. Annoying guy.”

  This from the woman who made Minnie Mouse sound like Al Green. Wu swore she didn’t know where Jason was now, and didn’t have any forwarding information for Natalie Patton. She was obviously losing interest in the conversation. “That’s okay. One other question,” I said hurriedly. “If a client of Savvy’s wanted to break into screenwriting, would you guys have handled that yourselves?”

  A pause. “No, we were strictly books. Nat had a few contacts at the LA agencies, though, so she might have been able to point someone in the right direction.”

  “Do you know which agencies?”

  Big sigh. “I don’t remember the names...but I guess I could dick around on the internet for a bit, try to come up with them.”

  “That would be great.” I gave her my email address.

  “Hey, are you really a PI?” she asked before hanging up. She said ‘PI’ the way people do in movies, with that implication of sex and mystery and cigarette smoke curling up black and white walls.

  “Yep, I really am.”

  Her voice lowered a notch, sounding more like a cartoon squirrel instead of a cartoon mouse. “Is it really like in all the movies?”

  Well, let’s see, I’m married, knocked up, lying to my husband, and I wouldn’t know a femme fatale if she asked to borrow my lipstick.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said dryly. “Just like the movies.”

  I spent the rest of the morning trying to track down Natalie Patton in Canada, without much luck. American private investigators have a pretty good network, but when you cross one of the borders all the rules change, and I didn’t have any contacts up north. From what I could tell Patton had moved to Vancouver initially, but she and her husband hadn’t purchased a home there or anywhere else I could find. I eventually ran out of ideas for websites and agencies to check. At 11:30 Bryce skipped into my office and perched uninvited on the empty green chair across from me, its twin once again demoted to padded file cabinet.

  “So? We didn’t really talk yesterday, how’s it going with the” – his voice dropped theatrically – “pregnancy? Did Toby flip out? Have you been to the doctor? Can I be the godmother?”

  Bryce is a psychology student, but apparently has very little insight into me. I actually found that kind of comforting. “Bryce, honey, I really don’t want to talk about it. It’s not that big of a deal.”

  He gave a little gasp. “Not that big of a deal? You’re with child, Lena! You’re a mommy!”

  I flipped a pencil at him, which he ducked easily. “I’m going to be a starving mommy, if you don’t go get me some lunch.”

  “Fine.” Bryce stood regally, glaring down at me. “Your subtle evasion tactics work once again. I get it.” He turned to flounce out.

  “Did you check in with Ruby today?” I asked before he made it through the doorway.

  He turned around, hesitating. “Yeah. She’s doing okay, I think. I can never figure out if extra hours are good for her, because she has something to do, or bad for her, because she’s out in public more.” He shrugged. “But she’s gotten a lot better about telling me if it gets to be too much, so I figure as long as she seems okay...”

  I nodded. Ruby was twenty-two, fully an adult now, but she had been disfigured five years earlier, her face carved up by a psychopath. The scars had been bad, not to mention permanent. Ruby had suffered a mental breakdown shortly after the assault, and spent years addicted to painkillers. She finally seemed semi-stable now, piecing together some income with a part-time job cleaning hotel rooms and the surveillance work for me. You wouldn’t think someone with severe facial scarring would be good at blending in while they took photos, but Ruby had spent the last five years trying to be invisible in a crowd of people. Bryce and I had both been pleased and surprised when she turned out to be good at it...but we still worried.

  “Is she still having the nightmares?” I asked quietly.

  “Actually, they’ve been getting better,” he said, face brightening. “So maybe that’s a sign that the overtime’s okay, right?” I nodded hopefully, understanding how desperately Bryce wanted Ruby to get better. After all, we were the two people in the world who felt responsible for her.

  Early that afternoon Jennifer Wu emailed me a list of three boutique agencies in LA that she thought Natalie Patton might have worked with. She also included a postscript that I should call her if I was ever interested in pitching a true-crime autobiography, and I snorted, imagining the titles. What to Expect When You’re Detecting, that would have to be one of the nominees, right?

  The three agencies were called Venture, A.R. Talent, and Chrisana Lyn’s, respectively. Taking a cue from my morning conversations with the New York agents, I called all three agencies posing as a producer who’d gotten hold of an old script and was trying to track down the screenwriter. Everyone was suddenly eager to help me, but no one had a client named Jason Anderson, J.P. Hashly or James Jacob Tyler. Venture had a Thomas Anderson, and Chrisana Lyn’s had several J.P.’s but that was about it.

  I leaned back, spinning slowly in the chair, thinking about Jason Anderson. All kinds of different people go missing, for all kinds of different reasons. But every missing persons case starts with the same two steps: do research on the computer, and talk to friends and family. I would guess 90 % of my missing persons are found, dead or alive, in those first two steps. But I hadn’t found anything online, and there were no family or friends to speak of. It seemed like things were pointing toward LA, but I had no hard evidence that he’d really moved there. Jason was a ghost, a shadow connected to his son’s world only by the thinnest of threads—his deceased mother, a fictionalized account of Jason’s life. And to make matters worse, the guy seemed to try on and discard identities like new clothes. One minute he’s a husband and father in suburban Chicago, then he’s a tortured novelist, and then, if Tom Christianti was right, a Hollywood screenwriter. Why did he keep changing his name, his identity? What was he looking for?

  I didn’t have an answer to that, but I did have a new idea on the alias front. I called all the agencies again, and his paydirt with Venture: the office manager found a script listing for a Caleb Hashly. Eureka.

  “Did he have an agent there?” I asked the receptionist.

  “No,” she responded, suddenly bored. “We keep a record of all the submissions that come through the office, so we can keep them from submitting over and over. That’s where your guy is.”

  “Do you have any contact information for him? Phone number, email, address?”

  “Let’s see.” I heard a keyboard clicking. “We just have a phone number. You want it?”

  “Absolutely.”

  I called the number, but it was predictably disconnected. I could have gone online and done reverse directory, but I had something even better: a guy on the inside. Or, as it were, a woman. I pulled out my cell and found Cristina’s number.

  I had met Cristina Gutierrez eight years earlier in San Diego at a convention for law enforcement officers. It’s not easy being a woman in the LAPD, period, but Cristina had managed to make detective at 32, the youngest Hispanic woman to ever do so. We’d both sat in on a panel called “Women in Vice”—me as a 23-year-old rookie, and her as a 36-year-old old vet. The panel was worthless—a lot of talk about not complaining about your period—but I found Cristina to be hilarious, snorting and checking her watch pointedly until the female speaker grew so nervous she ended the whole thing early. Kind of a rude thing to do, but that was Cristina – running a mile a minute on all cylinders, efficient and determined with no tolerance for wasted time. We’d gotten coffee
after the panel, and she’d taken me under her wing a bit. We still emailed once or twice a month, and at 44 she was as ruthless and energetic as ever. If my father had taught me that girls had every right to compete with the boys, it was Cristina who’d taught me to play in their world.

  True to form, she answered on the first ring. “Lena! Where have you been, what have you been doing?” Her voice was smooth velvet with just a hint of an accent, a souvenir from her native Puerto Rico. In the eight years I’d known Cristina, I’d never found her to be any less hyper than a five-year-old on crack. She made me feel perpetually lazy.

  “I’m good. How are you? Are you still with the younger man, what was it, Esteban?”

  She laughed, a full-throated cackle. “A younger man, yes. Esteban, no. The new one is called Miguel, and Baby Girl, I am in love.”

  “Wow, I’m impressed.” And I was. Cristina’s always been a love-’em-and-leave-’em kind of girl.

  “You have no idea.” Her voice lowered. “But, Baby Girl, you do not call me on a Thursday afternoon to hear about my many romantic triumphs.”

  I told her, as briefly as I could, about Nate’s father and the phone number in LA. “It’s kind of a long shot, Cristina, but it’s all I have. This guy is a phantom. He’s been through more identities in the last ten years than you’ve been through twenty-somethings.”

  She laughed again. “Give me the number.”

  I read it off to her, and waited while she typed it in.

  “Okay, let’s see. The number was assigned to an apartment in Studio City. Disconnected last year. The name on the account is James Jacob Tyler.”

  I fist-pumped in my empty office. Finally, I had real evidence that Jason Anderson had gone to LA. It felt great to have something to dig my nails into. “Can I have the address?”

  She gave it to me. “And does this mean you are coming to see me?”

  “You know, Cristina, I think it probably does.”

  I promised to call her back soon, and hung up the phone. As soon as I put the receiver down, the black office phone flashed the time: 3:45. Hmm. It looked like I was going to Los Angeles, but I needed to run it by my client first. So I picked up my jacket and bag and headed for the car.

  9. Typical Teenager Stuff

  Nate’s school looked like every other high school in the country—a collection of large, connected brick boxes with a giant fiberglass mascot—in this case, a cardinal—nailed haphazardly above the entrance. I smiled at the oversized bird. When I was in high school, across town, some deadbeat students had decided it would be a brilliant idea to kidnap our own mascot, a husky dog. Unfortunately, they’d unscrewed the back of the statue first, not realizing that the damn thing was lightweight and hollow. The Chicago wind tipped the whole thing forward, and when everyone came to school the next morning the dog was flipped all the way over, displaying his ass to the student parking lot.

  I was a suspect in the great Husky vandalism case, but only because I was so frequently a suspect for one thing or another, being known throughout the school as Not a Team Player. I told the principal that if it had been me, I would have gotten the whole dog off the roof and into a nearby dog park before the first bell, and she actually conceded that that sounded much more like me.

  On the left side of the building was a student parking lot, and on the right a long line of buses snaked past a big yard with picnic tables that were littered with cigarette butts. I parked the Jeep illegally at the front of the bus line, careful not to block in the lead vehicle, and stepped out, leaning against the Jeep to wait for Nate.

  It was a beautiful day for early spring: about 50 degrees with a wary stream of sunlight breaking through the overcast skies. I turned my face to the sun and sighed, trying to ignore the churning that had begun in my stomach again. Did pregnant women always feel sick? Because that was getting old really fast. I realized with a guilty stab that I still hadn’t made a doctor’s appointment or bought my mandatory copy of “What to Expect When You’re Expecting.” I hadn’t done anything, really, except cut out caffeine and alcohol. But hey, the kid wasn’t going anywhere for a while, right? I pushed the thought aside.

  A tone echoed across the parking lot – why do they still call that a bell? – and a few moments later a flood of students rushed the door in a chaotic escape attempt. A couple of the older boys whistled at me, attention that I found sort of quaint and adorable, considering the rather large handgun that was locked up in the Jeep at that very moment. Shading my eyes, I finally spotted Nate as he headed toward the bus line. He saw me at the same time, and jogged over. Today he was sporting faded jeans – probably the same ones –and a dark green windbreaker. His face brightened when he saw me.

  “Hey,” I said brightly. “You want a ride home? I can give you some progress on your case.”

  “Sure.” He headed towards the car.

  Whoa, it wasn’t actually that easy to snatch a minor, was it? “Won’t someone miss you? I mean, do the teachers watch to see if you ride off with strangers?”

  Nate shrugged. “Maybe with the other kids, the bus drivers will notice if they’re not there. But I take the city bus sometimes, ‘cause the route is shorter, so they’re used to me not showing up.”

  “Okay.” I walked around the drivers-side door, and we buckled ourselves in. We had to wait in a line of traffic to exit the parking lot, and Nate was the first to speak.

  “So, um, not that I don’t appreciate the ride, but how come you picked me up instead of calling?”

  “Well, you don’t have a cell phone, and I felt kind of weird calling your house while your stepfather is trying to rest.” And I didn’t want to go home. Again. “Plus I was running around town anyway, so I thought I’d just swing by the school. Is that okay?”

  “Yeah, it’s great.” He bounced a little in his seat. “To be honest, I kind of hate the bus.”

  I grinned at him. “Yeah, but it’ll be all the sweeter when you finally get your driver’s license, right?”

  His face closed down. “Yeah, I guess.”

  I mentally berated myself. We didn’t know where Nate would be in two years, much less if he’d have a car to drive. Nice one, Selena. We finally pulled out of the bus line and were on our way.

  “So anyway, I think I’ve got a lead on your biological father.”

  “Yeah?” Nate perked up.

  “Yeah. I tracked him down through some talent agencies. His last known address in in Los Angeles. I think he went out there to try to be a screenwriter.”

  “So, is that it? Do you know how to reach him now?” His voice was eager, with a thin edge of desperation that I tried not to feel.

  “Not quite yet. Nate, I think I’m going to have to fly to LA. I need to interview the agent he worked with, his neighbors, that kind of thing.”

  “Okay. That’s totally cool, I mean with the money and whatever. Do what you gotta do.” I glanced over. His shoulders had slumped again, head turned to face the window, and my heart sputtered a little. This kid couldn’t get a break.

  “Nate, do you have anywhere you need to be right now? I mean, do you need to get home to your stepdad?”

  He shook his head. “Not really. He has trouble sleeping at night because of his meds schedule, so he’s usually napping now. Why?”

  I turned, pointing the car’s nose downtown, and grinned at him. “I think we should make a quick detour. Do you like comic books?”

  We stopped at a little sub shop on 18th street, and a half-hour later I lugged a bulging grocery bag into Great Dane. Nate trailed behind me with a four-pack of fountain drinks. It wasn’t quite five, but the crowd had thinned out for the dinner hour: I saw a handful of teenagers in the Marvel section, and several grown men scattered around D.C. and the trade paperback shelves. My dad grinned at me as we walked in, and I headed over to the counter and leaned across to kiss him on the cheek, surrendering the food.

  “Hi, Daddy. We come bearing early dinner.”

  “Hey, Firecracker,” he
responded, his pet name for me. “Thank you – but who’s ‘we?’”

  I moved aside so he could see Nate behind me, and the boy shyly stepped forward, offering the drinks like an apology. “Hi, Mr. Dane,” he said quietly.

  “Dad, this is Nate. He’s a client.”

  “I see, I see.” He took off his reading glasses to inspect Nate. My dad is a thin, reedy man, with white hair and a neat matching white mustache. He was wearing his standard uniform of khaki pants and red suspenders– over an Incredible Hulk T-shirt. I think I get my sense of appropriate professional dress from him. “Well, Nate, Mr. Dane is my father. You should call me Peter.”

  “Okay.”

  “Anybody else around?” I asked casually. I didn’t really want to see my sister. She was going to bug me about the baby. “We brought enough food for everybody.” I grabbed an extra stool for Nate, who was standing awkwardly by the counter, and then walked around the counter to start setting up the subs on the table behind my dad.

  “Aaron is in the back room stocking the new shipment. And your sister took a deposit to the bank.”

  “Cool,” I said, trying not to sound relieved. I took an enormous bite of a turkey sub, and spent several minutes trying to chew. “More for us,” I mumbled.

  My dad rolled his eyes and looked over to Nate. “Tell me, Nate, what kind of comics do you read?”

  “Actually, I haven’t really read any, sir,” Nate said apologetically.

  My dad gave a little snort. “‘Sir,’ he says. Call me Peter. And that’s okay, nobody’s perfect. Finish that sandwich, and we’ll get you going with some graphic novels, which my younger daughter loves. Selena, what’s in your car right now?”

  “Uh-” I paused, trying to think. “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume II and the third Sin City book.”

  Dad shook his head sadly and said to Nate, “Young man, please don’t use my daughter as a role model. I tried to raise her right, but I’m afraid her personal compass doesn’t always face north. All she reads is the violent stuff.”