A is for Actress (Malibu Mystery Book 1)

by Rebecca Cantrell

  Finally, they got up, shook Brendan’s hand, and thanked them both for their time. Brendan showed them out. Sofia stayed in his office until he came back in.

  Brendan sat down behind his desk and went back to reading an open file, making notes as he went. Eventually he looked up. “Was there something else?”

  Sofia wasn’t sure. The whole thing felt so anti-climactic. A man was dead. A man she had been trying to proposition not twenty-four hours ago. It felt like there should be more. “I don’t know.”

  Brendan leaned back in his chair. He put his hands behind his head, lacing his fingers together. “We were hired to see if the guy had a wandering eye. We did that. Something happened to him afterward. That falls outside our remit. Unless there’s something you haven’t told me.”

  “What? No. There’s nothing else.”

  “Then why are you still sitting in my office?” said Brendan.

  “It just seems so, I dunno, so incomplete.”

  Brendan got up and walked over to the window, hands jammed into his pockets. “Life’s incomplete. You don’t get many nice, neat endings tied up with a bow like on TV. People come into our lives, and then they leave again.” He smiled at her. “This line of work isn’t any different from that.”

  10

  Once a week, Brendan took Aidan and Sofia out to lunch at Marmalade Cafe in Cross Creek. They got a table in back and went over their current cases while they ate. Today was company lunch/case review day. The problem was that the only case she wanted to discuss wasn’t their case anymore. Not only was it closed, the case’s main subject was currently being cut open by the coroner in the LA County morgue.

  “Okay.” Brendan ran his finger down the list of live cases, none of which included any dead TV producers. “Mrs. Wong’s missing Pekinese.”

  Aidan finished chewing a mouthful of blackened chicken sandwich and swallowed. “Posters are still up with the reward. I’ve spoken to all the local pounds, and there’s no sign of our puppy. But there have been a couple of other purebred small dogs that have gone missing in the past few weeks, so chances are they’re probably being stolen to order. I can talk to the sheriff’s department again, but it’s not exactly top of their list right now.”

  “What about the Palisades? Santa Monica? The Marina? If someone’s stealing dogs, the chances are that they’re not just covering Malibu. See if Santa Monica PD has any open cases,” said Brendan.

  Aidan made a note. Brendan looked over at Sofia who had just taken a bite of salad. “The Sabrina Ross case? Anything?”

  Sofia swallowed quickly. She’d been hoping that Brendan would skip the Ross case this week. There was never any significant news on the Ross case. There hadn’t been any in almost ten years. She was pretty sure that Brendan kept it on their books as a favor to Sabrina’s father. Some agencies would have kept it as a regular source of income, but Sofia knew from seeing one of the invoices that Brendan only charged a hundred dollars a month to keep it open, a fraction of the real cost to Maloney Investigations.

  Sabrina Ross had been a young co-ed at Pepperdine University who had gone missing over fifteen years ago after a party at a frat house at USC. The LAPD had conducted a huge search and spoken to hundreds of witnesses. Sabrina’s father, a wealthy tech millionaire, had offered a million-dollar reward that had served to bring out every crank and nutcase in America. Not only had Sabrina never been found, there had never been a confirmed sighting of her since she went missing. Most people, Sofia included, had come to the conclusion that she was dead.

  Sofia spent one afternoon a week chasing old leads and speaking to people who had likely been spoken to dozens of times before or who had all but forgotten poor Sabrina. It was a thankless task. At any given moment, she could conjure up the last known image of Sabrina, a photograph taken at the frat party that showed a slightly drunk pretty blond girl with a goofy smile hamming it up for the camera. Sabrina had become trapped in time, destined to be forever twenty years of age, not allowed to grow up or grow old. It made Sofia shiver thinking about it. She tried to think of something Brendan could pass onto Sabrina’s father, but the pickings were meager.

  “I spoke to the lady who thought she’d seen her at a bus stop on the night she went missing, Gladys Hildebrand,” Sofia offered.

  “And?” Brendan asked.

  “She couldn’t tell me anything more than what she’d already told the cops. I asked if she’d seen anyone talking to Sabrina or whether she looked upset, but she didn’t think so. I’m sorry.”

  Sofia really was sorry. There would have been no better feeling than to have offered Sabrina’s father some glimmer of hope. But the Sabrina Ross case looked destined to remain incomplete.

  They spent the rest of lunch going over a half dozen other active cases that Maloney Investigations had on file. Every time a waiter or busboy came round, Aidan would insist on ordering Sofia more iced tea until Brendan finally told him to knock it off. Aidan responded by going into a sulk and playing with his phone, obsessively swiping left and very rarely right as he played with Tinder, his favorite dating app.

  “Can you save that for your own time, Aidan?” Brendan said.

  Aidan looked up from what to Sofia looked like a stunningly perfect brunette with model looks. When he saw Sofia looking, he smiled and swiped left, effectively deleting her from his list of possible matches.

  “What was wrong with her?” Sofia asked.

  Aidan rolled his eyes. “Too short.”

  “She was five eight,” said Sofia, who was five foot eight herself. “In heels she’d be your height.”

  Brendan waved his hand at Sofia, indicating that she should drop it. “Don’t even go there. That way lies madness.”

  “Five nine’s my ideal. I’m not going to settle,” said Aidan.

  “Because you’ve already left swiped ninety percent of the single women in the Greater Los Angeles area?” said Sofia.

  Aidan shot her a withering look. “The saturation point for online dating apps in LA is thirty-six percent. There are plenty more where they came from.”

  Brendan flagged down a waiter for the check. “I don’t know why people can’t just meet these days. What happened to old-school romance? You work with some cute girl, you ask her out, and hey, presto.”

  The whole time he was talking, Brendan was looking at both of them. It wasn’t a secret that he had always harbored a desire for Aidan and Sofia to get together. Both of them smiled politely, but as soon as Brendan’s attention had turned to paying the check, they simultaneously mimed throwing up.

  Sofia thanked Brendan for picking up the check, and the three of them wandered outside. She was still thinking about Sabrina Ross and Nigel Fairbroad and how unfair it was that some people’s story came to an end too soon, while others never even got an ending, as she pulled up outside the office.

  A glamorous woman wearing a backless black dress and Louboutin high heels with red soles was pacing back and forth on the sidewalk in front of the office. Standing a short distance away was a man with thick gray hair wearing an expensive Italian suit. Sofia was fairly sure he was the attorney who steered so much business Brendan’s way. She was also fairly sure that the woman was the freshly-widowed Mrs. Nigel Fairbroad. For a woman whose husband had just washed up dead on Broad Beach, she didn’t so much look sad as angry.

  Sofia, who was the first back at the office because Aidan drove like a grandma, got out of her car.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  Melissa Fairbroad stopped in her tracks. She lowered her Louis Vuitton sunglasses and took a moment to study Sofia. She had an unforgiving gaze, though that may have been down to too much Botox. Her expression seemed to be frozen at a permanent mixture of shock and annoyance.

  “Holy Mother of Mary,” Melissa Fairbroad announced loudly to no one in particular. “No wonder he didn’t make a pass at you. Talk about sending a girl to do a woman’s job. I mean, do you even have tits under whatever that hideous outfit is, sweetheart
?”

  For once, Sofia was speechless. Suddenly, the prospect of Nigel having taken his own life seemed more likely than it had before.

  11

  The man who’d arrived with Melissa Fairbroad walked over, introduced himself as Melissa’s attorney, John Stark, and gently guided Sofia away from his client.

  “Melissa’s spent most of the morning being grilled by the cops,” he said to Sofia, as if that made his client’s outburst okay.

  Sofia could only manage a curt “I see.”

  Brendan had already mentioned to Sofia that John Stark, Attorney at Law, threw a lot of business in Maloney Investigation’s direction, so she knew it was probably best to suck up the abuse, at least until she worked out what they wanted. Melissa didn’t strike Sofia as the kind of woman who made casual social calls when she could be at home having her nails done or torturing fluffy kittens.

  Brendan and Aidan pulled up in Aidan’s canary-yellow Porsche, which was as obnoxious as it sounded. Brendan strode over and shook Starks’s hand.

  “Come on, let’s get you folks inside,” he said. “I’m assuming this isn’t something you want to discuss out on the sidewalk,” he added, shooting Sofia a slightly disgruntled look.

  “Sorry,” Sofia said. “I don’t have a key.”

  Brendan hustled everyone inside the building as Sofia and Aidan brought up the rear. Having delivered her verdict, Melissa proceeded to completely ignore Sofia, and instead, turned to critiquing the Maloney Investigations office, which Sofia had to admit, tended toward the functional.

  “If you were going for shabby chic without the chic, then you totally achieved that result.” Melissa clicked along on her Louboutin heels.

  Next Melissa turned to Brendan. “John here tells me that you’re one of the best in the business. I hope you are, because they are saying that Nigel was murdered, and I’m fairly certain they think I did it. Assholes!”

  Brendan winced as Melissa dropped the A-bomb. He didn’t say anything to her about it though. Sofia guessed he took less of a hard line with clients than he did with staff. And it wasn’t as if he could have gone through a twenty-five year stint in the LAPD, working in some of the city’s toughest neighborhoods, without having heard language that would have made a longshoreman blush. Criminals weren’t exactly noted for their use of pristine language. Nor were cops.

  Brendan looked to John Stark. “You think they’re heading in that direction?”

  Stark gave a small nod. “They haven’t said for definite that they’re treating it as homicide. They’re calling it suspicious. But I have a contact down at the coroner’s office, and while they haven’t completed the autopsy yet, word is that he had a couple of bullet-sized holes when he washed up on Broad Beach and scared all the rich folks.”

  It was a cold way to talk about the woman’s recently dead husband, and Sofia looked to see how she would respond.

  “Scared? Pah,” interjected Melissa. “It’s all movie people living there. The only thing that would scare them is a bad opening weekend at the box office. I doubt they even blinked. Now if it had been a homeless person who had washed up, that would have been different.”

  Sofia had to concede that, leaving aside Melissa’s acerbic delivery, she did have a point. Nobody got a beach house in Broad Beach by being a shrinking violet. Those homes were reserved for people who had, for the most part, clawed their way to the top of their respective professions, no doubt leaving a few metaphorical corpses of their own behind.

  “Why don’t you all come into my office and take a seat? We can talk this over. Sofia. Aidan. You come in, too. If that’s okay with you, Mrs. Fairbroad?” said Brendan.

  Melissa’s lip curled as she glanced at Sofia. “I suppose that’s acceptable. That’s really up to John.”

  Her tone that suggested it was anything but acceptable, but Sofia smiled at her like she didn’t notice. She was playing the role of Someone Being Nice to the Client.

  “No reason why not. It should save us time down the line,” said Stark.

  With that ringing endorsement, Sofia followed everyone else into Brendan’s office. She and Aidan stood by the window as Stark and Melissa took the couch. Brendan settled in behind his desk and adopted his reflective pose with his hands behind his head, fingers interlaced. She’d used that pose herself on her TV show, but it really only looked right on Brendan.

  Stark kicked things off. “I take it the sheriff’s department has already been here to talk to you, Brendan?”

  Brendan looked straight at him. “Yes. I called them as soon as I heard about your husband, Mrs. Fairbroad. By the way, my sincere condolences.”

  Melissa blasted straight past the part about condolences. “Why would you call the cops and tell them I was using you to see if my husband was cheating on me?”

  Stark put a hand out toward his client, but Melissa batted it away. “Get off me. I want an answer, and it better be good.

  Brendan’s expression remained neutral. “Sometimes volunteering information is better than having someone find it out. And believe me, they would have found out sooner or later. At which point it would have looked worse. Of course, I’m working on the assumption that you weren’t involved in your husband’s unfortunate demise because you have to admit it does look like one hell of a coincidence. You ask us to investigate him because you want to dig up dirt to help a divorce settlement, and the next morning, he turns up dead.”

  Sofia wondered if Melissa would spontaneously combust. She didn’t actually say anything. Well, not words. She sat on the couch, her face red (but still expressionless), her hands balled into fists, knuckles white, and made a noise like a kettle of water coming to the boil. She seemed to be trembling with what Sofia guessed was pent-up rage. If she were still acting, she’d want to use that for Furious Woman.

  Stark spoke first. “Let’s clear one thing up from the get-go. Mrs. Fairbroad did not kill her husband. They may have been going through a rough patch, but she was not involved in any way with whatever happened to him.”

  Spoken like a true attorney.

  Melissa seemed to unclench a fraction as she listened to her attorney’s stout defense.

  “But you’re not particularly upset that he’s gone?” said Brendan. The slightest hint of a smile crossed his face. It was like he’d slipped back into homicide detective mode. “Or at least you appear to be masking your grief better than most people in this situation.”

  Melissa seemed to levitate from the couch. “I am not going to sit here and listen to this complete bullshit.”

  “Mrs. Fairbroad, you don’t have to listen to me. That’s quite correct, but while you are here, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t use that kind of language in my office.” Brendan fixed her with a stare Sofia didn’t see often. She had always thought of it as a hangman’s stare, the kind of look he gave someone just before he dropped the hatch from under their feet and let them swing.

  Brendan’s stare had the desired effect. Melissa sat back down like her knees had given up on her. “I did not kill my husband, Mr. Maloney. I know I don’t come across as the most sympathetic person in the world or as a grieving widow.”

  You got that right, sister. Sofia kept her face expressionless.

  Melissa continued, “I was planning on divorcing Nigel. I hadn’t been in love with him for quite some time. He irritated me in ways I can’t even describe. I’m not happy he’s dead. But I’m not going to pretend to feel something I don’t or to be someone I’m not.”

  It sounded way too slick. It was the type of speech that might have been coached out of someone by an attorney like Stark, or that someone practiced in front of the mirror before they went on Dr. Phil. It was, in a word, bad acting.

  Brendan dialed down his death stare a couple of notches. “You may not have a choice about pretending, Mrs. Fairbroad. Like it or not, people judge other people by how they react to something like this. The same goes for cops. They see a woman who doesn’t seem that troubled by her husband’s
death, and they start getting real curious why not.”

  “I think they’re already curious, Mr. Maloney,” Melissa shot back.

  “They have already indicated that Melissa is their prime suspect,” said Stark. “She has motive. All they need now is opportunity and forensics that link to her, and they’ll be arresting her. I’m certain of it. The pressure’s on to solve this fast, even if that means blaming the wrong person. Brendan, you know as well as I do how these things can work when the vic is deemed important enough. Dead white people get attention. Rich, dead white people in the industry get close scrutiny indeed.”

  Brendan unlocked his fingers. He dropped his hands to his desk, and swept them across the top as if he were trying to smooth out the surface. “So what do you want from us? I can’t go back and untalk to the sheriff’s department, and to be frank, I’d do the same thing again if I had to. I rely on my good name and a good working relationship with those guys to stay in business. You know how that works.”

  Melissa leaned forward. As she did so, her skirt rode up a little, which would have given Brendan a flash of her golden-brown, Pilates-sculpted thighs.

  Not an accidental move. Still, Sofia had to admire the smooth way she’d done it.

  Stark cleared his throat. “We want you to find the killer.”

  “Now,” Melissa said to Brendan, “does that sound like the act of a guilty woman?”

  It sounded exactly like the act of a guilty woman to Sofia, and she was fairly sure it did to everyone in the room. But no one was going to say that. Not out loud. Not in front of Melissa Fairbroad. Or Brendan.

  Brendan diplomatically ducked the question. “Can you give us a moment? This kind of investigation is a major undertaking. It’s not a decision I can make without speaking to my co-workers, Aidan and Sofia.”

  “Of course. I understand completely.” Stark stood to go.

  Melissa looked less understanding but she still followed her attorney’s lead.