“The woman whose daughter was the foot model?”
“She was Rose Beaumont back then. They had a vicious little rivalry going. Once Michelle tricked Rose into going to the wrong place for an audition, took her place, and got the part. But I think they were laughing about that now, as if it were just a mischievous girlhood prank.”
“Sometimes even murderers laugh.”
“True. But a recent conflict would more likely be behind such a vicious murder, wouldn’t you think?”
“All murder is vicious.”
“I suppose so. But a knife in the back . . .” Mrs. Steffan’s bare shoulders shivered in spite of the warmth of the hot tub. “As for recent conflicts in her life, I really don’t know. We haven’t been close in recent years. Not since she took up with Gerald Gibson.”
“You mean because they moved away from Hollywood?”
“That too.” She rubbed a little finger over a damp eyebrow as if trying to erase the frown clinging there. “But I couldn’t approve of her relationship with him, and we had a serious falling out over that.”
“You didn’t like him?”
“I didn’t like her being involved with a married man. And I didn’t like him for cheating on that lovely wife of his.”
But she was willing to tolerate the Stan Man cheating on her. An interesting double standard. In any case, Pam’s suspicion about Michelle and her father was apparently not unwarranted. The relationship had started before her mother’s fatal accident. If it was an accident.
I tried to think of some clever way to waltz into that subject, but finally I decided time was short, and I’d just charge into it. “Do you think Michelle could have been involved in Pam’s mother’s death?”
“The police investigated the death. The hit-and-run driver was never located.”
An interesting answer. It didn’t accuse Michelle, but neither did it exonerate her. And I saw no indication of indignation or shock at my asking.
“There was a slight suspicion Michelle could have been involved in her husband’s death right here in this house,” I said.
“Really? I hadn’t heard that.”
Mrs. Steffan’s underwater dunk had left her goldy hair plastered to her head and emphasized her blue eye shadow. Matching toes and eyelids. Some fashion trend I didn’t know about?
“Was there an investigation?” she asked.
“Apparently it wasn't deemed necessary.”
“Then why do you say there was a suspicion Michelle could have been involved in the death?” Mrs. Steffan asked.
“Pam’s suspicion.”
Mrs. Steffan nodded as if that confirmed something for her. “Michelle confided something rather odd to me. It was . . . let’s see, the day after we arrived, and she and I were sitting here in the hot tub, just like you and I are now. She said something . . . unsettling was going on her life, and she was very much afraid.”
I sat up straighter in the water. “Afraid of what?”
“At the time I thought she meant a health problem. She’d always had this strange paranoia about getting a brain tumor. Her grandmother or someone had one.”
“But now?”
“Well, now I think she may have meant she was afraid of someone. I tried to find out more at the time. I thought perhaps I could help, suggest a good doctor or something, but then she turned . . . I don’t know, hostile, I guess you’d call it. As if she regretted confiding that much to me. So I just backed off, and we never discussed it again. But it seems significant now.”
Yes indeed, very significant. And could that sudden hostility be because the someone Michelle was afraid of was Mrs. Steffan’s own husband?
“Did you tell all this to the detectives?”
“Oh, yes. That Detective Molino asked both Stan and me all kinds of questions.” She paused reflectively. “A lot of them about Pam.”
“They’re suspicious of Pam?” I tried to sound shocked, but I knew there was no way Detective Molino could not be suspicious of Pam. “Surely Michelle wasn’t afraid of her.”
“You wouldn’t think so. Pam’s nice, of course, so quiet and polite. But I sensed considerable resentment toward Michelle.”
“Pam and Michelle weren’t close, but Pam seems much too gentle a person for murder.”
Mrs. Steffan unexpectedly chuckled. She hitched the strapless suit up a notch. “I think that detective’s suspicious of everyone. He even asked a couple of questions about you.”
“Me!”
“He asked if we knew of any conflict or arguments between you and Michelle.”
“No! We got along fine.”
“I think the authorities should zero in on that fog machine operator. Either as perpetrator, or at least as an accomplice. Because the murder couldn’t have happened without that incredible smelly fog.”
I turned to my other hip on the underwater shelf, and to another subject. “Given what you say was a rather cool relationship in recent years, I guess I’m a little surprised that Michelle invited you to the wedding.”
“Actually, the cool relationship was with me, not Stan, and she had an ulterior motive for getting him up here. She wanted a part in his new production, Any Day Now, that everyone’s talking about. But I wanted to come. I thought it was time to let bygones be bygones, and we could be friends again.”
“And did that happen?”
“I’m afraid not. Michelle was furious when Stan couldn’t give her the part she wanted. And then . . . well, I was afraid she was doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Another married man.”
A name instantly came to mind, but I fished with a noncommittal “Oh?”
“That couple she was in partnership with on the health club thing? A very attractive man. But the wife was in the way, as wives so often are.”
“But nothing happened to the wife. It was Michelle who was murdered.”
“What’s that old saying? Do unto others before they do unto you?”
It was phrased rather differently in my Bible, but could Mrs. Steffan’s cynical version be Cindy Hubbard’s philosophy? Was Cindy the "someone" Michelle had feared?
“It was rather sad about Michelle wanting a part in Stan’s new production. Like too many mature actresses, she thought she could still play the kind of sexy romance and adventure roles she did when she was younger. She kept herself in marvelous shape, of course, but let’s face it. It would have been ludicrous for a woman of forty-eight to try to play a twenty-five-year-old.”
“Forty-eight?” I repeated, surprised.
“Michelle was older than she looked. Older than she admitted to being as well.”
“But she was going to invest in the new movie?”
“Stan offered to let her do that, yes. He was trying to do her a favor. He felt bad when he couldn’t give her a part, and it would have been a marvelous investment for her.”
Which didn’t go along with the rumors of his problems financing the movie. Or with what Shirley had overheard, when Michelle called Stan’s wanting her to invest in the movie blackmail.
“Would he have given her a part if she invested enough money?” I asked.
I suspected the blunt question might get me a blue-toed whack in the ribs, but all Mrs. Steffan did was sound a little huffy when she said, “Of course not! Stan doesn’t do business that way. The artistic merit of his productions is vital to him.”
I made a mental note, when Fitz and I got together at the CyberClam, to check on the “artistic merit” of the Stan Man’s films.
Chapter Eighteen
Getting together with Fitz turned out to be complicated. First I had to run Stan Steffan out to the casino. He expected me to sit around and wait for him, but I ignored his arrogant attitude, gave him my cell phone number, and told him to call when he wanted to go back to the house.
I parked off to the side at the CyberClam, where the limo stood out among the handful of pickups and compact cars like a tuxedo at a clam dig. Fitz wasn’t there w
hen I arrived, but he called just as I was logging onto the Internet on one of the rental computers. He said the Miss Nora was late getting in, but they’d just docked and he’d be up as soon as he got the guests taken care of.
Pam had disappeared before dinner, but I’d retrieved the place cards from her room anyway. Before starting on them I Googled Steffan Productions, which brought up more hits than I could look up in the entire evening. The first few were enough to tell me what I wanted to know about the “artistic merit” of Stan Steffan’s movies. His earlier productions had been big commercial successes and received some praise for their story value, but later ones were R rated, with an artistic merit only slightly above dumpster level, though still fairly good moneymakers. The last one, however, had also tanked commercially, which perhaps explained why he was having to hustle for investors now. Although, given the attitude of the wedding guests, he still appeared to have considerable status in Hollywood.
I also learned some other gossipy tidbits about his recent relationship with a younger Italian actress, Mrs. Steffan’s work with a South American orphanage organization, and a party at their home that featured an unscheduled catfight between two young actresses.
Oh yes, the Hollywood rich are different from you and me. The closest thing to a catfight at any party I ever gave was when a neighbor’s tomcat and a skunk tangled, an altercation that did not make it into the fan magazines but did bring out a lot of neighbors.
Then, on a site that had some “at home” photos of the couple, something more interesting turned up. A photo showed Stan Steffan in his den, in the background a wall-mounted array of weapons that the accompanying description called “his collection of antique Japanese swords, one of which was reputedly used in the beheading of an important shogun.” No butterfly knives, but the collection certainly showed an interest in sharp and deadly weapons.
I was jotting down the URL so I could find it again to show Fitz when something touched the back of my neck. At first I froze. Then the touch tingled all the way to my toes.
“Is that you, Fitz?” I asked without turning.
“If it isn’t, how come you’re letting some strange guy kiss you on the neck?”
“I’d recognize the touch of your lips anywhere. Atop the highest mountain, across the hottest desert, under the deepest sea—”
He snorted, gave me another kiss on the nape, and swiveled my chair around to face him. We grinned at each other. His mustache was coming along nicely. The man exuded fun and masculine vitality and a breezy elegance, living proof that some men do indeed age like fine wine.
“I’ve missed you,” he said.
“You’ve only been gone overnight.”
He put his hand over his heart. “One day without you is like a winter of a thousand years.” Fitz could be melodramatic too.
We grinned at each other again.
“Okay, now that we have the formalities out of the way, shall we get down to work?” I suggested.
Fitz dropped another kiss on my forehead, and I showed him the Web site page of Stan Steffan and the head-chopping swords.
“Try to work it into a conversation with Mrs. Steffan and find out if he has any other interesting collections,” Fitz suggested.
We split the place cards and worked on two computers so we could get through them faster.
“Do you remember a Tiffany Hartline?” Fitz asked after a few minutes.
“I think that was the tall blond who was scrubbed from the bridesmaids’ lineup.”
“There’s some stuff here about her being arrested on a cocaine charge. After she got out, she blogged an account of the terrible five days she spent in jail. Very traumatic. She had no eyeliner or nail file, and the menu was overloaded with high-glycemic carbohydrates.”
“Poor thing. But would she murder over Michelle’s menu?”
“Not if it meant risking a broken fingernail, I’d guess.”
I finished my half of the cards first. A couple of the starlet types had a number of hits, and most others a mention or two, but nothing popped out to arouse suspicion.
On impulse I Googled my own name. Nothing. In this day and age, do you really exist if Google has never heard of you? I must see about setting up a website for Andi’s Limouzeen Service.
Next I did Pam’s old boyfriend’s name, which brought up only a site for the landscape design and maintenance business. Very professional looking, both the site and the business.
“Well, none of my place-card names showed up on a Murderers-R-Us site,” Fitz said finally. “I’m going to try Gerald Gibson.”
“I’ll do Michelle’s business partners, the Hubbards.”
Which yielded a website devoted to both the new fitness center and the mysterious exercise machine, the Uri-Blaster Extreme Body Builder. The site offered glitzy praise of the machine but no photos. Viewers were invited to the upcoming opening of the Change Your World Fitness Center to witness the unveiling and try it out.
“Listen to this on a biography page about the Hubbards. They met when Cindy’s army unit was stationed in Germany, where Uri was an instructor in an athletic club and winner of numerous body-building contests. They married in Germany, and then he came back to the States with her and became a citizen. And here’s a photo of her in uniform showing off her sharpshooter’s medal!”
“Michelle wasn’t shot.”
“No, but maybe they were trained with knives too.”
“Does the site mention Michelle?”
“Her page, as one of the ‘creators’ of this ‘revolutionary new weight and fitness center,’ has a long list of her acting credits. There are photos from the movies and a couple of her in workout gear, and she attributes her body to the Uri-Blaster. There’s a photo of the three of them together.”
Fitz got up to look over my shoulder at my computer screen. The photo showed Uri in the center, silver-haired and handsome, muscles bulging in his form-fitting T-shirt. Michelle and Cindy book-ended him on either side, everyone smiling, as if the miracle machine might include teeth whitening as one of its side benefits.
“One big happy family,” Fitz said.
“According to this, the opening date is still on schedule.”
“The murder isn’t mentioned?”
“Ignored completely. Although I can’t tell when the site was last updated.”
In spite of the fact that Pam’s father had been dead for several years, his name as a prominent southern California developer brought up quite a few hits. Most of the references concerned environmental problems with his subdivisions, including numerous complaints from purchasers about houses built on unstable fill dirt.
“Sounds as if a number of people were mad enough to turn a few bees loose on him,” Fitz suggested.
My surfing turned up a number of hits on Michelle before she married Gerald Gibson, but very little since then.
We gave up about nine-thirty, ordered decaf cappuccinos, and carried them out to the limo to talk. Fitz said he’d talked to his friend on the town police force, who’d looked into the autopsy report on Gerald Gibson and found it to be quite straightforward, nothing suspicious about the death.
“Which may only mean Michelle pulled off a successful murder,” he added.
Michelle’s death was a county sheriff’s department matter, not city police, but the officer friend knew the knife used to kill Michelle was indeed what Fitz had named it, a butterfly knife.
“And it is a collector’s type, quite fancy. I’m sure they were going to check and see if any local dealers remember it. But it could have been bought out of the area or off the Internet.”
“In any case, it isn’t the kind of knife the average person would be carrying around.”
“Right.”
“Were there fingerprints?” I asked.
“He wouldn’t discuss that, although I don’t know if it was because he didn’t feel he could tell me or because he didn’t know.”
Personally I doubted they’d find any prints. The kil
ler wasn’t going to make it that simple. I couldn’t remember seeing anyone wearing gloves, but the killer could have covered his or her hand with a handkerchief before plunging the knife into Michelle’s back. Or it wouldn’t have taken more than a couple of seconds to wipe the handle clean after the deed was done.
I passed along what Mrs. Steffan had told me about Michelle saying she was afraid of something. “Did anyone mention that when you were circulating the night of the murder?”
“Not a word. But it’s probably not something Michelle would have spread around. The impression I got was that she liked to present herself as the epitome of health, both mentally and physically. Most of the talk was about the fog machine operator, who he was and why he wasn’t around afterward.”
My cell phone rang. Stan Steffan, of course. I said I’d be at the casino within fifteen minutes. Fitz got out and stuffed our cappucino cups into a trash container.
“I feel as if we just chased down empty rabbit holes tonight,” I said with a bit of frustration when he came back. “We didn’t really accomplish much of anything, did we?”
“We learned that Stan Steffan collects swords and Cindy Hubbard has a sharpshooter’s medal. But the most interesting bit of information is what you got out of Mrs. Steffan earlier: Michelle was afraid of something. You might see if her husband has anything to add to that when you pick him up.”
“I don’t think Stan Steffan confides in chauffeur-level people.”
“There’s something else we got out of tonight too, of course. At least I did.”
“Which was?”
“I got to spend it with you.”
With a kiss even more tingly than the one on the back of the neck.
I doubted I’d have a chance to talk to Stan Steffan, let alone quiz him. He’d jump in the limo, slam the partition shut, and that would be that.
To my surprise, however, before I even had a chance to step out and open the limo door for him, he strode through the casino’s double glass doors, sunglasses locked in place in spite of the late hour, and slid into the passenger’s seat next to me. My nerves suddenly revved into high gear. I hadn’t figured out a motive yet, but Stan Steffan was vying for top position on my tightrope of potential murderers. Did he know I was suspicious of him? And why was he sitting up here with me?
Here Comes the Ride Page 16
