“On the night that boy died.”
Chapter 17—HELLO TROUBLE
Mrs. Boggs Bailey basked in Jonathan’s attentions, obviously unable to comprehend the seriousness of Gabriella’s troubles. Saying she was too tired to climb the stairs, the old woman triumphantly located a key to the secret elevator, stashed in a magnetic box stuck to the underside of the ice machine.
“This place is better than that Winchester Mystery House in San Jose,” Jonathan said. “I wonder if Gaby would let me tape a whole show here?”
“This ranch is in pictures all the time,” said Mrs. Boggs Bailey. “Back when I was a girl, this was the elevator they used for equipment like those great big lights. We used to catch heck for playing on it.”
“Really?” Jonathan said. “Gaby and Toby built their house on a movie set?”
I felt tense standing so close to Jonathan in the tiny elevator. His scent and warmth were so familiar—but he’d become a dangerous stranger. I stood as close as I could to Plant and was relieved when the red leatherette doors opened into Gabriella’s apartment.
Mrs. Boggs Bailey laughed and rushed to climb up on a bar stool.
“Not Gabriella and Toby, stupid. I told you before: this is my place. Me and my brother Hank. He bought this ranch after the Prohibition. He was a kid himself, but nobody wanted an old speakeasy, so he got it cheap. He rented it to the movie people. We had all the big stars here—Hoot Gibson, Buck Jones, Jonny Mack Brown. You ever see Buck in Hello Trouble? That was one of my favorites.”
I looked around the apartment, and thought it looked a little messier than it had last night, although the investigators had been pretty neat, if they’d been there. Toby’s desk looked sorted through. The Rolodex seemed to be missing. I couldn’t tell what else.
Maybe they’d found evidence here that pointed at Gaby as the murderer.
Maybe she was actually guilty. It was possible.
I felt guilty sitting at Gabriella and Toby’s bar with Toby dead and Gaby in jail. I wished Rick was here, even if he was an ex-gangster who was involved with another woman. His presence made me feel safer. I wondered if he even knew about Gabriella’s arrest yet. I sure would like to know what he and Gabriella had been arguing about.
I wondered if she could possibly be guilty. As I looked at Jonathan, pumping Mrs. Boggs Bailey for dirt about Gaby while he pretended to be entranced by the ghost stories, I could imagine being angry enough to bonk a spouse on the head with a frying pan, if I happened to have one handy. And Gaby had that office in the service wing—right near the kitchen. Didn’t Rick say that’s where Toby had been killed?
Jonathan poured himself a large whiskey from the array of bottles behind the bar.
“So tell me, Mitzi—you say you’ve got two cowboy ghosts here? Old Obadiah leaves you notes, and Joaquin Murrieta talks to you? How does he do that without his head? Is it an ESP kind of thing?”
“ESP? Oh, I don’t believe in that crap.” Mrs. Boggs Bailey grabbed a highball glass. “How about a whiskey sour? You know how to make a whiskey sour? My husband, Bob Bailey—rest his soul—now that man could make a whiskey sour. Couldn’t make a decent living, but he sure could make a mean cocktail.”
Jonathan gave me a pleading look “I guess I’m the opposite. I make pretty good bucks, but I haven’t got one cocktail in my repertoire. Just Jack on the rocks. Camilla, can you—?”
I couldn’t believe he was asking me to play waitress.
“Whiskey sour? Coming right up!” Plantagenet scooted behind the bar, a picture of efficient charm.
I sat in silence. Jonathan could make money all right, but he could spend even more. What about Luci’s claim that Jonathan would never pay me the divorce settlement? Could he do that?
“So you believe in ghosts, but not ESP, Mitzi?” Jonathan said. “Ghosts who can talk even though they’ve got no head?”
“He had a head the other night, if you must know,” said Mrs. Boggs Bailey. “He had that big collar on his coat pulled up to scare me. But I could tell it was Joaquin.”
The collar of a coat. In the dark shadows of the cabins, that might have made a person look headless. Maybe that was what I’d seen last night. Could that be the same “apparition” as the Burberry woman?
The awful thought came to me that all these apparitions and ghosts could have been Gabriella herself.
“So this spirit came into your bedroom last night…” Jonathan was gulping down whiskey in a way I’d never seen when we were married. “And he said, ‘My name is Joaquin Murrieta and I’ll be your ghost this evening.” His voice was thick with sarcasm as he put on a stagy gay-waiter voice. “My warning tonight is that Gabriella Moore is going to be arrested.’ Something like that?”
Plantagenet rolled his eyes at me as he pushed the button on the ancient blender he’d been filling with mysterious ingredients. It gave off a fierce roar.
“No. Nothing like that!” Mrs. Boggs Bailey shouted. “I didn’t see the ghosts last night. But I know they were there because they left stuff and they signed it. Mr. Smith can show you the letter. It’s signed Obadiah Wilke.”
“Obadiah Wilke is the other ghost?” said Jonathan. “So how did you know it was Joaquin and not Obadiah talking about Gabriella going to the hoosegow?”
“Because he told me who he was, Mr. Smarty-Pants.” Mrs. Boggs Bailey grabbed one of the glasses Plantagenet had filled with frothy liquid.
“He told you?” said Jonathan. “What? You asked him if he was Joaquin and he spoke to you?”
“Bingo.” Mrs. Boggs Bailey blew a bit of whiskey-sour froth from her upper lip. “I saw the two ghosts over by the Zorro cabin where the dead boy was, after I went in to ask him to stop the disgusting noises and shooting his guns and all. When I got back to Roy Rogers, the tall ghost was in the bushes by my cabin with his collar up, making spooky noises.”
I sipped whiskey sour, taking this in. Apparently this ghost act was a duet. Could they have been gang people? Maybe Fiscalini would go back to his gang theory if he heard about the two ghost-impersonators. I really needed to talk to Rick. He knew how policemen’s minds worked. Maybe he could get Fiscalini to look into Mrs. Boggs Bailey’s ghosts.
She went on with her tale. “So I said ‘Hey, Joaquin, is that you?’ and asked him if he was all right. Then I said maybe he wasn’t all right because he was a ghost and that meant he was dead. I guess that tickled him, because he laughed like crazy, and then he said, ‘That’s right, Mitzi Boggs. I’m a ghost, and if you tell anybody any different, you’re going to get Gaby in a heap of trouble’.”
So much for the Viboras theory. Gang people were unlikely to refer to Gabriella Moore as “Gaby”.
As Jonathan interrogated Mrs. Boggs Bailey I pulled Plant aside and whispered in his ear.
“Do you think it’s possible that Gaby is guilty?”
“Not a chance. They said her cowhide walls were splattered with paint. She’d never let that happen. And she couldn’t lift one of those steer heads.”
His phone chirped.
“I hope this is Silas. I’ll tell him we’ve got another emergency here, even bigger than Oscar Wilde.”
“Oscar Wilde?” Jonathan said as Plant gave his attention to the phone. “You’ve got the ghost of Oscar Wilde running around here, too? Hey, let’s hear it for diversity!”
I couldn’t stifle myself any longer.
“Jonathan, you’d be less of an embarrassment if you learned to listen a little more and drink a little less.”
Plantagenet shot me a warning look, but I could see for myself that I’d gone too far. Jonathan’s face changed as he grabbed the whisky bottle and refilled his glass to the brim.
“An embarrassment?” Jonathan’s voice rose. “Yeah. I was always an embarrassment to you, wasn’t I…?”
“Could I have a little less noise here?” Plant covered the phone and spoke over his shoulder as if he were speaking to a badly behaved child. Then he spoke to the phone again. “Silas, I’ll see yo
u at dinner here, then...”
“Who are you to tell me to shut up? You think an Oscar makes you king of the world, Smith?” Jonathan slammed down his drink so hard the contents shot up and rained on my Chanel suit.
Urgent knocking on the outside door startled us all.
“Miss Randall! Miss Randall! Where is Mrs. Boggs Bailey? Is she with you?”
I opened the door and saw Miguel the waiter-writer—looking harried, with his jacket off and shirtsleeves rolled up. With him was, of all people, Toby’s Donna Karan girl, looking like a schoolgirl in jeans and a skimpy tee-shirt, with her severe chignon unwound into a glossy pony tail. She even seemed to have washed off a few layers of make-up.
“My cousin can watch Mrs. Bailey and take her to Roy Rogers,” Miguel said. “The maids are gone. They are afraid of the policemen.” He started down the stairs. “Alberto says dinner is at six-thirty sharp.”
I looked at my watch. It said five twenty-five.
“Can they feed all of us—Jonathan and his crew?”
“Many people are leaving. There is plenty. I must go. We are very busy.”
“I can see that.” I glanced at Miguel’s rolled-up sleeves.
Miguel suddenly looked nervous—or was it frightened? He took off, rolling down his shirtsleeves as he ran to the stairs, but not before I caught a glimpse of something on his arm: A long, black tattoo of a snake. A devil-headed snake. Just like Ernesto’s—and the spray-painted image on the wall over Toby’s body.
That meant Miguel was—or had been—a member of the Viboras.
I’d wondered why Miguel seemed so nonchalant about Ernesto stealing his story. Maybe that was because he’d already taken a terrible revenge.
Miguel could have led the Viboras to Ernesto so they could murder him. Toby, too. He had reasons to be angry with them both. Ernesto had stolen the story, and Toby gave it that harsh critique. A serious overreaction, but an unbalanced person might do that. Miguel didn’t seem like a sociopath, but I’d so much rather believe he was a killer than Gabriella Moore.
“I’m Donna,” said Miguel’s cousin.
So the Donna Karan girl was really named Donna. I wondered if her devotion to the designer came from their shared name.
The girl shook my hand, but her eyes were fastened on Jonathan.
“Mrs. Bailey and I are friends. Right, Mitzi?” She waved at Mrs. Boggs Bailey, sitting on her bar stool swinging her legs like a small child, delighted with all the commotion. “I helped Miguel with her before,” she said in my direction.
“Jonathan Kahn spilled his drink,” Mrs. Boggs Bailey said.
“Fantastic to see you again, Mr. Kahn,” Donna said, walking across to the bar like a Miss America contestant on the runway. “We met at a reception for the Governor. I used to date Duncan Fowler, you know—the commentator on Fox News? I love your work.”
Jonathan basked, but Plant looked stunned.
“Duncan Fowler? You dated Duncan Fowler?” Plant covered his shock with a social smile. “Oh, yes. I suppose you met him here in town. I’ve heard he has a place somewhere around here?”
Jonathan used to refer to Duncan as “Crybaby Fowler” and a “fascist tool”, but now he beamed at Donna as if she’d announced she recently discarded Leonardo DiCaprio.
“He lives in Los Olivos, right over that hill,” Donna said to Plant, pointing out the window. She turned back to Jonathan. “The beach towns are so over. They keep, like, sliding into the ocean, don’t they? To meet important Industry people, you’ve got to ‘head for the hills’—that’s what Toby used to say.”
With the mention of Toby’s name, I expected to see some of the grief Donna had shown earlier, but there wasn’t a flicker of emotion on her pretty face.
“You’re an actress?” Grabbing a bar towel, Jonathan wiped his spilled drink from the stool next to him and motioned for Donna to sit down.
Donna sat. “Right now I’m a fragrance spokesmodel at Nordstrom in Santa Barbara, but I’m hoping my book will get me noticed in, like, the right places. I want to work in TV news.” She leaned over to display the cleavage that had probably helped her pay for those expensive clothes.
Plantagenet rolled his eyes at me and shrugged.
“TV News? Really?” said Jonathan. “Will you have a whiskey sour, Donna?”
“None left!” said Plantagenet, emptying the blender into the sink. “But if you want to go down to your cabins—here!” He handed Jonathan the Jack Daniels bottle. “Why don’t you take this to your people? I’m sure Gaby would want to include them in our happy hour.” He wiped the bar, like a bartender cleaning up for the night.
“Do you have any champagne?” Donna said. “I only drink champagne.”
Plant opened the small fridge under the bar. “Just one sparkling wine in here. But it’s been opened. Probably flat by now. He reached in and pulled out the bottle of Blanc de Noir from the night before. In the daylight, I could now see the number “14” scrawled across the label in red marker.
“Want to try a little, Donna?” Plant grabbed a champagne glass.
Donna stared at the bottle.
“No. No. I don’t want…that.”
She pushed the bottle away as if as if it were something that had just been dug up from the grave.
Chapter 18—THE GAY CABALLERO
Once Jonathan and Donna left with Mrs. Boggs Bailey, Plant barely got the door closed before he let out a hoot of laughter.
“Camilla, darling, I hope Jonathan was good in the sack, because otherwise, life with him must have felt like being confined to one of the darker, hotter circles of Hell.”
It felt good to be able to laugh. “It looks as if Jonathan may have met his match with that Donna creature. Did you hear her comment about Duncan Fowler? That wasn’t name-dropping, it was name-hurling.”
“What a crock,” Plant said. “Everyone knows Duncan Fowler is an old queen.” Plant rinsed out the blender. “More whiskey sours?”
“No thanks. I should try to keep a clear head, since people seem to expect me to be in charge of things around here.” It felt so safe being alone with Plant. Part of me wanted to confide all my worries in him—the increasing number of things that were making me feel a little nuts.
Like the ghostly Burberry woman.
And the headless ghost.
And that horrible, nonsensical photograph.
And the scar on Rick’s forearm that was shaped like the Viboras tattoo.
But there wasn’t time to really talk this stuff out. I figured I’d better keep the mysteries to myself until I’d sorted them out a bit. And I didn’t need another man to give me that “you’ve had a shock, dear, have a drink,” attitude I got from Rick last night.
Plantagenet sniffed at my sleeve.
“You’d better change before dinner, darling. Essence de Jack Daniels isn’t a good fragrance for you. Don’t want to start any new rumors about the Manners Doctor’s bad habits. Let me help choose your ensemble, for old time’s sake.”
I couldn’t tell if the investigation team had been through my things. Nothing seemed to have been moved, but I hadn’t noticed that much when I left this morning. I opened the top suitcase and found my speech notes—exactly where I’d put them. I took the folder with the mysterious Newsbabes manuscript out of my tote bag. I’d have to ask Alberto if somebody had reported losing a manuscript.
I understood how Rick might have thought the folder was mine when he found an unfamiliar manuscript in his room, but I couldn’t figure out how it got there. It seemed odd that anybody would ask a policeman to critique a chick lit novel.
Plant chose a sexy little Valentino jacket dress in an aquamarine knit. Watching him choose my clothes transported me back to my debutante days, when Plant and I bonded over clothes, society gossip, and dishing every celebrity we met.
“So you know Duncan Fowler?” I said as I re-did my make-up for the paler outfit. “He’s gay? Isn’t that difficult for a right wing pundit?”
Plantagen
et laughed. “There’s always talk of outing him, especially now he’s aligned himself with the gun-nut crazies. And it’s weird—about his guns. You know the big cannon that they say killed Ernesto—the thing they found tossed on the floor of my Ferrari?”
“Of course. I’m the idiot who locked the car door after it got put in there. I’m afraid that’s why the police suspected you.” I gave his arm a squeeze, hoping he knew how sorry I was about what he’d had to go through.
“I’m kind of an obvious suspect: the old fool with the frisky young lover—one of the ten basic plots.” He gave a grim smile. “But what I was going to tell you is about that big Colt. It was reported stolen—the day of the murder—from Duncan Fowler. Odd coincidence.”
“Odd indeed.”
My brain started connecting dots. Duncan Fowler, who owned the gun, was the ex-boyfriend of Donna. So Donna had access to that gun. Donna was Miguel’s cousin: Miguel—with the Viboras tattoo. Last night, alone at the front desk doing his substitute concierge duties, Miguel had had the perfect opportunity to kill Toby. Or let his cohorts inside to do the deed.
“That’s it,” I said out loud. “It’s definitely Miguel! He’s strong enough to lift that cow head.”
Plant lifted an eyebrow. “That waiter who was just here? Why on earth would you suspect him?” Plant was neatly tidying the room and putting things into my suitcases. Very helpful, since it wouldn’t be right staying in Gaby’s apartment, under the circumstances.
“Miguel has that tattoo. He was trying to cover it up.”
“Plenty of fine people have tattoos, darling. The Manners Doctor needs to get a clue.”
“The Manners Doctor has no problem with tattoos!” I hated it when Plant got all politically correct. “In fact she’s written that a small one can be quite elegant. But Miguel’s tattoo is the same devil snake design as Ernesto’s—and the one on the wall over Toby’s body.”
Plant’s expression changed. “Like Ernesto’s gang tattoo? Are you sure?” His tone was businesslike. “You should tell the investigators.”
Randall #02 - Ghost Writers in the Sky Page 14
