Bad Girl and Loverboy

by Michele Jaffe

  J.D. said, “The service in here is bad. That’s part of the reason it’s hard to reach me. You might want to step outside.”

  Bugsy left and Imogen said, “There is one other thing. Why didn’t you tell anyone you searched the taxi before the crime-scene unit arrived?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t bullshit me, J.D.” She lifted his blue baseball jacket from a chair and carried it toward him. “A fiber that came from right here”—she held the right sleeve in front of him, pointing at a snag in the fabric—“was found lodged in the clasp of the glove compartment in the taxi the killer used. Everything else can be explained away, but not that. What were you looking for in there?”

  J.D. put up his hands in surrender. “You’re good.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet, opened it, and removed a photo. He held it out so she could see. It was a picture of her, the one from her FBI identification card, and it had a heart drawn around it in ballpoint pen. Smudges showed it had been dusted for prints.

  J.D. said, “The funny thing is, I took it because I didn’t want you to get sidetracked. Freaked out that he was watching you too. I just wanted everyone to stay focused on Rosalind. You two were running all over, far from here and—I guess I just sort of lost it. And now it’s actually sidetracked you more.”

  “Yes, it did.” Imogen was furious but it was hard to be mad at J.D., the man practically decomposing in front of them. He wasn’t looking at her, listening to her. His eyes were on Benton.

  J.D. said to him, “You don’t think I deserve her. Rosalind.”

  Benton seemed to mull it over. He said, “What I think is that she deserves someone who cares about her as much as you say you do. But also someone she can count on. And I don’t get why, if you really love her, you are fucking around with your ex-wife. Seriously, why?”

  “Because I lost Rosalind. And I wanted to blame you, but it was my fault. So I was just proving to myself what an asshole I am.”

  Benton said, “Oh. If you need any help, I can tell you what an asshole I think you are.”

  “Thanks, I think I have it covered.”

  Benton nodded. “You told me on the first day of the investigation that this was about her, not us. I think we should keep it that way.”

  “I agree.”

  Silence. Then Wylie, still in his ice-cream suit, said, “So, Mr. Eastly, this place yours? Pinball machines and everything?”

  “Yeah, I inherited it from the first guy I arrested.”

  How nice, Imogen thought, listening to them talk. For some reason it pissed her off, their camaraderie, and she moved to stare at the collage. Her investigation was at a standstill. Her prime suspect, if her ragtag collection of suspicions about J. D. Eastly could even have made him that, was gone. The only fingerprint she’d found turned out to belong to the victim. There were six hundred Dumpsters within a one-mile radius of the airport serviced by thirteen different waste management companies, five of whom had just sent their night supervisors on vacation.

  Every lead felt dead. Worse, she knew, the leads were just window-dressing, just her spinning her wheels. Because everything she needed to find Rosalind was staring her in the face. And she could not see it.

  What, are you stupid, Page? Can’t solve a simple little riddle?

  They all died because of you.

  Knock, knock.

  Don’t screw this up, Page.

  She drove her fingernails into her palm. Only five days left. There was no more time for mistakes.

  Without looking at any of them she said, “I’m leaving. I’ll see you back at the hotel,” and walked out to the car.

  She was gunning the engine, about to pull out when Benton knocked on the passenger window of her car. When she rolled it down he said, “I’m coming with you.”

  “I need to be alone.”

  He reached in, popped the lock, opened the door.

  She said, “I can’t be responsible for what I might say if you get into the car. I’m feeling like I messed up again.”

  “I’ll take that risk.” He buckled his seat belt.

  She stepped on it.

  Benton was watching her as she drove, her jaw set, her hand gripping the wheel. Almost as tightly as he was gripping the armrest. He said, “Imogen—”

  “Don’t. Don’t say it. I know, I’m beaten. I was a fool to think I could do this on my own. I’ll call Lex and have him send someone better.”

  “There is no one better.”

  “Stop it. That’s not true. I made another mistake, and if we’re lucky the news won’t get to Loverboy, but if I’m not he’ll find out and do something. To Rosalind. Someone better wouldn’t have let that happen. Someone better would have figured out what the collage means.” A car honked as she cut in front of it.

  “Someone better might not even have made it to Vegas by now. Would not even have known about Rosalind. And we’d just be sitting here wondering why the kidnappers weren’t calling.”

  “Right.” She shook her head. “I’m no good. I can’t even think straight anymore. Rosalind, you, the case, you deserve better.”

  “Do you know what your problem is, Special Agent Page?”

  Imogen put up a hand to silence him, changing lanes one-handed without slowing down. “Please, Benton. I really do not think I can handle any—”

  “You’ve been working too hard and people keep interrupting you and you barely ate breakfast and you’re spending all day stuck in a place with no real air and lousy chili fries,” Benton said, ignoring her. “Lucky for you, I happen to have the solution to at least that last problem.”

  “What?”

  “I know a place with the best chili fries in the world. Really, really spicy. And fresh air and privacy, so you can think. I’ll take you for lunch.”

  He could see she was interested, but fighting it. She said, “Where is it?”

  “L.A.”

  “You want me to go to L.A. for lunch?” She swerved to avoid a pedicab, almost taking out two pedestrians. Benton thought she might have been aiming for them. “No way.”

  “Why not? Just a minute ago you were going to quit. I would rather have you in L.A. trying to sort this out than leaving. Or driving. You have your team doing all the door-to-door stuff here. All you need is the collage, to study it, right? We can take that with us.”

  He saw her thinking about it, tapping her fingers impatiently on the steering wheel as they waited for a light to change. “I have an appointment at one with the medical examiner to go over the cabdriver’s body.”

  “That’s okay, I have a few things to do here too. We’ll leave after your appointment and fly down. The weather is great. Instead of lunch, we’ll make it an early dinner. Afterward, I’ll bring you right back. It is less than an hour each way.”

  “Are you crazy, Benton?”

  “Look, I want you on this case. I want you one hundred percent on this case. And it’s not happening here. Sometimes when I am stuck on a problem, going somewhere without distractions, somewhere different, helps me.” He’d been dead serious, but now he got a gleam in his eye. “Besides, can you think of a better way to guarantee that a new lead will come up in the investigation than leaving town for a few hours?”

  She took the turn into the Bellagio driveway on two tires but she slowed down well before pulling into the valet area. Benton decided that was progress.

  CHAPTER 65

  “Ros, Ros wake up!” Loverboy boomed in Rosalind’s ear.

  Rosalind felt like she was being dragged back from a great distance. For a moment she could not remember where she was. His face came into focus hanging right over hers, and it was completely clear.

  “Hi,” she said. Smile at him. Make him feel at ease. Her mouth tasted stale and her head ached. She smiled. “What time is it?”

  “Pizza time! Mamma Celeste Deluxe Family Style!” he announced. “Now come on, lazybones! Don’t make me do all the work!” He pulled her into a sitting position i
n bed, and turned her so that her feet were touching the ground.

  She realized they were unbound again but her arms were still taped at the wrists. As he led her from the bed to the recliner she realized that something else was different too.

  She was wearing the new nightgown he’d bought her the day before. He must have changed it while she was passed out.

  Which meant he had to have seen the white marks on the back of the other one. The marks from leaning against the wall underneath the panel, looking for an escape route.

  But he did not seem to be bothered. If anything, as he tucked the blanket around her in the recliner and began to riffle through the grocery bag near the door, he seemed calmer, more relaxed today than before.

  “Did you have a good date?” she asked.

  He looked up from the frozen pizza box he had been reading. “Date? Oh, yesterday. Yeah, it was great.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Mommmm,” he said in the tone of an exasperated teenager. “You don’t expect me to tell you THAT, do you?”

  “No,” Rosalind agreed. Realized she really did not want to know.

  “Right. Now are you ready? I’ve got to meet someone and I’m sort of short on time so you’ll have to eat fast.” He ripped open the pizza box.

  “Do you have another date?”

  “Is that any of your business?” he teased her. Then said, no longer teasing, “Maybe. Why? It’s not like you care.”

  Rosalind heard his tone begin to seesaw between relaxed and tense. She shook her head. “That’s not true. It is very boring here when you’re not around. And”—her eye caught the TV—“and I hoped we could watch TV together tonight.”

  He looked from her to the TV, then back at her again. “That would be nice,” he said. His voice was so sincerely wistful that for a moment Rosalind felt sorry for him.

  Something horrible had made him this way. Something horrible and scary. She had thought she knew his history, but she realized now that you could never really know what went on behind the doors of anyone else’s house when they were growing up. She said, as genuinely as she could, “It would be nice.”

  “Yep, but not tonight,” he told her, matter-of-fact again. “I don’t want anyone saying I’m a mama’s boy.” He pulled the pizza out of the vacuum-packed plastic bag and held it in front of her. “Eat up, Ros.”

  She stared from it to him. “It’s frozen.”

  “It’s frozen,” he mimicked. “So? I should tell you this is your last meal for a while. Are you going to eat it or not?”

  His eyes began to glaze over the way they did when he got angry. Rosalind knew that if she hesitated even a moment longer, he would take the food away.

  At the very least, take the food away.

  She opened her mouth and bit as hard as she could into the frozen crust. A huge piece cracked off and a square of frozen green pepper fell into her lap.

  A corner jammed itself against her palate, poking the back of her throat. “Uh cah heeeew ich,” she tried to say. Her arms flailed behind her. “Uh cah heew ich.”

  “Come on, Ros, we don’t have time for your stupid games.”

  “Uh hoooaking.”

  “You’re choking?” He stared at her. “You don’t want your food?”

  “Helll,” Rosalind pleaded. “Pleeeeh helll muh.”

  Loverboy took the shard of pizza from her mouth and shook his head at her. “Why did you take such a big piece, Ros?” he scolded. “Bit off more than you could chew, didn’t you?”

  She gulped and nodded as she breathed hard. “I did. I’m sorry. I was just—just so excited to have pizza.”

  Why did that mollify him? Why did he suddenly look so happy? “Pizza’s your favorite, isn’t it, Ros? I knew it.”

  “One of them,” she agreed. “It’s one of yours too, isn’t it?”

  He nodded and began carefully breaking the pizza into smaller pieces. “Open up,” he said, and tossed one into her mouth.

  Rosalind managed to eat half the pizza that way. Her jaw ached with the effort of chewing the frozen crust and she felt cold, but at least she wasn’t hungry. She was just swallowing the last bite when he said, “Ooh, I forgot! I have ANOTHER present for you.”

  The bite almost came back up. “Another one? Why?” she asked. This is it, she told herself. He saw the white paint and now he will punish me.

  But when he reached into his coat pocket he pulled out a blue card with twenty bobby pins on it. “I bought you hairpins, like you asked for. Too bad we don’t have time to play with them now. I’ll leave them on the desk where you can look at them, though. So you can try to decide how you want me to pin you up.”

  Rosalind did not feel cold anymore. Her jaw did not ache. She could barely keep herself from weeping. Hairpins. When she asked for them she had been worried that he would remember the summer Jason became fascinated with locks, but she had to take the chance. It was her only chance. And he had brought them to her.

  He had brought her an escape route.

  “Time for your medicine,” he told her, holding three tranquilizer capsules in his hand. She had learned to gauge how long he was going to be gone by the number of pills he gave her. Three meant a long time, which suited her well. She opened her mouth and let him put them in.

  “Swallow,” he ordered, and she did. He pinched her nose together to make her open her mouth so he could look around and poke under her tongue to be sure.

  “Very good, Ros. You have really been very, very good today.”

  “Thank you,” she said, careful not to move too much so the pills would not be too far down her throat. “So have you.”

  He stopped and stood motionless, staring at her after she said that and for a moment she thought she had made a mistake. But something clicked inside him and he smiled hugely. “I know. I am a good boy. I always am. ‘Bye for now, Ros! See you soon!”

  No, Rosalind thought. No, you sick bastard, you won’t.

  She managed to throw up only two of the three pills, but even if she slept a little, she should still have time for what she needed to do.

  CHAPTER 66

  Seven hours later, sitting on the end of the Santa Monica pier sucking chili from her fingertips with the cool wind off the ocean flapping around her ears, Imogen was thinking that Benton was right. Her mind felt alive again, away from what was going on in Las Vegas.

  She glanced at the small copy of the collage anchored between the two of them under their Slurpees and the bottle of habanero salsa Benton had conned off Bugsy.

  Sort of away from what was going on in Las Vegas.

  Imogen slipped it out from under the Slurpees and stared at it. She looked out at the sea. She was getting closer. She could taste it. Closer, but not close enough.

  He said, “I read in one of your files that sometimes you feel like you’re thinking the same thoughts as the killer. What’s that like?”

  “It’s like having Martina Kidd in my head all the time. Reminding me that there’s not much that separates me from her.”

  “That’s bullshit. What you love about your job is the challenge of unearthing the killer. What a killer loves is killing. You may think the same thoughts, but to opposite ends. It’s a crucial difference.”

  Imogen was not sure what she was tasting at that moment, but it was new and it made her uncomfortable. She reached for the habanero sauce.

  “What happened to your parents, Imogen?”

  She took a moment to dot the sauce on a fingertip and suck it off before answering. “They committed suicide. I told you. Or Martina did.”

  “But why do you blame yourself?”

  “I don’t really. Not anymore.” They sat in silence. “Oh hell, I do, you’re right. It’s because I started it. I was the one who saw the notice in the newspaper.”

  “Newspaper?”

  “Tabloid. At the supermarket. It was about my father. He had once been sort of famous as a movie idol, but by the time I was born he was just doing theater. My
mother was thirty-five years younger than he was. They met when she was eighteen and playing Ophelia opposite his Claudius in Hamlet at the Ashland Shakespeare Festival. Anyway, it must have been a slow gossip week, because one of the tabloids ran a story about my father on the cover. It said he had a gay lover. I didn’t know what that was but it sounded nice. ‘Gay’ like happy. Love. So I asked my mother.” Two beats of silence. “It did not sound as nice to her.”

  “Was it true?”

  “Probably. You’re the one who told me the tabloids always tell the truth. But my mother didn’t know. Or didn’t want to know. So she told my father she was going to commit suicide. And he, to prove to her how much he loved her, decided to do it with her.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “They were both actors. It made sense to them. Maybe my father had played Othello one too many times. Anyway, it was a fabulously dramatic exit.” That was what love was, Imogen reminded herself. She remembered the way Julia talked about sharing everything with another person. The idea left Imogen cold.

  “You do know that was not your fault, right?” Benton asked. “I mean, you’ve had therapy to address that?”

  “Oh yes. Intellectually I’m all clear with it.”

  “And emotionally?”

  “Emotionally I think I’m still about seven years old.”

  “Probably not ideal, but it will go perfectly with what I have planned next. Come on.” Benton seized her by the hand and pulled her after him. They stopped in front of the Strongest Man booth. It looked like a prop from a 1940s movie, with a big mallet and a worn leather pad and a bell at the top of a meter that would say how hard you hit.

  Benton handed the man two dollar bills and said, “Do you want to go first?”

  “Uh, no. Go ahead.”

  He stepped onto the platform, picked up the mallet, and swung, hitting the bell at five hundred. Then he held the hammer out to Imogen. “Now you try.”

  “No, I won’t get it.”

  He leaned close to her and looked very grave, like he was imparting ancient wisdom. “There is a little-known secret. It has nothing to do with arm strength, it’s all in how strong your hands are. How hard you squeeze.”