The lawyer stared at me from under his dark blond eyebrows. He propped his arm over the back of my seat and leaned in. Not sexy. Felt comforting, actually. Sweat and maybe the remnants of his morning soap or cologne. “I’m not a wizard,” he said. “The best I can do is keep your name out of the paper. That’s if and only if the PD doesn’t pressure you to talk by leaking your name. Unofficially, of course.”
I made a mental note to talk to a detective about that possibility. “You can’t tell Roberto.”
“I don’t take money from clients and then not do what I’ve agreed to do.”
“Is your agreement to report on me, or to keep me out of trouble?”
“This is not a discussion we’re having.”
This was absolutely a discussion we were having. That we needed to have. Might not be one he wanted to have, might not be one I ever expected to have, but we were having it. And it was only fair that Nathaniel understand the constraints I was operating under.
“You know my real name, don’t you?”
He shook his head. “No.”
Was he kidding? He was smart and he had enough information—Oh. Right. I was speaking to a lawyer, and he had answered the precise question I had asked. Nathaniel Ross’s careful word parsing he made me smile. “Let me phrase it this way. You’re fairly certain you have guessed what my real name is, aren’t you?”
He chuckled, probably recognizing the game. “Yeah. I think so.”
“Then you know, when all is said and done, I will be a valuable ally for you.”
“Well, since you want to discuss this, let me be clear. Right here and now, Roberto Montesinos is a valuable client for me. You’re just a pain in the ass who keeps getting into trouble.”
“Yes. But you don’t have any really important information about Roberto that gives you leverage on him.”
“I don’t have any—”
“When I was sixteen, I killed a man.”
Nathaniel swore under his breath. “Shut up. Right now. Not another word.”
“I can’t prove that to you, though, because the official cause of death was heart attack brought on by pneumonia. Lots of important people swore in front of Parliament or wherever they swear these kinds of things that he died from natural causes. He was an important man. I’ll save you having to do a Google search. His name was Peter Quaid. Ever heard of him?”
The sound of Nathaniel sucking in his breath was answer enough.
Peter Quaid might have been dead for eleven years, but the name was still famous. Billionaire media mogul, opening up the airwaves on satellite, a name that was shorthand for the brave new world of instantaneous media everywhere. He’d definitely been charming and telegenic. If the news reports Stevie and I couldn’t avoid were accurate, millions of people were shocked and saddened when he died in his mid-forties, at the height of his empire-building. A heart attack can get anyone, any time. The commentators on Quaid’s channels and competitors’ channels mourned.
Nathaniel rocked his head against the seat rest. “Jesus Christ. Why are you telling me this?”
“Maybe he did die of natural causes. Perhaps it was a heart attack. If so, it was brought on by my application of a cricket bat to the back of his head six or seven times. I lost count after four.”
He held his index finger up. “Shut. Up. Now.”
I batted his hand away and leaned in closer. Now I could see the reflection of street lamps in his eyes. “He was on top of Stevie at the time. She was eleven years old.”
He did not blink. Good man.
“I will do anything to protect my little sister. I have done things to protect her. You don’t want to know how I got us out of London that day. Everything I did that day I would do again if I had to.”
His mouth opened and closed a couple of times, as though he kept thinking of things he wanted to ask and then realized he was better off not knowing the answer to. Finally he shook his head and sank away from me. “What the hell? Did your father know what this man did?”
I snorted with laughter. “Know about it? He arranged it. My father made a lot of money from having a close relationship with Peter Quaid. They were finishing up a multi-billion-dollar deal to merge their companies. A deal where Stevie was the signing bonus. Because Quaid had already got tired of me. At sixteen, I was too old.”
Nathaniel, the criminal defense lawyer, stared at me. He must have heard worse over the years. People can survive some terrible life situations. I’d at least had a roof over my head and food whenever I’d wanted it, which was obvious as I’d spent most of my adolescence kind of pudgy. It’s when I finally started growing that Quaid started looking for a replacement.
“My father wants me dead. He even sent someone to kill me. It’s why I’ve been hiding. If Roberto takes me back to New York and leaves Stevie on her own, how long do you think it will take for him to make her pay for what I did?”
He didn’t answer me. What was he going to say? Instead, we sat in his fancy Mercedes sedan not saying a word. The night was so noisy, with the sounds of people milling about on the street and cars whizzing by on the boulevard. People only whiz by when it’s late at night. During the day, the traffic usually crawls.
When I decided he had thought long enough about what I’d said, I reached over and put my hand on his. He didn’t pull it away this time. I leaned toward him, which was more about making him aware of me than needing to whisper. Then I whispered.
“I need you to help me. I will do anything you ask me to. Now, or in the future.”
When he snorted, he breathed too rapidly. I was making him nervous. Good. “You really shouldn’t give open-ended blank checks.”
“I do if I need to. I do if I’m willing and able to pay up. Which I absolutely am. I do what I have to do when I have to. And I don’t agonize over it or regret it for even ten seconds. What I need right now is time. Time to figure out what I can do with Stevie to protect her. If you have any ideas, fabulous. Let’s hear them. But right now, if I go back to New York, she’s as good as dead.”
He tapped his thumbs on the steering wheel. Probably looking for the best angle for this situation, or maybe wondering how he could fire Roberto and me as his clients. Maybe he was picturing the gigantic stretch of Malibu beachfront real estate he was going to buy with the money he could make off my family.
He pushed the button that started the car. “My father always spells God with the ‘o’ left out. He says it shows respect to the creator. Shows awareness that you’re not even worthy to write the name.”
“Religious beliefs are weird.”
“That they are. I will call you tomorrow.”
I opened the passenger-side door. “Fair enough.”
“What are you doing?”
“I need to drive my car home, Nathaniel. No one survives for long in Los Angeles without a car.”
“I’ll follow you,” he said.
“Make sure you charge for every minute of drive time.”
Once in my car, I stared at the wheel. It was hard to remember what I was supposed to do next. This key in my hand—why? Oh, that’s right, to begin driving the car.
In the space between my seat and the center console, a few metal zipper teeth peeked out at me.
Courtney’s purse and keys. I still had them.
A glance in the rear-view mirror told me Nathaniel was ready to shadow me home.
Well...fuck.
I opened my door and signaled to him. He got out of his car and walked over. “What is it?”
I pointed into my car. “The whole reason I came here to talk to Courtney. I forgot to bring them in.”
Nathaniel looked at me. “You are a piece of work.” He went to his car, undoubtedly to get an envelope to store them in before handing them over to the police.
CHAPTER TEN
STEVIE GAVE ME hot chocolate to wash down the Vicodin tablet before bed instead of the G&T I asked her for. Then she asked if I wanted her to sleep in the same room as me, so I wouldn�
��t feel alone. I told her that wasn’t necessary because I was fine.
Instead, I lay awake for hours, staring at the ceiling and burping chocolate-scented acid.
After an hour or two of bad dreams involving blood and people pointing at me, I sat in bed and stared out the window at the sunrise. For the first time in a long time, staying in bed felt superior to doing any other activity. Good things happened in beds, and very, very bad things seemed to happen out of them.
I’d gone with Anne on that interview to help her out, and I ended up in a fight and with an assault charge against me. I’d talked to Courtney to straighten out what happened during the interview, and now Courtney was dead. I could only imagine what would happen if I ever ran into Roger Sabo again.
Maybe Courtney’s murder had been random. There had been fewer than three hundred murders in the past year in Los Angeles—the news constantly bleated about how L.A. was now the safest big city in the nation—and some percentage of those had to have been random. Gang-related, or drug-related, or whatever. Perhaps a bullet meant for a drug dealer hitting a passerby instead.
Courtney’s murder wasn’t a random drive-by, no matter how much meth she snorted. She had been well-lighted in the motel room’s window. The murderer could have been after me, but when I was standing anywhere near Courtney, it was quite clear which one of us was which. Her murder had been deliberate.
The obvious question was: Did Roger kill Courtney? If he did, why did he wait until I was with her? And if he didn’t pull the trigger, how had the killer known where she would be and when? The murderer could have been following me to get to Courtney, of course, but how would anyone have known that I’d be talking to her? The killer would have had to get that information out of Stevie, and she wouldn’t have said a thing to anyone.
And that man she’d wanted me to talk to, Greg Hitchcock. Could he have murdered her? It had happened right after they talked.
Courtney had been the target. I couldn’t for the life of me imagine why.
Not my problem, I told myself. The city of Los Angeles retained the services of well-armed, good-looking men (and probably women, too, though I hadn’t met any yet and wasn’t planning to) to find the answers to those questions, and my job was just to stay the hell away from it.
The house was quiet. Which meant Stevie was outside in the garden, poking at green things, or in the main house, cooking. My phone was on the kitchen table with a sticky note stuck on top of it. The note had an arrow on it, pointing to the front door of the guest house.
I checked the phone: three calls from Anne, one from Nathaniel. A couple of others I didn’t recognize, which meant they could wait.
Sabo was my main problem at the moment. Courtney’s death changed nothing when it came to the problem he presented me with, so that was what I had to focus on today.
On the front door of the guest house was another sticky note with an arrow. My sister had a gentle way of guiding me to where I needed to go, and she was telling me to head outside. Perhaps she had been struck by the need to make lots of French toast for breakfast.
As I walked into the garden, though, Stevie and Anne walked through the gate on the side of Gary’s house, heading toward me. Anne’s hands rolled forward constantly as she explained something to Stevie, and my sister kept nodding.
“Hey!” Anne waved at me, as though I hadn’t seen them coming my way. “Did you hear?”
She sounded concerned and upset. But not at me. Which meant that her news probably concerned Courtney’s murder.
“Just put my feet on the floor. What happened?”
“Courtney was shot and killed last night,” she said.
Since her opening line wasn’t, “Tell me everything you know about what happened last night,” she didn’t know I’d been with Courtney when it happened.
Stevie rubbed her fingers on her collarbone, confirming my suspicion. If I wanted to pretend I had no idea what Anne was talking about, I was in the clear.
I could tell Anne not only did I know that but why, or pretend that I had no idea. With option one, the conversation was going to rapidly turn into an interview. And that was too risky.
I slowed to a stop by the line of chaise longues by the pool.
Anne nodded furiously. “Last night. In her hotel room. Somebody shot her.”
Stevie curled her fingers at me, which meant, react to that news. So my mouth dropped open and a few moments of silence went by. “That’s horrible. Do they know who did it?”
She shook her head. “The cops have a witness they want to talk to.”
That would be me, I thought.
“You saw her yesterday, right?” Anne asked. “How did that go? What happened? Have the police talked to you?”
“Are you working on a story about this?”
She pulled her cell phone out and glanced at the screen, which was covered in notifications. “You bet I am. This was a shitty little human interest story on Monday morning and now it’s about a murder. Just a second.” She walked away from us, phone to her ear.
Stevie took my hand in hers and pulled me back toward Gary’s house. I turned the handle on the French door and my shoulder ached so hard I let Stevie pull the door open. “Let’s get you some breakfast,” she said. Sotto voce, she added, “She called your phone so many times in a row I decided it was best to answer it. She was on her way over, so I let her in the front gate. What are you going to tell her?”
I looked out at Anne, chattering away into her phone. “Do what I always do. Stall. What are you up to today?”
She pointed toward the library. “Working in there. On a project. Come find me afterwards?”
“Be good. Try to spend at least fifteen minutes outside today.”
Stevie gave me a thumbs-up and disappeared through the butler’s pantry, heading toward the east wing of the house.
In the kitchen, Anne plopped down on the stool next to mine.
“We’re going to talk to Micah Schlegel today,” Anne said.
“Why do we want to do that?”
“He’s one of the producers from Girls Becoming Stars. We already had an interview scheduled to talk about the GBS reunion. He might know some stuff about Courtney and Sabo we could use for this assault charge. On the way you can tell me everything that happened with Courtney yesterday. Maybe there’s something there.”
And my job was to prevent Anne from figuring that out.
“Let me grab my things and we’ll chat,” I said.
* * *
On the drive to Micah Schlegel’s office in Studio City, I told Anne about my chat with Courtney and how extremely familiar she was with the owner of the office she’d worked in. She’d wanted me to talk to him for some reason. Then, he’d offered me a part-time job.
“That was awfully Christian of him,” Anne said. “That’s it? She didn’t talk to you about the lawsuit?”
“Never figured out what she wanted,” I said. “Now I don’t know what to do.”
“Did anything happen that might tell you why someone wanted to kill her?”
I shook my head. I wanted to stop thinking about Courtney Cleary. “Explain to me who this person is we’re going to talk to.”
“His name’s Micah Schlegel. He produces reality TV shows.”
“How do they differ from regular TV shows?” I asked.
Anne glanced over at me. “Seriously, you live in LA?”
She spent the drive over the Sepulveda Pass and into the San Fernando Valley explaining the economics of reality TV shows. The successful ones made a lot of money but had no lasting power, because no one watched reruns, and the unsuccessful ones didn’t cost that much to produce, so churning through a lot of crap to find the ones that worked was economically viable. On the other hand, a standard TV sitcom or drama might take hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to produce one episode and then get canceled right away, because the real money was in surviving a few years and reaching syndication. Lots of places were choosing shor
t-term money over the long-term.
A show like Girls Becoming Stars could burst onto the scene, be incredibly popular for two years, and then flame out, and that would be considered an unqualified success. The producers made some money with almost no investment and then were on to their next project.
“Leaving the stars of the show high and dry and wondering what just happened.”
“Exactly,” Anne said. “Gotta feed the beast. And you get so used to the money and the perks and then it all vanishes.”
“And you end up dead in North Hollywood.”
“Can you imagine?” Anne said.
Studio City was named after its origins in the early days of the movie business, when the undeveloped area was used as studio lots. Westerns were filmed there. I myself never particularly enjoyed Westerns. Good vs. Evil? Cattle vs. Sheep? Everything the main characters were fighting over was eventually going to give way to whoever owned the railroads, so all those poor bastards did was distract everybody from the real issues, which was who owned the land.
My unique perspective on the opening of the West may have been colored by the fact that one of my great-great-grandfathers was a railroad tycoon who married a silver heiress and bought up cheap what these poor ranchers and farmers had been killing themselves to own and work on.
It was tough to imagine movie cowboys riding around modern day Studio City. Despite the name, the place had zero glamour, although it was one of the wealthier areas of the San Fernando Valley. Ventura Boulevard looked much the same here as it did in Tarzana: lots of tall palm trees, garish billboards, and oversized store signage competing for drivers’ attention. There were some pedestrians, but the cliché about Los Angeles being designed for drivers was triply true in the San Fernando Valley. The Valley really came into its own post-World War II and the layout was absolutely designed for autos: wide lanes, large radiuses on sidewalk corners to make turning easier, and every ten feet another driveway.
Everybody Takes The Money (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries) Page 10
