“That’s not the point.”
“I know, I know.” Teri shrugged. “But I can’t change it now, so let’s move on.”
They waited silently for the coffee to brew then, when they had filled their cups, they adjourned to the deck, where a smoky haze hung in the air.
“How bad is it?” Mona asked.
“I don’t know.”
“But bad?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“What do you think this guy’s gonna do?”
“I’m more worried about what we’re gonna do.”
Mona sipped her coffee and appraised her friend. “You look tired.”
“I didn’t get much sleep last night. And I’ve got a busy day ahead of me.”
“That’s what Mike said. I want to go with you.”
Teri shook her head. “I need you doing something else for me.”
“Name it.”
“Find out everything you can about Leland Crowell and his will. Was there anything strange about the probate? Was there an order that allowed me to take the script? I need to know everything, and I don’t trust the lawyers to do it.”
“Okay.”
“And I need to know as much as I can about Doug Bozarth and his money. I want to know where it came from. And I want to know what he’s capable of.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s just a hunch, but I think that we may end up having more to worry about from him than we do from Leland Crowell.”
Mona stopped in mid-sip. “What are you talking about?”
“That’s what I need you to find out.”
Then Teri got up and went inside, leaving Mona slack-faced on the deck.
CHAPTER 19
The neighborhood where Spencer West, attorney-at-aw had maintained his home office had not changed in the two years since Teri’s
first and only visit there. She pulled up in front of the house and killed the engine on her SUV. She checked herself in the rearview mirror. With her hair pulled back in a ponytail, wearing faded jeans and a golf shirt, a Texas Rangers baseball cap, and sunglasses, she thought herself passably disguised.
As she approached the front porch, the first thing she noticed was the absence of West’s “shingle” out front, pathetic though it had been. She had not heard from him since that prior meeting, so she had no way of knowing if he had moved or simply shut down his practice. She pushed the doorbell, but heard no sound inside. She knocked on the door, her knuckles causing the flimsy wood to wobble with each rap. After a moment, she heard shuffling sounds from inside, then the thin curtain over the window in the door moved aside. A few seconds later, the door cracked open about ten inches and an elderly Hispanic woman peered out, her eyes wide behind thick glasses lenses.
“Can I help you?” the woman asked, in perfect, unaccented English. “I’m looking for Mr. West.”
“There’s nobody here by that name.”
“Is this no longer his office?”
The door opened wider, to reveal a diminutive woman, no more
than five feet tall, wearing a threadbare flowered housecoat. Her hair was shoe polish black, though surely she was approaching her eighties. “You looking for the lawyer?” she asked.
“Yes, Spencer West.”
“He’s dead.”
“Dead?”
“They say he killed himself,” the woman said. “I don’t know for sure.
I just know he died in here.”
“How long ago did this happen?”
“Oh, two years ago, maybe.” The woman pulled her glasses down on
her nose and peered over them at Teri. “Do I know you?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Sure I do. You’re that actress.”
“I get that a lot, but no, I just look like her.”
“No, you’re her. I know.”
Teri backed away and down the steps. “I’m sorry to have bothered
you, ma’am.” She turned and headed for her car as the woman stepped outside onto the porch. “You’re the one that writer killed himself over. Did the lawyer kill himself over you, too?”
Teri got in the SUV and locked the door. She squeezed the steering wheel with both hands and leaned her head back. “Lady,” she said softly, “that’s starting to look like a really good question.”
“I’ve got a new research assignment for you,” Teri said. On the other end of the call, Mona answered, “I guess I’ve got nothing better to do.”
Teri slowed and peered at a street sign. The letters were obscured by rust and spray paint, the name of the street barely discernible. She turned left.
“Find out what happened to Spencer West, Leland Crowell’s attorney. He died a couple of years ago. Might have been suicide.”
“What difference does it make?”
“Because if he was part of a scam, or even if he wasn’t, but found out about it and ended up dead under mysterious circumstances, then that tells us something.”
“Tells us what?”
Teri saw a crumbling apartment complex ahead on her left, with a sign out front that proclaimed it the “Paradise Arms.” She figured that, even in its heyday, the name must have been some kind of inside joke.
“For one thing, it tells us if this is more than just a scam. If this thing is going to get dangerous, I’d like to know.”
“Don’t you think you’re being a little melodramatic?”
“What you find will tell us whether I am or not.”
She pulled in to the Paradise Arms parking lot and stopped in front of the staircase. It all seemed eerily reminiscent of last night’s visit to the Crescent Hotel. Apparently rundown structures in bad parts of town had a limited number of building plans to choose from. She climbed the stairs and went to the apartment number she had been given by Bozarth’s office, but no one was home. Back downstairs, she located the management office, opened the door, and went inside.
To call it an office was to be kind. It was actually a darkened studio apartment that doubled as the residence of the complex manager, a rail thin black man who sat at a card table, eating cereal and watching a tiny television. Behind him was a filing cabinet, and next to it a sofa bed, opened and unmade, which rounded out the furnishings.
The manager looked up in surprise when Teri entered. “Don’t you knock?” he asked.
“I’m sorry. I thought this was the office.” She took off her sunglasses and allowed her eyes to adjust to the dim light.
“It’s also my home.”
“You might want to put a ‘please knock’ sign outside.”
“Yeah, I’ll do that,” he said, obviously with no intention of doing so. His eyes narrowed, then widened in recognition. “Hey, I know you.”
Two for two; so much for thinking she had adequately disguised herself.
“I’m looking for one of your tenants. Annemarie Crowell in apartment—”
“She moved out yesterday.” He turned in this chair and shuffled through a haphazard stack of papers and envelopes on the floor beside him. “But she said you’d come looking for her. I thought she was lying, but damned if you aren’t here.”
He grasped a legal-sized envelope from the stack, turned, and handed it to Teri. “She said to give this to you,” he said.
Teri took it and looked at the careful handwriting on the outside, the name PEGGY TUCKER in all capital letters. She flinched just briefly at the name, but quickly recovered.
“Who’s Peggy Tucker?” the manager asked.
“I don’t know.”
He grabbed a notepad from the floor, along with a pen, and thrust it at Teri. “Can I get your autograph?”
“No.”
“Just say ‘To Rondell, my biggest fan.’”
Teri put on her sunglasses, turned, and left with the envelope in hand. As she closed the door behind her, she barely heard Rondell’s last words: “Sorry to bother you, your royal highness white bitch.”
Teri ran to her car, gasping for breath. It see
med as if every inhale she took was a desperate struggle for life. A vise gripped her chest, and a deep freeze settled into her soul. She jumped in the car and slammed the door.
“Easy, easy,” she said to herself. A few deep breaths, blowing air out through pursed lips, and she felt her heart rate slow. Not yet back to normal, but getting there. She stared at the name on the envelope. Peggy Tucker. Peggy had been dead and buried for nearly twenty years. How did Annemarie Crowell know about her? What the hell was going on?
With trembling fingers, Teri tore open the envelope. Inside was a single sheet of yellow paper from a legal pad. In the same handwriting as the name on the outside were the words: CALEB’S DINER— MIDNIGHT.
She crumpled the page into a tiny wad in her right fist and threw it over her shoulder into the back seat.
She gasped for breath again.
CHAPTER 20
The same group that had met at Denny’s after Teri’s encounter with Leland Crowell had reassembled, this time at Doug Bozarth’s Malibu home, perched above the beach overlooking the ocean. Mike seemed almost giddy when he explained to Teri that this was Bozarth’s “beach house,” complementing his three acre estate in Brentwood, his mountain resort in Vail, and his four-thousand-square-foot vacation home on Anini Beach, on the north shore of Kauai. And, oh, yes, there was also that small island he owned in the Caribbean and the villa overlooking the Mediterranean in Italy. Not yet forty years of age, and Doug Bozarth had done quite well for himself.
Although Teri had never been overly impressed with the accumulation of wealth and assets, Mike made no secret of his own aspirations in that regard. He relished his newfound association with Bozarth and his ilk, to the point, Teri thought, of shutting down his mind and stifling any inclination to ruin a good thing by even considering the possibility that matters were not as they should be with Bozarth. Mike’s villains of choice remained Leland Crowell and his mother. Teri had a more expansive list.
The four sat around a patio table on a teak deck that resided on stilts above the beach. Mike and Bob enjoyed beer, Bozarth his Scotch, but Teri stuck to water, wanting to keep her mind one hundred percent clear. Although to any passerby below, it would appear to be a casual gathering of friends, the atmosphere was anything but casual. The mood was tense, even grim. The centerpiece on the table was the uncrumpled yellow page with Teri’s rendezvous instructions, and it was the focused topic of conversation.
“I don’t want her meeting alone with this guy,” Mike said. “How do you know it’s Crowell?” Bob asked. “Maybe it’ll be the mother. After all, she’s the one who left the note for Teri.”
“I don’t care which one it is. They’re both nuts. And I think that makes them both dangerous.”
“It’ll be the writer,” Bozarth said. “The mother is just the messenger. But what this proves is that they’re both in it together, and they have been from the start.”
“I can’t get over this whole thing,” Teri said. “Do you know how much patience it takes to run a scam like this? They’ve been waiting for over two years, and they had no way of knowing at the start that it would ever pay off. What were the odds that I’d even read that script, much less like it?”
“Maybe it was just luck, and now they’re taking advantage of it,” Mike said.
“Spencer West died right after I got the script. If his death is connected, then that’s a plan.”
“And that means there’s more to it than we know,” Bozarth said.
“Do you think the lawyer was in on it, too?” Mike asked.
“Probably. They figured they couldn’t trust him to keep his mouth shut.”
“I think I’ve missed a step here,” Bob said. “Are you saying they killed him? I checked with the police, and they’re pretty sure the lawyer was a suicide.”
“But I did some checking of my own,” Mike said, “and I’m pretty sure he’s the one who spilled the story to the trades. Like I told Teri back then, it really didn’t matter if the script sucked, because we could rewrite it into something worth a damn, and the buzz would carry it from there. I’m with Teri on this; it’s all part of a plan.”
“The police were also pretty sure that Leland Crowell took a swan dive off that cliff up at Big Sur,” Bozarth said. “But we now know he’s alive and well. That spells plan, too. A lot of thought went into this. I don’t believe in happenstance.”
“Somebody damn sure jumped off that cliff,” Mike said. “But not Leland,” Teri said.
Bozarth riveted his attention on Teri. “So you see what we’re dealing with: people who are willing to kill to scam us.” The subtext wasn’t lost on her: We’ve got to be willing to kill to protect ourselves.
Then a sudden thought hit her. “It is a scam.”
“Welcome to the conversation,” Bob said. “Try to keep up here.”
“No, I mean what if that really was Leland Crowell who jumped off that cliff? Annemarie identified his body; what if she wasn’t lying? What if that really was her son?”
“I’m not following what you’re saying,” Bob said.
“I’ve been sitting here trying to understand how anyone, especially someone who needs money as badly as Annemarie and the ‘undead,’ as Doug calls him, could sit back and wait two years for their scam to pay off. That doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t buy it. So what if this isn’t a twoyear-old scam, but it’s a brand new scam made out of opportunity?”
Bozarth furrowed his brow. “I think I see where you’re going. You’re saying that the newly resurrected Leland Crowell isn’t Leland Crowell at all. But he and Annemarie see a chance to get in on the money, so he shows up claiming to be the dead man. Or maybe it was all part of a plan, but Leland is still dead.”
“Exactly.”
“That would make sense.”
“So if we can prove it was really Leland Crowell who died, whether he killed himself or not, then the script is legally mine. And even if it turns out that the will wasn’t legally probated, that’s just a formality.”
“How do we prove that it was Crowell who died?” Bob asked.
“We don’t have to,” Mike said. “We just have to prove that Lazarus is someone else.”
“Go there tonight, Teri,” Bozarth said. “If it is Leland, or whoever the hell he is, who shows up, we’ll have someone watching. We’ll take it from there.”
There was that subtext again that bothered Teri. And again, it was nothing you could take to the bank, but she heard it as a mortal threat. Maybe Annemarie and the scraggly-haired man were killers, or maybe they were just scam artists. Either way, that’s what courts were for. Taking the law into your own hands left scars; all this talk was picking at the scabs over Teri’s scars.
She stood and walked to the edge of the deck and gazed at the ocean. On the beach below her, a blonde-haired girl and a small dog that looked like a Sheltie passed by. Carefree, a day on the beach. Teri wondered what dreams and aspirations the little girl had. Did she want to grow up to be a doctor or lawyer? Or an actress?
With her back to the others, even though she knew they were all watching her, Teri said, “What do I tell him?”
“Tell him he’s not getting a damn dime,” Bozarth said.
She spun around to face him.
“Are you crazy?” Mike said. He got up and walked to Teri, then stood beside her, as if lending support.
“It’ll rattle him,” Bozarth said.
“That’s what I mean,” Mike said. “We already know these people are willing to kill, and now you want Teri to go in there alone and deliberately piss him off?”
“He needs to know he’s not the only one willing to kill.”
The words hit Teri like a tidal wave.
There, he had flat out said it!
She supposed she should give him credit for honesty, but things seemed to be spiraling out of control.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Mike asked.
Bozarth answered Mike, but looked at Teri as he spoke. He wante
d to be sure she knew he was talking to her.
“What I’m saying is that people kill for lots of reasons. Sometimes it’s for money. Sometimes it’s for love. And sometimes it’s just plain ol’ selfpreservation.”
He nodded almost imperceptibly when he spoke the last words. She knew exactly what he meant.
“If he’s willing to kill, he knows others might be, as well,” Bozarth continued. “There’s one other thing he knows. If he should suddenly disappear, no one would miss him. After all, he’s already a dead man.”
“I don’t like the sounds of this,” Mike said.
“You don’t have to like the sounds of it,” Bob said. “It makes sense.”
“Look, Mike, don’t go getting all Grassy Knoll on me,” Bozarth said. “He just has to think we’d kill him. It’ll put him off-kilter so he’ll make a mistake. Then we can wrap this up.”
“Wrap it up, how?” Teri asked.
“Let me worry about that.”
CHAPTER 21
Between Spencer West’s former office, Annemarie Crowell’s apartment complex, and the Crescent Hotel, Teri had seen enough
rundown, ragged structures in the last couple of days to last her a lifetime. These weren’t the charming “holes-in-the-wall” that she learned to love back home in Texas, the quaint ranch and farm houses and classic cafes. These were the kinds of places that testified to a world of sadness and poverty that she and her friends only read about in newspaper articles or saw on television or the big screen. The world that she subconsciously hoped she would never know about firsthand. The world that she had somehow been drawn into against her will by a bizarre sequence of events that even the most creative screenwriter might have dismissed as not being credible. But before she could put that world of rundown structures behind her, she had one more to visit.
Caleb’s Diner.
At exactly midnight, Teri pulled her SUV into the sparsely-populated parking lot and stared at the building, constructed in the style of a railroad car, or maybe Airstream trailer, with windows lining the front with a row of booths. What looked like a narrow aisle separated those booths from stools at a counter. Through the windows, she saw that all booths were vacant at the end away from the front door, and only a couple of the stools at the counter supported diners. No Leland Crowell, as far as she could tell.
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