When I returned to the foyer everyone had gone, probably headed for the burial site. I walked outside and was leaning against the cool granite of the building’s exterior, inhaling fresh air to calm the turmoil in my head and stomach, when the redhead exited the foyer and walked by me. She must have been in a stall in the ladies’ room when I was there, because I hadn’t seen her in the foyer.
She headed for the parking lot. I followed her. My mind was a tangle of thoughts—Aggie and Randy, Trina’s locket, B. Lasher. I couldn’t sort it out now, but I could try to find out if this was Doreen and, if so, why she was wearing a wig.
She was walking at a rapid pace that I had difficulty matching in my Manolo Blahnik heels. I considered calling out “Doreen,” to see if she’d turn around, but she disappeared behind a steel gray minivan.
Almost tripping as one skinny heel caught in the asphalt, I sped up, determined to reach her before she got into her car and drove off, but a second later she reappeared and continued walking in that steady pace. I figured she’d mistaken this car for hers—there were a number of gray minivans in the horseshoe-shaped lot.
Then she did it again—walked around a car and came back a couple of seconds later, first behind a beige minivan, then a black sport-utility vehicle, then a blue Suburban.
What on earth was she doing? No one could be that disoriented, and her purposeful gait said she wasn’t drunk or stoned. I doubted that she was planning to steal a car and trying to see if a forgetful owner had left his or her key in the ignition.
Now she was at the bottom of the horseshoe. I was still following her, but I’d dropped back. With one eye watching her, I pretended to rummage in my purse as she walked around another black SUV and reemerged from behind another minivan several cars farther ahead.
That was when I figured it out: She’d been taking cover behind large vehicles that would prevent her from being seen.
By whom? And why?
I looked over my shoulder, but there was no one else in the parking lot.
My Acura was two cars up. Twenty seconds later I was inside, seat belt buckled, ignition on, my eyes glued to the rearview mirror so that I’d be able to watch her as she made her trek across the lot until she arrived at her car.
Ten seconds went by, then twenty. A minute. There was no sign of the redhead, but she couldn’t have left the lot.
I kept my eye on the mirror. Another half minute passed. A black Lincoln Town Car with tinted windows pulled into the lot and glided to a velvet stop on the other side of the horseshoe, in front of a dark blue SUV.
In a fluid movement that would have done Jackie Joyner-Kersee proud, the redhead sprinted from behind the SUV to the Town Car, yanked the door open, and slid into the limo, which rumbled past me seconds later on its stately way out of the lot and afforded me a fleeting glance at a mustached driver with a swarthy complexion.
Backing out of my spot, I sped after the car, turned left when it did, and kept several lengths behind as the driver entered the Pomona Freeway heading west. Minutes later we merged onto the 10 toward Santa Monica.
I’ve never followed anyone in my life. The tension, and maybe the adrenaline, added to my headache, which was boring through my skull. With my right hand I found my pillbox, flicked it open, and downed another Advil with water from the bottle I always carry with me.
The Town Car was keeping pace with the traffic. I did the same. At one point it made a sudden lane change. I stayed in my lane but was able to track its progress, and five minutes later I changed lanes, too, though I allowed two cars to separate us.
It was a long forty minutes, which felt longer because I didn’t know our destination and was unfamiliar with the area. At the National off-ramp the Town Car exited and so did I. We drove to Robertson, took that to Olympic, and turned left. My headache was subsiding, in part because I was more relaxed as we passed through familiar streets.
We were in Century City when the Town Car cut a diagonal to the right lane and made a sharp turn onto Avenue of the Stars. Muttering a curse, I did the same, eliciting several angry honks in the process, and found myself behind four black Town Cars. Two were in the lane to my left, two in front of me.
I’d memorized the license plate of the redhead’s car and was able to eliminate the car in front of me and the one alongside me. Pulling forward until I was inches from the bumper of the car ahead, I read the license plate of the lead Town Car on my left.
That was the one. I allowed myself a satisfied smile that disappeared moments later when both Town Cars on my left turned into the drive of the Century Plaza Hotel while I had no choice but to continue to the intersection.
I made a right turn, and three more that brought me back to Avenue of the Stars and the hotel’s semicircular driveway.
My Town Cars had spawned a fleet. A parking attendant dressed in a red-and-gold-trimmed Beefeater uniform complete with cap opened my car door.
“Okay if I leave my car here for a few minutes?”
His frown said my smile wouldn’t do, so I handed him a five, which didn’t bowl him over, but he pocketed it.
The redhead’s Town Car was three cars up. I knocked on the driver’s door.
He lowered his window. “Where you want go?” he asked in a thick Russian accent. He had unnaturally black hair and bushy eyebrows and a trim mustache below a nose with prominent capillaries that said he probably drank too much. I hoped he didn’t indulge while he drove.
“I wanted to ask you about the woman you just drove here from the cemetery in Downey.”
“Lady, you want driver, okay. I’m not lawyer. I don’t make money talking.”
I pulled a ten from my wallet and showed it to him. He rolled his eyes in disgust. I took out another ten.
He stretched his hand out the window and snatched both bills.
“Where did you pick her up?” I asked.
“Here.” He pointed toward the hotel. “She wants go to Downey, wants I should wait, but not in lot. She will phone when she is ready to leave. I am thinking, this is crazy lady, but she says she will pay me two hundred dollars, so okay.” He shrugged.
“What’s her name?”
“Who gives name to limo driver? You?” He shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe my stupidity.
“Anything else?”
“She brings big black bag and leaves it in car.”
I peered into the back of the Town Car.
He followed my eyes. “In Downey,” he said, impatient. “Not now. Now she takes bag and goes back into hotel. Crazy lady.”
I thanked the driver and took a few steps, then walked right back. I knocked on the window again and waited until he turned down his radio.
“You said she phoned you,” I told the Russian. “So you have her phone number. Can you tell me what it is?”
“Why you are looking for this lady?” A crafty expression had narrowed his brown eyes.
“I want to ask her a few questions.”
“Maybe she is not wanting to talk to you. When she is in car, she is nervous, turning head to look out back window.”
“Do you have the number?”
“Fifty dollars.”
“Twenty.”
“Fifty.”
He was literally in the driver’s seat. I opened my wallet and pulled out three tens. “That’s all I have. Unless you take MasterCard or Visa.”
He grunted. “Funny lady. You should go on Leno.” He stuffed the bills into his pocket, then punched a few buttons on his cell phone. “You have paper?”
“I hope so, ’cause I’m sure that’s gonna cost extra.” He gave me a dark look and rattled off ten digits. Between the speed and the accent, I had to ask him to repeat the numbers twice before I got them all down in sequence.
The prefix was 619. That was in the San Diego area.
I tucked the slip of paper with the phone number into my wallet. This time I didn’t thank the driver. I don’t think he was crushed.
I headed to the lobby, avoidi
ng eye contact with my valet. I was out of cash and goodwill. Inside the elegant plant-filled room with a soaring ceiling, a guy at a black baby grand (his jeans said he was a hotel guest, not an employee) was playing the hell out of The Phantom of the Opera for a handful of people sitting on sofas who couldn’t have cared less.
I’ve been there. I’ve done signings at chain stores where most of the customers look at me as though I’m wallpaper, or ask me for other writers’ books or directions to the restroom. At a Valencia library where only one woman showed up for my reading, a man interrupted me to ask where he could find a book on Marco Polo and gave me a baleful look when I said I didn’t know. The woman bought a copy of Out of the Ashes. “I probably won’t read it,” she told me. “But I felt bad for you, honey, you came all this way and had such a bad turnout.”
My redhead, of course, was nowhere in sight. I’ve attended weddings at the Century P but have never stayed here, so it took me a minute to find Registration, where I improvised my spiel for the brunette behind the desk:
A woman had come in five minutes ago, tall and thin with medium-length red hair, carrying a large black bag. Her first name was Doreen, I didn’t know her last name, we’d just met at a prewedding brunch and the bride had asked me to give Doreen a ride to the Century, which I did and was about to drive off when I noticed she’d taken my day planner and left hers in my car. Her name wasn’t in her planner, so I hoped the clerk knew who she was. Oh, and she was from somewhere near San Diego. I remembered that.
The clerk had listened patiently while I talked. “You could ask the bride for the woman’s name,” she suggested.
I nodded. “I would, but she’s with her fiancé, doing a final inspection of the house they bought. It’s in Hancock Park, and you can’t get cell reception there, unless you have Nextel, which she doesn’t.”
“Well, then, you can leave the planner, and when you talk to the bride and find out this woman’s name, I’d be happy to return the planner to her.”
“Right. But in the meantime, she’s probably frantic, thinking she lost it. And I really need mine,” I added, hoping the anxiety in my voice would sway her. “Could you check to see if you have a guest named Doreen?”
The woman’s smile was less friendly but still polite. “I’m sorry. I’d like to help, but I couldn’t give out any information about any of our guests. I’m sure you understand.”
It had been worth a try. On my way out of the hotel, I detoured to the restroom to use the facilities and get the most for my five dollars. Fifty-five, if you counted what I’d paid the limo driver.
I was looking in the mirror as I freshened my lipstick when a woman emerged from a bathroom stall.
It was my redhead.
I recognized her coppery eyes. She’d chucked the wig and the glasses, which had left reddened indentations on either side of her thin, delicate nose. Short black hair peeked out from under a floppy gray fleece hat that sat low over her forehead. She’d changed into jeans and a sheepskin jacket and a pink pair of the sheepskin Ugg boots that stores can’t keep in stock. She’d probably stashed her funeral attire in the black tote she’d slung over her shoulder, the tote she’d left in the Town Car during Randy’s service.
I shut off my cell phone and counted to ten. When I returned to the lobby, Piano Man was playing music from Cats and she was walking out past the large glass doors.
She turned left. My valet was busy and didn’t notice me as I followed her down the wide boulevard. I stayed back while she waited for the traffic signal to turn green, and I stepped into the intersection after she reached the other side, when the Don’t Walk sign started flashing red. She turned left again and slipped into the middle of a small group of pedestrians, but I was able to keep her gray hat in sight until she entered the Century City mall underground parking lot.
It’s a huge, multilevel structure. If I didn’t hurry, I was sure to lose her. If I did hurry, she’d hear my footsteps, louder in this echo chamber, and would confront me: What the hell was I doing, following her? The truth is, I didn’t know. There was no reason for me not to walk up to her and ask her why she’d disguised herself, who she was hiding from. Unless she’d come here to meet someone. If that was so, I wanted to know who.
When I caught up with her, she was several hundred feet ahead of me and was leaving the parking area through a door that would take her to the escalator that, from my many visits to the mall, I knew was there.
Scurrying past rows of cars, I ran up the escalator in my damn heels, eliciting stares from people who moved aside to let me pass. I ran up the second escalator and was out of breath when I stepped off and found myself in the outdoor mall. I looked all around me.
She was gone.
She could have entered any of the stores surrounding me—Macy’s, Pottery Barn, Talbots—or others farther down. If she had, I’d never find her. I was about to step onto the down escalator when I glanced to my left and saw her, several hundred feet up ahead.
I no longer cared whether she spotted me. I hurried to catch up, turned left when she did, and followed her to an escalator near Bloomingdale’s, but by the time I reached it, she had descended and disappeared. At the bottom of the escalator were two exits to the parking structure.
Right and left.
I turned left and entered the structure. I didn’t see her. I walked for a minute or so, searching in all directions for the gray hat. I had given up and was on my way back, intending to check the other side of the parking lot, when I felt something hard and cold against the back of my head.
“Don’t move,” a woman said.
seventeen
MY BREATH WAS SO TIGHT I COULD FEEL MY RIBS.
“Don’t make a sound,” she said. “Don’t think about running, because I will use this gun.”
I’ve never had a gun held against my head. She could have been faking, but I wasn’t about to take the chance. I was nauseous with fear.
“If you want money . . . ,” I said, knowing this wasn’t about money. My eyes darted left and right. I strained to hear the mating call of chirping car alarms but heard silence. Where were all the people?
“Unzip your purse and hand it to me.”
With shaking hands I slipped the strap of my Coach bag off my shoulder. My hands were slick with sweat, and I fumbled with the zipper for an eternity before I got the bag open.
She yanked the bag from me. “Put your hands at the back of your head and keep them there.”
I did what she said. A few seconds later I felt her hand inside the pockets of my peacoat, then in the waistband of my skirt, under my sweater, between my legs.
“You can put your hands down. See the black Suburban and red Explorer to your right?” She had a soft voice that under other circumstances would have been pleasant. “I want you to walk in between those cars. If anyone passes you, don’t say a word. Go on.”
She gave me a sharp shove and moved the gun from my head to the small of my back. My legs felt wobbly and heavy at the same time, Jell-O and lead. I was amazed they were working.
“Kneel and put your hands behind your neck,” she said when we were standing between the cars.
I did as she directed, my knees flattening cigarette butts, popcorn, and gum wrappers floating in a puddle that oozed from a large cardboard soda cup nearby.
“Who sent you?” she asked, her tone conversational.
My heart drummed madly against the wall of my chest. “No one.”
She rapped the gun against my head. I winced. Tears stung my eyes and I bit my lips. It occurred to me that this was how people were executed. My mind refused to stay with that thought.
“Who sent you?” Her voice shook with anger and nervousness. “You’ve been following me since I left the cemetery. I want to know why.”
“I swear, no one sent me.” I didn’t want to make her more nervous. I didn’t know whether the safety was off the gun. I licked my lips, which had gone dry. “I saw you at Randy’s funeral. I wanted to talk to yo
u about him.”
I heard footsteps several hundred feet ahead. Laughter. Please, I thought. Come this way.
“If you yell . . . ,” she said, leaving me to fill in the rest as she increased the pressure of the gun against my head. “If anybody approaches, put your head down. I’ll say you’re feeling faint.”
I nodded. Sweat was trickling under my arms and between my thighs.
I heard a series of clattering sounds and realized she’d dumped the contents of my purse onto the concrete. A lipstick rolled past me.
“You don’t mind if I look through your wallet,” she said. “Molly Blume. Is that your real name?”
“Yes.” In my wallet, I remembered with a jolt, was the slip of paper with her phone number.
“Who was that man you were sitting with at the funeral? Did he tell you to follow me?”
“No one—” My voice was raspy. I cleared my throat. “No one told me to follow you.”
“Who is he, Molly?”
“A friend.” I wasn’t about to tell her Connors was a detective.
“He was whispering in your ear, Molly. You looked very chummy.”
“A good friend.”
“Do you work for them, Molly? You and your good friend?”
“I don’t know who you mean.”
“I don’t believe you.” Her breath was warm against my neck. “They sent you to follow me, didn’t they? Just tell me. I need to know.”
“No one sent me. I’m a freelance reporter.”
“You’re a liar, Molly Blume. Or should I say Morgan Blake? How many other names do you have?”
“Morgan is my pen name. I write books.”
“Is that another lie, Molly?” She rubbed the cold barrel of the gun against the side of my head, near my eye. “What kind of books?”
“About true crimes. That’s why I wanted to talk to you about Randy. I saw you at the funeral. I hoped you could fill in some blanks.”
“True crimes. I think that’s funny. Don’t you think that’s very, very funny, Molly?”
Her voice had an edge of hysteria that frightened me more than her anger. I didn’t know the right answer. I concentrated on the gun that was cold against my temple.
Grave Endings Page 11
