Born To Be Wild

by Catherine Coulter

  Lydia shudders, then looks her daughter straight in the face. “The truth-dear God, Sunday, it’s been such a long time. Memories blur.”

  “That’s a lie and you know it. Memories of the man you say you loved more than your own life would never blur. Tell me.”

  “All right. All right! My father-your grandfather-believed Phillip was not right for me, not right for you-or for the family.”

  “A man of God-not right? Now that makes a whole lot of sense. Why?”

  “I-I never knew, Sunday. Phillip refused to discuss it with me, he never told me.”

  “Mother, please-” Sunday reaches out, grasps her mother’s hand. Lydia looks down at that lovely white hand clasping hers. There’s shock on her face, but she doesn’t move her hand. “You have his hands. Odd how I never before noticed that.”

  “Please, Mother, tell me the truth.”

  Her eyes still on Sunday’s hand, Lydia says, “I can’t swear this is true, but my mother told me she overheard them talking the day Phillip left. She said Phillip told my father he’d found out he’d used extortion, manipulated stock, ruined lives and reputations to get what he wanted. He said my father was responsible for a friend’s suicide. Can you begin to imagine anyone saying such things to your grandfather? He was enraged, beside himself with fury-”

  “My grandmother told you this?”

  Lydia nods. “She said that he-oh God, Sunday, she claimed my father almost killed Phillip. She said he was panting he was so furious, that he pulled a revolver out of his desk drawer and started screaming at Phillip-that he was a sheep, he was weak, he’d never amount to anything. And that he’d see him dead before he allowed him to stay in the family.

  “My mother said there was a shot. She rushed in to see that Phillip had taken the revolver from my father and he was white as death, but unhurt. Then he threw the revolver in the fireplace and walked out. He didn’t say anything to either of them, simply walked out. I never saw him again.”

  “But you don’t know if this really happened.”

  “Unless my mother dreamed it up to protect me. I know you always believed your grandmother was weak because she never stood up for herself, pathetic because your grandfather controlled her completely. Well, after your father left, I was a wreck. I was told that he’d simply said he was sick of me and sick of the baby. I locked myself in my bedroom and wouldn’t leave it, wouldn’t eat. Until one day she came into my room, sat down beside me, took my hand, and told me this is what happened.”

  “My father never talked to you about any of this?”

  Lydia shakes her head. “I told you, I never saw or heard from him again. There were divorce papers with his signature at the bottom, that was it.”

  “So many lies. All lies, from you, from my father, from my grandparents.” Suddenly Sunday freezes. She whispers, “Grandfather has never said my name. Never.”

  Lydia looks startled, then nods. “No, he hasn’t. He hated Phillip so much that from that day on he refused to see you, to admit you carried his precious blood, my blood, as well as Phillip’s. He certainly didn’t want to call you by that name your father gave you. It was he who insisted on sending you to boarding school in Europe-”

  Lydia’s face contorts as she places her palm over her own mouth, as if to hold the words in. She leaps to her feet, knocks the chair over, grabs her purse, and runs from the club dining room.

  Jacques Trudeau rushes after her, then stops. He turns and looks at Sunday, starts toward her, and stops again.

  The camera rests on Sunday’s face. Tears sheen her eyes, slowly begin to slide down her cheeks. She doesn’t move, then her lips form the word Father.

  “Clear!”

  There was silence on the set, and then, something that rarely happened, there was applause.

  It took Mary Lisa a good minute to bring herself back. She blinked, but the tears continued to fall.

  She heard Bernie yell, “You just won the Emmy for next year, sweetheart!”

  Betsy walked up to her, marveled at the tears on her face, and grabbed her hand. “You were incredible, Mary Lisa, and you know what? You made me better. You drew me right into it. Well done, well done. Hey, sweetie, maybe we’ll both get Emmys next year. Hey, are you all right, Mary Lisa?”

  “Huh? Oh, I’m fine, Betsy. I’ve got stuff on my mind, I guess. I’ve got to get changed now.”

  Betsy, besides being a good actor, was also a shrewd woman. She lightly touched her fingertips to Mary Lisa’s arm. “It’s amazing you can function at all, with all you’ve been through, Mary Lisa. You keep your chin up. I want you to know that all of us are on the alert. Come along now, let’s walk to the dressing room together. Hey, Lou Lou, are you free to touch up Mary Lisa’s makeup?”

  FORTY-FIVE

  Chico held a kick pad in front of him as he yelled at Mary Lisa that she wasn’t kicking hard enough. When she yelled and went at him, Chico turned, feinted, and leaped backward, all the while yelling at her-“Keep your knee straight!”-“Stay balanced!”-“More energy!”

  After five straight minutes, she was panting so hard, she collapsed where she stood. He tossed the kick pad onto a mat, leaned down and patted her shoulder. “Not bad for your third lesson. Next time wear a band around your forehead, it’ll keep the sweat from dribbling into your eyes. I know that stings.”

  No kidding, Chico de Sade. She kept her head down, still trying to simply draw breath into her lungs.

  “Mary Lisa, you’ve got some talent, you’re tough. Come on, now, get yourself together. Here’s a Coke, loaded with sugar. Catch your breath, and then we’re going to do it again at”-he consulted the big clock on the wall-“a quarter after, okay?”

  Three minutes from now? You’re giving me three lousy minutes to come back to life? She raised her head as she drank down the Coke. “I want to kill you. Promise you’ll let me take you down, and I’ll do it.”

  “You can try, Mary Lisa, you can try.” He patted her sweaty shoulder again and walked away, whistling. She watched him pull out his cell, punch in numbers, then talk. Here she was dying and he was calling his girlfriend?

  Three minutes later, with the help of a full can of Coke racing through her system and lots of deep breathing, she knew she was going to live. She splashed cold water on her face, slipped one of Chico’s sweatbands over her forehead, and got to her feet again. She focused all her strength, all her energy, all her fury and fear, on him. Her first kick was so hard he stumbled backward. He gave her a huge grin, waved his fingers at her. “Is that a onetime deal or do you think you can do that again?”

  When she was hovering at the edge of collapse again, unable to give Chico even a hate-filled look, he called a halt and told her not to forget the aspirin and hot tub.

  Mary Lisa wanted to get going so she didn’t take time to shower in Chico’s minimalist unisex locker room. As she walked barefoot across the mats, she noticed the bright red polish on three toenails of her right foot was badly chipped. She grinned at Chico, pointed to her toes. “One of the hazards of the sport, Chico?”

  “As long as none of those cute little toes are broken, they’ll just serve as a reminder you’re in training,” Chico said.

  She gave him a fist to his perfectly polished bicep on her way out. “I’m going to clean the floor with you next time, Chico.”

  “Yeah, I’ll count on it. Don’t forget the exercises, Mary Lisa.”

  Mary Lisa rolled her eyes. She had forty-eight hours to convince her muscles they wouldn’t implode. And she was actually paying for this?

  She was surprised to notice this time, though, that she was actually walking out of the dojo without all her muscles screaming at her. Only her foot was sore. When she climbed into her Mustang, she pulled out her cell, noticed a message from Jack. She hit the Call Number button.

  Jack answered his cell on the third ring. “Yeah?”

  “Hey. It’s Mary Lisa. I gather since you called you’re in need of some of my insights into that mess you’ve g
ot in Goddard Bay?”

  “Right. But first, Mary Lisa, how are you? You’re taking care, right? Still the most popular girl in the Colony?”

  “I’ll tell you, I don’t feel very popular right now. I haven’t felt this unpopular since I called Robbie James impotent in the eighth grade.”

  He laughed. She smiled listening to that wonderful laugh. He’d sounded tired, but now that was all forgotten, at least for a minute.

  “How did you know he was impotent?”

  “I heard my father mention the word to my mother, about a friend of theirs. I asked her what it meant and I thought she’d faint. She told me to forget it-”

  “So of course you used it the first chance you got.”

  “Robbie was being a real jerk, talking about how a friend of mine didn’t have any boobs when he knew both of us could hear him, along with a dozen other kids, so I called him an impotent jerk, told him I’d read it in the girls’ bathroom.”

  “What did Robbie do?”

  “His face turned as red as the trim on our neighbor’s house and his friends started hooting, poking him, you know the teenage boy drill.”

  “You think maybe he’s the one down there trying to do you in?”

  “Nah. Last I heard, Robbie was living in Moscow, Idaho, teaching history at the local high school.” She laughed. “That’s enough about me, big boy. Tell me what you’ve found out about Milo Hildebrand’s murder.”

  Jack was in his office. He took a sip of his cold, dead coffee, put his feet up, and tilted his head back. “The M.E. has confirmed Milo died of poisoning with coumarin-you remember I told you it’s a kind of rodent poison. It’s only loosely regulated, fairly easy to get. We found traces of it in what was left of the mashed potatoes on Milo’s dinner tray. So it looks like someone did slip into the kitchen at the Goddard Bay Inn, or got to the tray after it left there. We’ve shown photos of everyone close to the case-the Hildebrand family and Mick Maynard, Jason’s brother-to everyone at the inn and to our own staff. No one recalls seeing any of them around the time Milo’s dinner was prepared in the kitchen.” He sighed. “It turns out Marci Hildebrand worked in the inn five years ago, long before she married Jason Maynard, but so have lots of people in Goddard Bay over the years.”

  “No one from the kitchen staff remembered anything unusual?”

  “Yeah, an old bum who came by for a handout, real unusual for Goddard Bay. He caused a bit of a ruckus, tried to pee in the drinking fountain in the kitchen. That disrupted everything for a while.”

  “There you go. Your poisoner could have slipped in while he was causing mayhem. Do you think the killer maybe bribed the old guy?”

  “That’s what I’m thinking. However, the old guy disappeared. But where would he go? Everyone agreed he looked homeless, ill-kempt, bad teeth, layered dirty clothes.”

  “A disguise, you think?”

  “Yeah, that’s possible too.”

  “A woman?”

  “Could be. I don’t know. I’ve got all my deputies out near the inn looking for him, or for his clothes.”

  “What has John been up to?”

  “Among other things, he’s been dealing with Patricia Bigelow. She been all over city hall, threatening to wipe out the town’s coffers with a lawsuit on Olivia and Marci’s behalf. She says Milo was innocent and in our custody, and we’re liable for his death. She seems really excited about the possibility of a large contingency fee.”

  “So she’s rubbing your noses in it. You don’t think it’s possible, do you, that Milo was innocent?”

  “Truth is, you always feel better if the perp confesses. Milo didn’t. But the evidence, Mary Lisa. There was simply too much evidence against him. And he tried to run.”

  “But say he didn’t do it, say he made himself look guilty because he was protecting someone. There are only two people he’d protect, right? Olivia, his wife, and Marci, his daughter. Maybe something happened to make him turn on the guilty one.”

  “When I arrested Milo, he was trying to blame his wife, so go figure. There’s Marci, of course, the apple of her daddy’s eyes. I can’t think of another person in the world Milo might protect.”

  Mary Lisa said, “I never did like Marci in school. She was always gossiping, bad stuff that hurt people.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  She heard the fatigue in his voice again. “Hey, Jack, if I think of anything else you can do, I’ll be sure to call you.”

  He was silent for a moment. She was hanging in there, trying to keep his spirits up, her own as well, he supposed. He admired her in that moment. He was proud of her. The fact was he missed her-missed her smile, her ready laugh, her smart mouth, all of her, not to mention that orgasm she’d had lying on top of him. That made him hard just remembering the movement of her against him, remembering those screams of hers in his mouth. He wanted to do that again, like right now. He wanted her powerful bad. He hoped she couldn’t hear his shudder through the phone. “You do that,” he said. “Oh yes, listen to what Daniel tells you. Ah, Mary Lisa? Keep that blanket of friends wrapped around you. Take care of yourself, no rides with strange men.” He paused. “I miss you, kiddo. I really do.”

  She closed her eyes, felt her heart beat slow heavy beats. “I miss you too.”

  He wanted to keep talking to her, but his office phone buzzed. “I’ve got to go. Please, sweetheart, you take care of yourself. We’ll get through this, I promise.”

  “Okay.”

  As soon as he’d punched off, he barked into the phone, “Yeah?”

  His secretary, Mulhouse, just Mulhouse, thank you, said in her scratchy smoker’s voice, “The D.A.’s on the line, Chief. He wants to meet you at Marci Maynard’s house.”

  “Got it.”

  When Jack pulled into the Maynard driveway ten minutes later, John Goddard waved him over to the living room window.

  FORTY-SIX

  Malibu

  At Monte’s, just off PCH, Elizabeth and Lou Lou waved Mary Lisa to their favorite back booth. They were talking to a couple of people, who greeted Mary Lisa when she came in. It was ten minutes before they were finally alone with three Diet Dr Peppers on their table.

  Elizabeth said, “Okay, Mary Lisa, what is this about?”

  Mary Lisa raised her soda and clicked it to Elizabeth’s glass, then to Lou Lou’s. “It’s something I mentioned before, but I didn’t act on it because everything happened all at once.” She sucked in a deep breath. “But I’d like to now, and I need your help.”

  Elizabeth gave her a reporter’s stare. “Help with what, exactly?”

  Mary Lisa sat forward, lowered her voice. “You were an investigative reporter, Elizabeth. You know all about how to run an investigation, how to dissect evidence, how to break a story. You’re really smart. Lou Lou and I are smart too, but we don’t have your experience, your way of looking at things. I hate to admit this, but Detective Vasquez isn’t getting anywhere. He can’t find Jamie Ramos and there isn’t anything more for him to do unless this crazy tries to kill me again. I’m going to get an ulcer if I just wait around for him to try again because next time he could succeed. I’m tired of being paralyzed with fear, Elizabeth. I want you to help me find him, not wait around like a helpless wuss and hope I survive next time.”

  Both Lou Lou and Mary Lisa looked at Elizabeth while she tapped her fingernails on the tabletop. She said slowly, “You’ve held up remarkably well so far, but I can see you’re near the edge, and you have a right to be. We could hire a private investigator, Mary Lisa. I’ll bet the studio would instantly provide you with private security guards. All you’d have to do is ask. Or you could take a leave of absence. Understand, it’s not that I don’t want to help you, it’s just that directly involving ourselves could be dangerous, more dangerous than it is now.”

  “I can’t think of a single way it could be any more dangerous. Look, I’m already doing something to protect myself-I’m taking karate lessons. Elizabeth, you went on TV about the va
n and Jamie Ramos. But it’s not enough. Would you at least help me do something else to protect myself?” Mary Lisa cut her eyes to Lou Lou. “Are you in this with me, Lou Lou?”

  Lou Lou never hesitated. She covered Mary Lisa’s hand with hers. “All the way.”

  “Okay, would you teach us how to shoot, how to use a handgun?”

  Elizabeth looked closely again at the women she’d considered her best friends for some time now. Every day that passed without someone on the radar was a danger for Mary Lisa. Lou Lou knew that too and it was driving her nuts. “Okay, you guys, I’m in. We’re all in this together?” At their nods, she raised her glass, clicked it to Mary Lisa’s and then to Lou Lou’s. The three of them drank silently.

  Elizabeth continued. “Teaching you to shoot is no problem. We can get you started right away. Do either of you know anything about guns?”

  “Nope, not a blessed thing,” Lou Lou said and Mary Lisa nodded.

  “Okay, you know I have a permit to carry a handgun, but I’m not about to pull it out of my purse and freak everyone out. It’s not easy to get a permit in L.A., but you’re a celebrity, Mary Lisa, and there have been attempts on your life. I’m sure you could get one, and with Daniel’s help, maybe quickly. The first thing we need to do is get you to a gun shop.”

  Mary Lisa asked, “Can Lou Lou and I buy a gun right away?”

  “By law you’ll need to take a handgun safety course first. Takes about an hour, and I can ask Frank Reynolds, an old friend who owns the gun shop I use in Calabasas, to make time to give you guys one. We might be able to head over there now and get you some practice on the firing range.”

  Mary Lisa said, “Perfect. What kind of gun should we get?”

  “I carry a nine-millimeter SIG Sauer P239 semiautomatic. The P stands for personal, which means it’s small and light, and there’s not much recoil. The clip or magazine holds seven bullets.”

  “What does nine-millimeter mean?” Lou Lou asked.

  “Nine millimeters refers to the caliber-the size of the bullet. About a third of an inch. There are more powerful rounds, but if you aim it right, it’s enough to stop anyone.