Play this cool. She’s too valuable a business asset right now. “Hey, Abbs—you know you’re the one. You’re my right arm. We’re a team. Nobody takes that away from us.”
Her expression relaxed. “But you sent me home so suddenly.”
“Because, if you’ll remember, I needed you to handle the meeting with the Sundance people.” And if I actually had a film to enter in the festival, that meeting could have been important. “Baby, you saw how eager I was, the minute I got back in the office.”
He slid his hands from her shoulders to the curve of her waist and pulled her close, kissing the top of her head. She wrapped her arms around his waist and hugged. Crisis averted.
“Okay,” he said, stepping back. “I’ll see you in the morning at the office.”
She picked up her mineral water from the table and raised the bottle. “If you really can’t use some help tonight, okay then.” She sipped the fizzy liquid, her eyes sliding toward his computer case on the table. Before he could reach out, she’d plucked a printed sheet of paper that was sticking out of the side pocket. “What’s this?”
The real estate listing for my dream. Shit. “Oh, that? Just a potential location for one of the films.” The seven-bedroom white villa was all angles and light, with an indoor pool, and hillside seclusion just outside Cannes. At thirty-three million dollars it was certainly priced right, and was close enough to afford him access to the famed film festival.
“Gorgeous! Wow—couldn’t you just see us living in a place like that some day?”
Me, yes. Us? No way I’m getting tied down. “Well, it’s pretty far away. You’d miss your sister if you had to spend much time in the south of France.”
“Well, hey, at least if we use it as a location, we get to stay there awhile, right?”
“Um, maybe. We’ll see how it works out.”
Again, the brows pulled together.
He sighed. “What I meant to say was, absolutely. You bet. When we film there it’ll be the grand adventure of our lives.”
“Okay, now you’re just teasing. You’ve told me how it is on location—living in RVs, dusty towns that don’t even have internet half the time, local food that sucks. But, surely in France …”
“Good point. France will have everything we could possibly want.” Was she ever going to finish the damn mineral water and go? He resisted looking at his watch, but the numerals on the microwave beyond the kitchen island told him he now had forty-five minutes to get to his dinner date.
At last, Abby drained the small bottle and set it on his dining table. She took another fond look at the French villa, but at least she handed the page back when he held out his hand. He walked her to the door, kissed her with gusto. The way she kissed back made him almost wish he’d not made other plans tonight. They could have had a good time staying in. He could still … Who was the flight attendant, after all?
Abby was watching his face closely. He put on the appropriate regretful look and opened the door.
“See you at the office tomorrow. Be ready to fill me in on the venue choices for Scottsdale, okay?”
She shook her head. “I swear, you really do eat, sleep, and breathe business.”
“That, I do.” He closed the door before she’d quite left the porch, but he heard her car start up a minute later.
As he dashed for the shower, it began to nag at him that Abby was getting too close. Now she knew about the villa. If she put it together—the amount of money they were raking in, the way he kept his expenses cut to the bone, the fact she’d never actually seen him begin production on a movie in the two years she’d been with him … It was about time to get rid of her.
Chapter 14
“It was all I could do not to run the minute we hit the sidewalk,” Gracie said, panting, when they reached their rental car. As it was, they had speed walked, glancing over their shoulders the first two blocks.
“I need to get you into the gym more often.” Mary fluffed her spiky hair to catch the breeze. Otherwise, she hadn’t sweated a drop.
They slid into the car, putting their thoughts together. Mary spoke first. “Did you get the idea that Intrepid Dog Pictures has downsized—bigtime? All that expensive furniture and art but, shall we say, borderline dumpy office suite.”
“I thought so. And what’s with the other company name on the window? Reliant Fox Productions. Reliant on what—their money donors?” Gracie was rummaging in her bag and came out with the fistful of business cards she’d snatched from the box in Rob’s office. “I wonder if these will tell us anything.”
Mary craned her neck sideways for a better look. “They seem to be from a whole variety of people. Look, there’s a building contractor, here’s a CEO of some satellite TV company … and what’s a venture capitalist, anyway?”
Gracie tried to stack the cards, but they became unwieldy and a few flew loose and went between the bucket seats.
“Careful, we don’t want to lose any until we can figure out what they mean,” Mary said, reaching for the strays.
“Right. We can go through these in our room tonight.” Gracie stuffed the cards back into her purse. “For now, we still have the whole evening. If Amber’s come up with his address, I say we go check him out. We can surely come up with a good cover story.”
Mary was one step ahead, already dialing their youngest cohort.
“Oh yeah, found it easy-peasy,” Amber said. “It’s scary what information those mapping apps have on us.” She rattled off an address in nearby Inglewood. Gracie wrote it down, but Mary was already entering it into their GPS.
Together, they gave Amber the rundown on what they’d discovered so far, and she promised to search for background information on the second company name.
Mary started the car and let the GPS, which they had affectionately named Birdy, talk her through the turns. On the map the distance seemed like nothing at all, but rush hour was still in full swing, and the drive took nearly forty-five minutes. When Birdy told them the destination was two hundred feet ahead on the right, Mary slowed and they both stared toward the house.
Small Spanish colonial with tan stucco and red-tiled roof, a driveway running down the west side to what looked like a detached garage, a small square of lawn out front and two small flowering shrubs against the covered front porch. No lights on inside, no vehicle in the driveway.
“Doesn’t look like much, especially for some fancy movie producer,” Gracie said.
Mary snorted. “Probably built fifty years ago for ten grand and sells for a million today.”
“Seriously?”
“Well, you know how crazy this market is. Your mother lives here.”
Gracie nodded. Unfortunately, real estate woes had hit way too close.
“Anyway,” Mary said, “it doesn’t look like anyone’s home. Might give us a chance for a look around.”
“And if Robert Williams really is here, I plan to confront him about my mother’s investment. Demand that he hand over what he promised she would earn.”
“Yeah, well … let’s just go see.” Mary had driven past the house and parked three doors down.
Personally, she didn’t think Rob would be there, but it also wouldn’t do to have him come driving up, spot their car, and be prepared to catch intruders in his house. She noticed the other houses on the block showed signs of life—cars, lights, sounds of television coming from behind closed curtains. No one was out and about, so it seemed as good a time as any to do this.
Gracie was out and halfway up the sidewalk before Mary had locked the car and caught up. “I say we try the honest approach first—I mean, he could just be a guy who actually has room in the garage for his car and likes to sit in the dark watching TV.”
She walked to the front door and rang the bell. No response but the echo of the chime. She began to dig into her purse for the lock picks.
“Getting pretty confident with those, aren’t you?” Mary teased. “But maybe we’d better check out the back first. Wha
t if he’s out on the patio firing up the grill?”
“Okay. And it might be better if some dog walker didn’t spot me down on my knees at the front door.”
They put on a little show of disappointment that no one had answered, then walked down the long drive toward the garage. No sign of backyard activity on the plain concrete slab, where a single scrawny palm tree in the back corner provided the only landscaping. The back door had a wrought iron gate over it, as did all the windows. Great neighborhood, Mary thought.
“So, I guess it’s the front door, after all,” Gracie whispered.
“I could suggest we wait until he comes home and just get ourselves invited inside,” Mary said, “but that kind of defeats our purpose of coming up with copies of contracts and proof that he’s cheating people. He’s hardly likely to hand over any of it willingly.”
Gracie was already working on the front door lock. “Probably could have done this one with a credit card. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a cheap lock. Doesn’t the guy do anything to keep up his home?”
“Probably a rental.”
They stepped into a living room that felt crowded with a sectional sofa, coffee table, and widescreen TV. The latter sat in front of a fireplace, which clearly didn’t work. Along the mantle sat more photos of Rob and his celebrity chums. A niche to the right held a dining table and two chairs, and past that was a kitchen with ’80s-era appliances. All this was visible only because of a streetlamp that shone through the open blinds.
Gracie edged her way through the living room, peering through a blocky hall that revealed two bedrooms and a bath. One bedroom held packing boxes, stacked nearly to the ceiling; in the other a king-sized bed took up nearly every inch of the space. This looked like a starter home for a young family, not the digs of an important producer. More than ever, she wondered what Rob Williams’s real story was.
“There’s a computer,” Mary whispered from the dining area. “Should we take it?”
“No!” Gracie stubbed her toe on a hidden leg of the sofa as she hurried toward her friend. “I mean, at this point we haven’t actually done anything wrong—”
“If you don’t count breaking and entering.”
“We’ve only looked for information. We haven’t stolen anything.”
“But he has! He’s taken a whole bunch of money under false pretenses.”
Gracie laid a hand on Mary’s arm. “And … the law will deal with him, eventually. What we need is to find evidence. We’ll take the evidence to the law, and it will turn out all right.”
Mary gave her a skeptical look. “You saw how that worked out in my case. Remember?”
Gracie twitched. “Let’s just see if we can find some records or something. I brought a flash drive to copy stuff.”
She unzipped the computer bag and slid the laptop onto the dining table. Facing the screen away from any windows, she pressed the power switch and the screen lit.
“Well, great, it needs a password.”
“Not surprised.”
“Call Amber—she knows how to get into these things.”
Mary pulled out her phone again and got Amber on the first ring.
“Why am I not surprised to hear from you two again so soon?” she joked. “Did it turn out to be the right address?”
Gracie and Mary exchanged a glance. What if they’d broken into the wrong house? But no—there were the photos on the mantle. Gracie began to giggle. Mary held out a hand to shush her.
“The computer needs a password,” Mary told Amber. “Can you get us into it?”
“How much time do you have? I’ll need an internet connection and some protocol numbers. If you haven’t gotten past booting it up, it’s not a quick process.”
“Can we copy anything onto a flash drive without logging in first?”
“If you could see my face, you’d know I’m rolling my eyes right now. No. You can’t just plug a flash drive into any computer. You have to get logged on and then find the files.”
“I suppose I knew that,” Mary grumbled. “Just grabbing at straws here.”
Gracie tapped her on the shoulder. “Look.” She held up some printed pages. “They were in the computer case and they look similar to the contract Pen got hold of.”
Amber was talking again. “There’s one thing I might try remotely … let me see …”
Gracie pulled another sheet of paper from the case, a photo of a huge house. She held it toward the window to read the details, but couldn’t see well enough.
All at once, lights beamed across the living room window and shone into the dining room. A car had pulled into the driveway. The photo dropped to the floor.
“Mary—look!” Gracie frantically gestured toward the sleek SUV less than twenty feet away.
“Amber—gotta go!” Mary clicked off the call, pocketed the phone, and slammed the computer’s lid down.
“It’s Rob,” Gracie said. “He’s got someone with him.”
The producer’s face showed clearly in the Land Rover’s overhead light. They recognized the dark hair and neat goatee. He got out and walked around to the passenger side, opening the door to a tall blonde with curls that flowed to her waist. Definitely not Abby Singer. Both were laughing and looking only at each other.
“Which way are they going?” Gracie’s head whipped left and right as she weighed the options—front door or back.
“They’re heading to the front,” Mary whispered.
“Come on, the kitchen door’s this way.” Gracie grabbed the handful of papers she’d taken from the computer bag and headed through the small galley kitchen.
The back door swung open, revealing the inside of the locked, wrought iron security door.
Chapter 15
Birdy calmly guided the rental car back to the Seaside Inn, luckily, because Mary’s hands didn’t stop shaking until they were safely in their room with the door locked.
“I need a drink,” she told Gracie. “What’s in the minibar?”
“Those things are so expen—”
“I don’t care. Two narrow escapes in one evening has earned me a bourbon and Coke.”
Gracie went for ice while Mary raided the stash. With two fourteen-dollar cocktails poured, she reached for a teensy can of peanuts.
“Don’t. That’s where I draw the line. Look at the price list. That quarter-cup of nuts will set you back another thirty. Let’s get a pizza delivered—at least it will fill up both of us.” Gracie kicked off her shoes and made the call.
“Oh my god, can you believe what we just did? I’m definitely getting too old for this,” Mary said. She was finally able to laugh about the escapade.
“That iron door … I was about to throw myself against it.”
“Good thing I noticed the little twist lock. I saved you from a row of bruises in the morning.”
“I wonder if he’ll notice it’s not locked. Or, what if he touches the computer and it’s still warm? He’ll know someone broke in.”
“I have a feeling the warm thing he’ll be touching right now isn’t his computer.”
They both screamed with laughter and almost missed the knock of the pizza guy at the door. They settled with slices, conversation waning until they’d each put away two.
“Seriously, he’ll know. Look at all the papers I came away with.” Gracie nodded toward the pages she’d dropped on one of the beds.
“Maybe he’ll be so hung over, his head filled with memories of his date, that he will have completely forgotten which papers he brought home.”
“Let’s hope.” Gracie wiped pepperoni grease off her mouth with a napkin. “Anyway, we should go through our bounty and put it together so we can report to the team.”
Mary became pensive. “You know what the sad thing is … Abby was right about Rob cheating on her. She really pinned her hopes on that guy.”
“As did a lot of people. And we’re going to figure out how to sic the law on him.”
Gracie dumped the contents of her
purse, gathering all the business cards she had taken from Rob’s office, stacking them neatly. Sitting cross-legged on her bed, she began to look carefully at the papers from his computer bag. There were four of the two-page contracts in the same format Pen had showed them. Long on promises, absent any sort of guarantees. Mary had picked up the business cards; she now sat on the room’s other bed, sorting and then laying them out in rows in front of her.
“I really wish we’d been able to see what he has on his computer,” Gracie said after reading one of the contracts in detail and skimming the rest. “Surely, he has more data than he gives here. I mean, what about the contracts between the actors and his company? Those must be fairly hefty documents—and maybe that’s why he doesn’t print them out. For his sake, he’d better keep good backups of the computer …” She looked up at Mary. “Why didn’t I think of it? Rather than trying to get into the computer, we should have been looking for backup drives—an external hard drive, flash drives, memory sticks. Right?”
“Are you seriously thinking of going back?” Mary’s face was screwed up into a frown as she continued to stare at the cards in front of her.
“Well … I don’t know.”
“Take a look at this,” Mary said, picking up a card and flinging it across the space between them to land at the edge of Gracie’s bed.
Gracie picked it up. “Roger G. Middleton, OB-GYN. Middleton Obstetrics, LLP. Obviously, not Rob’s personal physician.”
“Turn the card over. See the little numbers written on the back?”
Gracie squinted. “Very small, lower right corner … 450. So?”
“So, every one of these cards has a number. The smallest three-digit one I’ve found is 100, the largest 970. Some are in a different format. This one, for instance, is 1.2 and the card comes from a Las Vegas building contractor. I recognize the firm from my old days in the plumbing business. It’s a huge company with multi-million dollar casino jobs.”
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