“Is that so?” Gunnar wanted to remember to jot that down. He stuck the cigar back in his mouth and took out his notepad and pen as they headed for the main stairway. “Do you think anyone around here might know the name of the company?”
“Sure. Back at the front desk. They left their promotional pamphlets all over the place.”
After picking up one of the promotional packets from the management and leaving the hotel, Gunnar took some time to walk around the circumference of the building and study all of its exits. He found an emergency exit of the kitchen opening onto the west side of the building and yet another emergency door on the east side opening from a corridor beyond the theater.
CHAPTER 45
This night was supposed to make up for the missed opportunities from the one before. It was supposed to correct for the work, the conferences with Chicago cardiologists, and the bad timing that had kept Gunnar and Erika apart.
It had started well enough. Gunnar met Erika at her house. They had a dinner planned at a local restaurant, and they both needed to clean the day off themselves. Their reservation was far enough away to give them time in the shower, lathering each other, massaging each other, tasting each other, satisfying each other.
Afterward, Gunnar put on a charcoal-grey suit for the evening and Erika a deceptively provocative silken black dress.
The dress teased, made a statement, shocked by how much it covered up and how much it displayed. It covered up much of Erika’s upper body, yet it was skin-tight enough to display all of her amazing dimensions. Its silky texture played with the light, making it shimmer along the lines and hills and peaks of her rippling physique. The hems of the skirt dared to stop seven inches above Erika’s knees, leaving a pair of bronzed gams on display all the way down to her steep, stiletto-heeled black pumps. Although the top of the dress was conservatively closed and collared around her neck, a pair of full sleeves left the shoulders and covered up both her arms. On first glance, it might have made one think that the dress was designed to downplay the muscles and avoid stares. But it wasn’t. The sheer material fit her so perfectly, they called attention to her staggering muscularity. One could see the thickness of her biceps, the horseshoe curve of her triceps. The slope of her enlarged trapezius muscles flowed into shoulders so broad and rounded they looked as if the halves of coconuts had been tucked under the dress.
“I don’t think that collar’s buttoned correctly,” Gunnar said and slipped behind Erika as she was putting on her earrings in front of her bedroom makeup table and vanity.
“Of course, it’s put on correctly,” she said and smiled at him through the mirror.
“No, it’s not,” he insisted, his arms on her shoulders. “Let me check.”
“You better make sure,” Erika said, smiling ever more broadly as Gunnar swept her hair to one side and began kissing her neck.
“Well?” she whispered.
“Sorry, I was wrong,” Gunnar said between kisses. “Let me make up for the mistake,” he added, kissing more vigorously, moving over from her neck to her ears, first her right cheek then her left cheek, back to her neck, then down to her back left exposed by the open back of the dress.
“Come on, now,” Erika teased at last. “You’re not going to make me take this dress off right after I put it on.”
“I don’t know,” Gunnar panted and pressed his erection into her rear as he went back to her neck, his arms encircling her, feeling her pectoral muscles bulging above the soft spots of her petite breasts.
“No,” Erika insisted, “you’re going to have to wait with that until after we get home.”
“You know how much that will torture me?” Gunnar whispered into her right ear between kisses.
“I know. That’s why I’m doing it,” Erika said and peeled his arms off her and pushed him back. “Come on, now. You’ve gotta let me put on my makeup,” she said and pushed him further away with her right hand while her left grabbed and squeezed his crotch.
“You’re cold-blooded, you know that,” Gunnar protested in mock outrage.
“That’s right.” Erika grinned and winked, then turned her back to him and went to work applying her makeup and lipstick. “Come on, tell me about the case instead,” she continued teasing as she applied her eye shadow. “That should help cool you down.”
“I don’t know,” Gunnar replied but actually thought it was worth taking her advice. Fondling her had aroused him almost painfully.
“Tell me about that problem you have with her comings and goings at the contest,” Erika said, her voice turning more serious now.
“Huh?” Gunnar asked, still not able to switch gears as he watched Erika’s lush, flexing, exposed back.
“You know, what you said you’re going to try and ask Laura next. Just where exactly she was…or where did she go off to during the contest.”
“Oh,” Gunnar said, trying harder to concentrate on her words, his voice sounding sort of deflated in his own ears. However, he wasn’t feeling quite deflated in his crotch yet.
“And good luck with that, by the way,” Erika said. “It’s not going to be easy.”
“Say what?”
“You going back to Laura and asking her these things,” Erika said over her shoulder. “She’s gonna be pissed at you!”
“Oh, I’ll go back and broach the subject tactfully. I can be persuasive, can’t I?”
“Yes, you’re very persuasive,” Erika said and grinned at him from the mirror.
It made Gunnar want to go and squeeze up against her, but he thought better of it, smoothing a hand over his fly.
Then Erika’s face looked quite serious. “Come on, be serious for a bit, okay? I’m curious what you’re going to do about this case.”
“All right, all right.”
“You think you can corner her into admitting she was with Holt during the intermission?”
“I don’t want to corner her into anything,” Gunnar said as Erika finished her makeup, sprayed some perfume onto her hair and neck, then turned around to face him. That face, those eyes, that body, the strange yet peculiarly feminine and erotic combination made him miss a beat. “I mean, I want to know where she was. When I was sitting in the audience, it looked like she left the place and never came back.”
“You think she left the hotel?”
“She had to have. She was never back on the stage again. Not after Holt collapsed, and not during the awarding of the titles. I’d like to know where she went.”
“Or when she went, right? If she was still in the hotel during the intermission to talk to Holt, she had to have been…hiding?”
Just saying the word made Gunnar realize how right Erika was in the point she raised. “That’s what I want to ask her.”
“And that’s why she’s going to throw you out of her office.”
“I think I can actually avoid that.”
“How?” Erika asked with a curiously arched right eyebrow.
“Like I said before, sometimes we actually seem to get along well. I don’t know how to describe it.”
“Wait a minute. Like you said before?”
“Yeah. When I thought I had problems with this case.”
“Oh yeah!” Erika said, melodrama clear in her voice, affecting sudden shock, dawning realization. “Now I seem to recall that. Yeah.”
“And what exactly do you mean?” Gunnar said, countering with mock evasion.
“It sounds like—what?—you two’ve got some nice little chemistry building, I’d say.”
Gunnar laughed at her.
“Should I be worried?”
Gunnar stood close to her now and took her by the arms, very carefully feeling, caressing her hard-pumped biceps. “She doesn’t lift anymore,” he said and ran his index fingers over the heads of both her biceps. They were pumped so hard, and the dress was so thin he could feel a
thick, swelling vein run down the center of each muscle, even through the silk material.
Erika switched out of the playful mode abruptly again. “So, do you still have problems with the case?”
Gunnar thought about that for a moment. “I don’t know.”
“But you got a chance to talk to Diane. What’s happening with her?”
“She’s getting the court order to exhume Holt’s body—”
They were cut off by the ringing in Gunnar’s jacket pocket.
“Damn it,” he said, fishing out his cell phone. He wanted to check its caller ID, intending to ignore whoever demanded his time right now.
“Saved by the bell,” Erika said.
Gunnar noticed it was Amy calling. After another second’s consideration, he thought it best to check what she wanted. “Yeah?” he asked.
“Marino, I’m down at the Foundry, and we’ve got an emergency,” she blurted across the line. He could notice the edge in her voice. This one was serious.
“What?”
“It’s Sherry. There was a break-in, and she’s hurt. Bad!”
CHAPTER 46
Gunnar counted three blocks short of the Foundry when he saw the trouble ahead. At first, it was a white splash of light bleaching the customary shadows of the night from the vicinity of the gym. Then he could distinguish the crazy cascading of colors across the wall of the Foundry, across the collection of cars that shouldn’t have been there, the half-empty Galesco Professional Building across the street, Mrs. Melville’s Vintage Furniture store next to the gym parking lot, and all over the people slinking toward Mike and Sherry’s place.
A barricade of three police cruisers, all their lights flashing, kept the entrance to the Foundry’s parking lot off-limits when Gunnar and Erika arrived. Two more of the vehicles stood guard by the building entrance. When they got out of the Charger, they advanced on the yellow POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS barrier.
“You’ll have to keep back,” one of two cops standing by the cordon began, but Gunnar was already grabbing the tape. The two uniforms moved in to counter him.
“I work here,” Gunnar protested.
“In the gym?” the second cop asked.
“Above the gym! In a suite over the building. My business office is in there.”
“All right, relax, sir,” The second uniform waved at Gunnar to calm down.
“What happened here?”
“A break-in and an assault,” uniform number two explained in a hard and measured yet sincere-sounding tone.
“Where? In the gym? Upstairs?” Gunnar was stunned. “Is she okay?” he blurted out, on instinct, demanding an answer to everything he heard.
“It was one of the gym owners,” the first cop told him.
“Sherry Branigan,” the second cop added. “She’ll be—”
“Where is she?” Gunnar was confused. He couldn’t see the ambulance. There was barely any movement going on inside.
“She’ll be okay,” the second cop said with a deep, deliberate nod.
“Oh yeah?”
“She’s been taken to David Freeman Hospital,” uniform one said.
“She’s got a husband—”
“He’s with her, sir,” uniform one said. “Everything should be all right. Just please stay calm and let us do our job.”
“Can I at least have a look at my place?”
The cops looked at each other.
“We need to preserve the crime scene, sir,” the second LAPD man said.
“There’s a stairway in through the back,” Gunnar insisted. “Come on! This is my place of business. I’ve got valuables in there. Can’t I just take a quick look?”
“Sergeant?” the second cop asked a superior at last, and he was told he could let Gunnar take a quick look at his place if he was escorted in. They wanted Erika to stay behind, though.
She nodded at Gunnar and let him go.
Gunnar and one of the cops climbed the flight of stairs rising outside the wall by the rear of the Foundry. They paused before entering. The cop checked the back door for signs of tampering, then proceeded to let Gunnar unlock the door and step inside the office. After he threw the lights, everything seemed in order. Following a cursory check of its undisturbed contents, he slid an index finger between the blinds veiling the windows to the gym below. He took a look at the front desk and the business office on the first floor.
He saw five cops milling around. Two of them appeared to be looking for fingerprints around the cash machine and the drawers of the main desk. All of them were careful to avoid a dark crimson pool of blood settled on the light-yellow tile floor in an irregular spill, with smear marks leaving one side. It must have measured some three feet between its widest edges.
A cold, crawling hatred possessed Gunnar as he fixated on the blood. Not long ago, Sherry was lying in that blood.
“Was it a shooting?”
“She was hit over the head,” the cop said. Then, after a moment, added, “Is everything all right in here?”
Turning to face him, Gunnar noticed the cop eyeing the private investigator’s license framed above the business desk.
“Yeah, everything looks okay.”
When Gunnar rejoined Erika outside, he caught onto something that didn’t fit in with the rest of the gawkers. Joey Reigert’s goodly frame stood immobile among the squirming mob. Amy McCambridge was with him.
“What the hell happened?” Gunnar hissed as he came upon Joey and Amy, hoping they would know more than the cops were willing to disclose.
“Sherry, man!” Joey said, and his eyes widened.
Gunnar nodded. “I know that.”
“She closed the gym,” Amy said. “Mike was at home with some friend of theirs who just got in from San Francisco. He was gonna come back and pick Sherry up, and he found her unconscious in the office. Some bastard robbed the place.”
“You heard them say that?” Erika asked.
“Yeah! I just got here as the cops and the paramedics were going in. I wanted to talk to you before I was gonna get something to eat and wait to go to Whitlock’s.”
“Did anyone see anything?” Gunnar asked.
“I don’t think so. I mean, I didn’t hear anything.”
Gunnar could feel there would be some work for him to do. That way, it was going to be done right.
“How was she when they were taking her away?” Erika asked.
“I think she was coming to,” Joey said in a rising tone, his sentence punctuated by a loud exhale.
“Maybe it was worse than it looked,” Gunnar whispered.
“Yeah,” Joey seconded. “Mike went to the hospital with her.”
“I know. David Freeman Hospital.”
“We could check how she’s doing.”
“Yeah,” Gunnar said and thought about what to do next. “Then you can tell me what you found today. Anything interesting?”
“Yeah,” Amy said. “I was about to call you to go over what I found out about the contest service staff. Some interesting stuff about a guy at the front door.”
Gunnar liked what he heard. “All right, sounds good.” A good lead on the Holt case was welcome right now. He figured that both Joey and Amy would need something to occupy themselves to quell the rage of the break-in.
Then he looked at Erika, about to tell her the same, but saw not only understanding but a steely eagerness in her look.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go somewhere else, and we can go over what Amy found.”
“Let’s drive by the hospital first,” Gunnar said. “See how Mike’s doing and what’s happening.”
Everyone agreed.
CHAPTER 47
The rough-cut of the Sun State Classic looked great, Laura thought as she reviewed the tape in her living room. The direction and the editing actually made the
Santa Monica Palace Hotel look regal, and the crowds like a sea of rabid bodybuilding fanatics. The program would make a perfect impression once it streamed online. Hopefully, make a great impression, she corrected herself. It would hopefully draw more spectators into the next event staged by the WBBF.
Brad Holt, of course, and his demise were gone. The editors would insert a brief note at the end of the program, dedicating the event to the “memory of a true champion of the sport.” That would come after all of the closing credits would have aired, where few would notice.
She was also satisfied with herself that the men’s and women’s coverage were almost of equal length. That’s how she ordered it. The women got five extra minutes of air time. That was her own dedication to Brad.
Her cell phone suddenly went off in its charging cradle. She quickly yanked it free, seeing Monty Montgomery’s ID on the display window. “Yes?”
“The bugs are loose,” Montgomery said. “So turn on your equipment.”
“They’re working?”
“They should. Remember, they’re voice-activated. We’ll need noise and activity in his office to know for certain.”
“All right.”
“But there was a problem putting them in.”
Although Monty’s statement was vague enough, Laura was stung by a jolt of adrenaline. The problem must have been big. She just knew it. “What kind of a problem?” she asked, noticing her anxiety intensify with every word. Within seconds, she had to discipline herself to stay and sound cool. “What happened?”
“You know I went in there and told them I was considering joining up. Got a day’s guest pass—”
“Yeah?” Laura blurted. She wanted to hear the problem right now, not Montgomery’s complicated back story.
“I stayed in the locker room when everyone was gone, then planned on slipping into Marino’s office upstairs. Well, I was almost found out by one of the owners.”
Blood was pounding in Laura’s ears. “Almost?”
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