“Baby, you’re a child. You’re grieving.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. I’m not a child. I have a job. I travel. My dad always gave me the credit card when I was going away or when he traveled and I stayed at the house by myself. We had a system, and it worked,” she said. “If you’ve got, like, maternal instincts or whatever-whatever, you can take them elsewhere.” She flicked her hand at me again, like she was dismissing an incompetent servant.
“Man.” I shook my head. “When they were handing out sass in heaven, you loaded up a truck.”
“Damn right.” She extracted another vape pen from her purse.
“So what happened to your mom?” I asked. “Did she leave him?”
“They were never together. Their thing was a one-night stand.”
“What? Are you kidding?”
“I’m dead serious. He couldn’t even remember who she was at first. He was hanging out with a lot of lady folk at the time if you catch my drift.”
I sighed.
“She dumped me on his doorstep with a letter and a picture of the two of us.”
Baby pulled out her phone and tapped to a grainy photo of a tall, attractive Black woman with curly dark hair and brown eyes, holding a baby.
“How old were you?” I gaped.
“Two.” She exhaled a cloud of smoke. “I’m definitely Dad’s, though. He got a DNA test.”
“Oh, I bet it’s the first thing he did,” I said. “I bet he grabbed your little hand and the car keys and went and got it immediately.”
“I don’t remember.” She rolled her eyes. “You got water in your ears? I told you. I was two.”
“So what happened to your mom exactly?”
“She washed up on a beach in Papanoa, like, three weeks later.” The girl shrugged. “Somebody tied her to a cinder block.”
“Oh, Baby. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t care.” Baby snorted in the feigned nonchalant way I’d seen a thousand teenagers do before her. “I didn’t know her.”
“But—”
“He tried to find out who killed her, but he couldn’t.” Baby exhaled more smoke at the dashboard. “He found out everything about her, found some family and all, but he couldn’t solve the crime. He had fun trying, though. It was like a mystery, I guess. He liked mysteries. It’s why he started doing this job.”
“What job?” I flicked the vape pen, sending it sailing out the window.
“Goddamnit, bitch! You do that again and I’m gonna smack you, I swear to God.”
“Dad gave up being an accountant?”
“An accountant?” Baby burst out laughing. I pulled into a parking lot in front of a strip mall and found a space. “He was an accountant?”
“Last time I saw him he was,” I said.
“Well, when he got landed with me, he had a shop on Sunset that sold taxidermy.”
“Oh, sure.” I rolled my eyes. “Because that makes complete sense. So what was he doing lately?”
Baby gestured through the windshield. We were parked outside a small office door wedged between a busy nail salon and a crab boil restaurant covered in nautical paraphernalia. The stenciling on the door read EARLY BIRD PRIVATE INVESTIGATION—WE’LL GET THE WORM!
Chapter 16
“‘We’ll get the worm’ was my idea.” Baby jutted her chin proudly. “When he started out he was mainly just catching cheating husbands and bail jumpers. You know. Worms.”
“Genius,” I said.
I opened the office door, which led to a stairwell, and was hit with a wall of cigar stink mingled with the smell of crabs from the restaurant next door. There was something else there too: my father’s cologne. Trumper’s West Indian Extract of Limes. I’d smelled it now and then on my clients’ fathers over the years, and it always struck pain into my heart. I walked up the rickety stairs as Baby reassured herself behind me.
“Seven hours and four minutes,” she said. “That’s still plenty of time to get home, pack, get to the airport. Settle into the lounge nice and early. Nab a spot by the window.”
“You’re not going to Milan, Baby. Not this time.”
“It’s hilarious that you think you can stop me,” she said. “You’re gonna give me my credit card, and I’m gonna go.”
In a tiny office above the crab restaurant, my father’s desk sagged under a three-foot-high pile of papers, books, take-out containers, and unopened UPS packages as well as scrunched gambling tickets and receipts, all sprinkled with cigar butts and ash. Just as I had anticipated. The only difference from the office I remembered in Watkins two and a half decades earlier was the weapons. From the doorway I could see four knives—two big hunting knives lying in the pile on the desk, a penknife on a windowsill crowded with used Starbucks cups, and a kitchen knife stabbed into the wall by the window—plus a huge Magnum revolver lying on the seat of his battered leather chair.
I sighed and moved the gun, then sank into the chair. My dad’s groove in the chair fit my butt exactly. Baby shoved a pile of debris off an old sofa onto the floor with the familiarity of someone who had done it many times, then she reclined dramatically with an arm up over her head, holding her phone aloft.
“The woman is trying to take over everything,” Baby narrated to her followers. “She’s ransacking my father’s office now. I can tell she’s going to try to dominate my entire life. She thinks she’s my mom already. She says I’m not going to Milan, and she still hasn’t given me my credit card. This is going to be a battle, people.”
“Are you out of your mind?” I said. “Ransacking? I’ve touched one thing since I walked in!”
“The woman is trying to lecture me now,” Baby narrated.
“I have a name. It’s Rhonda.”
Baby ignored me. I tried to shake off the hot, heavy annoyance creeping up between my shoulder blades, a sensation that had begun in the car and was peaking now. Baby had clearly hung out in this office a lot. My dad had brought her around his work. He’d let her brand the business with a slogan. He’d spent enough time with her that she’d picked up some of his mannerisms—that aggressive hand flick, and the jut of her chin at her own cleverness like a happy cat looking for a scratch. She’d been dumped in his lap as a tiny toddler, and instead of foisting her off on her mother’s relatives, he’d chosen to raise her himself. There was no mistaking it.
I was deeply jealous of this girl.
My entire life, my dad had been aloof, stern, or completely absent. When I reached age thirteen, he’d had enough of me. What did Baby have that I didn’t? What was wrong with me? I strummed my purple-painted fingernails on a small bare spot on the desk.
“What was the lawyer getting at when he said I needed to secure this place?” I asked. “Both doors were locked.”
Baby said nothing and tapped furiously on her phone. I was starting to shift the stuff on the desk into piles when Baby finished her post or whatever it was and popped up again.
“I’m gonna go get a crab stick,” she said. “I assume you want one. Maybe more than one.”
“You assume right,” I said, refusing to take offense. “Get me three. And if you try to run off to Milan, I will find you so fast it’ll make Liam Neeson look like an amateur.”
“Who’s Liam Neeson?”
“What? Liam Neeson isn’t even Marlon Brando old. He’s current!”
“If you say so.”
Baby didn’t get far in the hall, it seemed. I heard her bump into someone, and racked with guilt, I went to the door to listen in.
“I don’t have time for this,” I heard Baby say to them. “I’m trying to make a run for it.”
Chapter 17
I put my hand on the knob but paused when I saw Baby’s reflection in the mirrored surface of another door in the hall. She was standing with a teenage boy who looked so tired and terrified, I forgot all about Baby’s escape attempt and froze where I stood, observing them.
“I need help.” The boy swiped back his long, ragged hair. “Is your
dad here?”
“He’s dead.”
“What?”
“What the hell do you need him for?” Baby cocked her hip and folded her arms. “Jeez, man, what’s it been? Two years? I haven’t seen you since…”
“The thing.”
“Yeah.” Baby stared at her feet. “The thing.”
Both kids stood in the awkwardness, fidgeting with their clothes. It was Baby who came out of it first.
“You got tall,” she said.
“You too.” The boy wrung his hands. “Look, I’m in trouble and I can’t go to the cops. I need your dad. What happened to him?”
“What happened to you?”
“I…I was abducted last night.”
“What? What the hell does that even mean?”
“It means someone abducted me.” The boy smoothed down his shirt. It was dirty and wrinkled. “Like, for real. Like, the guy knocked me out and tied me up and put me in a white van. He had a gun.”
Even as the boy spoke, I could see him mentally backtracking. He swiped at his face, and I could see his hands were shaking.
“Are you high right now?” Baby asked.
“No, I’m not high.” The boy’s voice dropped so low I could barely hear it. He took a step closer to Baby. “Look, your dad was always a cool dude, and he came through for us that time. I just thought maybe…maybe, like…Okay, look. It doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t have come here. This was a stupid idea.”
The boy turned.
I pulled open the door of the office and pointed at him. “Not one more step,” I said.
Chapter 18
Baby’s eyes were full of terror. Not the physical kind. The social kind. Just opening the door and showing myself in all my aesthetic horror to someone she knew was clearly terrifying enough, but as I spoke, her eyes somehow got bigger. She was horrified that I might reveal who I was and make some kind of scene, which is exactly what I did.
“You two, get your butts in here.” I pointed to the office.
Baby and the boy walked into my father’s office. Baby’s expression slowly turned into a furious, threatening glare as she moved to the couch.
“What’s your name, kid?” I asked the boy.
“Ashton Willisee.”
“Ashton, is it true what you were saying?” I asked. “Were you abducted?”
“Whoa!” Baby put her hands up. “Rhonda, what…we…You-you don’t get to listen in on people’s private conversations!” she blurted.
“Yeah, I do.” I shrugged. “When they involve crimes and the possible endangerment of the people around me, I do.”
“I’m out of here.” Ashton tried to get up.
“Sit down and tell me what happened to you,” I said.
“Nothing happened.” Ashton slithered down in his seat. Ultra casual. He actually yawned, let his eyes drift half closed. I knew from my years of watching tapes of kids in police interrogations that adopting an overly casual or relaxed stance was often a coping mechanism for kids in danger. I’d spent much of my professional life advocating for kids who appeared callous or indifferent during false confessions when really they were terrified.
“Nothing happened?” I pressed.
“Look, I just—” He gave a humorless laugh and gestured at Baby. “I know Baby from school. I was just in the area, and I thought I’d see if she was here and…uh…pull a prank. Make up a story. I’m sorry, okay?”
“Look at me,” I said.
Ashton stared at the floor.
“Ashton, look at my eyes.”
The boy glanced at me for a fragment of a second before straightening back up in the chair.
“I can help you,” I said. “We can go to the police together. If there’s some reason that you—”
“I’ve gotta go.” The boy leaped to his feet. “I don’t need any help, lady. It was just a prank, okay? That’s all.”
He was out the door before I could get across the room to him.
“That was so uncool. I just…” Baby was shaking her head disgustedly at me. “I’ve got nothing. I’m, like, speechless.”
I ignored her and went to the window, where I watched Ashton fast-walk to a Mercedes parked at the end of the lot. There was a bumper sticker on the back of the car, which was unusual given the expense of the vehicle. I had to squint to read it. PROUD PARENT OF A STANFORD-WEST ACADEMY STUDENT.
“Hey, Baby,” I said, keeping my eyes on the Mercedes. “What’s the name of your high school?”
She snorted. “I’m too busy to go to school. I’ve been homeschooling myself since I was thirteen.”
“Dad let you do that?” I sighed. “Jesus.”
“People don’t let me do things, Rhonda,” Baby said. “I just do them.”
I found a set of car keys on the windowsill. My father’s car had to be out there in the lot somewhere. “So do you think Ashton was abducted?”
“Probably,” she said. “But that’s not the point. You can’t eavesdrop on me and my friends.”
“Baby, the abduction is the point,” I said. “I know you’re mortified to be around me. I get that. You’ve made it perfectly clear. But you saw how obvious his body language was, didn’t you? I mean, he was clearly telling the truth to you out there in the hall but lying when he was in here.”
“I guess,” she said as she took out her phone and lay back down on the couch with a huff. “I don’t know about body language. But he had drag marks on the backs of his shoes. Fresh ones. There was still dirt on them. So I guess he was probably abducted.”
“Really?” I was genuinely impressed. “You saw drag marks?”
“Yeah, right here.” She lifted a foot and touched the back of her heel without taking her eyes off her phone. “I saw that once on one of Dad’s cases. I was looking at the crime-scene photos of some chick who got raped and killed in the woods up at Big Bear. Dad showed me the drag marks on her shoes like someone had dragged her unconscious body across gravel or concrete. You don’t get marks like that if you’re fighting and kicking.”
“I can’t believe Dad let you look at crime-scene photos,” I said, fiddling with the car keys.
“You are so not listening to me.” Baby turned her body to face the back of the couch. “I don’t need anyone to let me do things.”
I pointed the key fob at the window and clicked it. None of the cars in the lot flashed their lights. I hit the button again, looked around. Nothing. I clicked and clicked, until something behind me clicked in response under the desk. I turned and knelt, pressing the button on the key fob and listening for the responding click beneath the worn blue carpet.
I pulled up a corner of carpet that was curled against the bottom of the desk. Beneath it was a badly fitted wooden hatch set into the floor. The key fob disguised as a car key was clicking the lock on the hatch open and shut.
“Like Milan,” Baby was saying from the couch, out of sight. “I’m going. You can tell yourself whatever you want about letting me. But I’m getting on that plane.”
I opened the floor hatch to reveal a space filled almost entirely with a black duffel bag. I unzipped the bag.
Cash. Stacks of cash, in mixed denominations, bound with elastic bands. I pushed experimentally against the stacks of money, feeling for depth and density. A quick estimation told me there were millions of dollars here. It was more money than I’d ever seen anywhere in my entire life.
It was bad news. The mere sight raised the hairs on the back of my neck.
“In fact, we should go,” Baby said. I heard her roll off the couch. “I’ve got to pack.”
“Yeah,” I said, zipping the bag closed. “Let’s go. I’ll meet you at the car.”
Chapter 19
Vera arrived late. She always did. She liked to keep them waiting, give them an opportunity to talk about her. The more people talked about you while you weren’t around, the more mythical you became. The more powerful.
She threw the keys to her convertible at the Soho House valet and wore her sun
glasses all the way up the elegant white stairs to the restaurant, right to the table, so they wouldn’t be able to tell whether or not she was pissed off at having been called to a meeting. Her crew were all watching her as she sat down. The tension was so palpable, a group of people at the next table—which included Jennifer Aniston and her manager—looked over too.
The twins, Sean and Penny, were slumped in their chairs, looking bored as usual. Ashton looked puny, dwarfed by Benzo beside him, whose sinewy muscles were barely contained in Hugo Boss. The waitress saw Vera and turned midstride so abruptly she almost tripped. Vera had once scalded a waiter here with her bowl of soup for ignoring her, so now the staff always attended to her promptly.
No one spoke. The waitress came, and Vera said, “Coffee, black,” without looking up. She pushed her sunglasses up into her blond ringlets.
“You can explain,” she finally said to Ashton.
Ashton sagged with relief. “There’s not much more to add about what happened other than what I said in my text,” Ashton began. “Guy grabbed me right outside the Playhouse. He let me go in some shithole off the 405 near Mulholland. I wouldn’t have escaped if it hadn’t been for the cops driving by. He was gonna kill me.”
“And why do you think this has something to do with our game?” Penny asked, idly perusing the menu.
“He knew who I was,” Ashton said. “He knew my name. He was, like, angry. Really pissed. He was talking about what children deserve…”
“What do you mean, what children deserve?” Benzo snorted.
“I don’t know! He was, like, ‘Don’t you know who I am? Don’t you know what children deserve?’ Something like that. I can’t remember exactly. I was freaking out.”
“Children.” Penny rolled her eyes. She looked over at Jennifer Aniston’s table, where a pair of publicists, or whoever the hell they were, were still ogling them. “What are you assholes staring at?”
The publicists snapped to attention, turning away.
“Ashton, if this guy knows who we are, we’re in deep shit,” Sean said. “I can’t believe you could let this happen. Did you disable your phone?”
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