by Louise Penny
After talking with several denizens—I like that word, don’t you?—of the walk, Ja-ron, the fire eater, steered me to Haley Garrick Lambert. I’d seen her around but never paid any attention. She was younger than I’d expected, early thirties maybe. But still probably past her prime for Lambert. Short shorts and sandals—hey, it’s an L.A. winter. Baubles and beads on bracelets and necklaces. A headscarf wrapped around long golden-brown hair that hung down below her shoulders. And two or three different-colored tank tops layered one over the other. Yeah, she belonged in Venice. She worked selling handmade jewelry from a stand on the side of the walk.
I told her who I was, who I was working for. Asked the usual opening questions.
“I’d help you if I could,” she said. That’s more than Emily’s sister had said. And why wasn’t Erin worried? That worried me.
The sun cracked the clouds, glinting off Haley’s dangly earrings, which sported a distinctive dolphin design.
“You’re looking at my earrings.”
“They’re unusual.”
“Yeah, and solid platinum. Patrick’s very magnanimous. He gives all his exes earrings, ’cause he’s sure stingy on the alimony.” She squinted in the glaring sun. I could taste the sarcasm.
“How many does he have?”
“I’m the second. I guess Emily is the third now . . .”
“Can I ask you something?”
“That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?”
“What’re you doing hawking this shit out here in Venice?”
“Oh, you think because I’m the great Patrick Lambert’s ex that I should have my own alimony mansion in Bev Hills, right? I’ll tell you, I signed a prenup. I get a little, and when I say a little—”
“You mean a little.”
“Very little.”
“So there’s no love lost.”
She hesitated. “I don’t hate him, if that’s what you mean. I started out wanting to be a star like every other halfway decent-looking girl in L.A. I thought Patrick was my ticket. We used each other. I didn’t expect much on the back end. Just like in the movies, nobody gets their back-end money. Almost nobody.”
“He do that to you?” I pointed to a pink scar on her leg.
“Oh hell, no. But it did happen on one of his locations in the Angeles National Forest. He finally gave me a bit in one his flicks, The Atom Boys.”
“Don’t know it.”
“You’re not missing anything, though it did make a lot of money. Anyway, I got hit by a falling light. You should have seen it right after. Searing red.”
“I’ll bet. So he didn’t hit you, but maybe he was controlling?” I said, remembering Erin’s comment and playing off my own hunch about Lambert.
“Everything from soup to nuts, as my grandmother would say. He’s a control freakazoid.” The venom gushed now. “I’d say that’s why I left him, but he left me. Probably for Emily—probably had her waiting in the wings. But I don’t care, I’m happy, I got the sun in the morning and the beach all day long. I’m not mad at him or her.”
“You think he—”
“Well, yeah, sure. He could have taken Emily out. Well, not Patrick. He pays people to do his dirty work.”
“Like me.”
“Yeah, like you.”
I went away knowing a little more than I had when the sun woke up this morning. Erin was closemouthed. Haley was friendlier. Maybe bitter about the breakup, about Emily taking her place. Motive to kill or kidnap her? Sure. She claimed not to hate Emily or her ex-husband. Nobody knew anything. Nothing they would cop to, anyway. And I was suspicious of them all.
My phone buzzed. Lautrec wanted a meet. We hooked up at the Sidewalk Café, not too far from Haley’s stand. I knew something was up as soon as he walked in. Tense, unsmiling. Shoulders tight.
“Hey.”
We took a table, shot the breeze—how’s your wife, how’s the bunker, that kind of thing. But something was wrong. The conversation stiff, avoiding the subject at hand until . . .
He leaned in. “We’re definitely liking Lambert for it now.”
That came out of the blue. “You think he’s the doer?”
“New thinking is he killed her and staged the break-in to explain her disappearance.” He downed a slug of Sam Adams. “This is under your hat.”
I tipped an imaginary hat. “So why would he hire me if he killed her? You think he’s trying to set me up?”
“Makes him look like he’s doing something.”
I toyed with my beer. “So what’s wrong, that’s not why you wanted a meet. I see it in your face.”
“Every day it gets back-burnered a little more.”
“That makes sense—much as anything, I guess. You think he’s the doer and somebody’s warning you off it.”
“And now I’m warning you off,” he said. “Fair warning.”
“I get it, the studios are comin’ down on you. L.A.’s a factory town and Hollywood’s the factory. Wanna make sure one of theirs is protected.”
“Get outta here.”
I walked home, looking at the colonnades along Windward, echoes from another time, and feeling uneasy about my meal with Lautrec as I entered the office. As soon as I did I saw something on one of the monitors that pissed me off. A green minivan blocking the gate to my little parking lot in back. I have to police that area, because people will park there and go to the beach, even at night. Then I have to call a tow. It’s a royal pain. I could see there were still people in the van; they didn’t look like they were going anywhere. I went out back to tell them to move on. I walked by the van. Two men jumped out from behind a low wall, slapping something down over my head. Everything went black. They yanked the hood’s drawstring tight, shoved me into the back of the van. I didn’t think it was a random kidnapping. My first inclination was to laugh, crooks with a minivan. My second was, how the hell do I get out of here? Third, I left the damn door to my place unlocked. Shit.
Zip ties tore into my wrists as they lashed me to a cargo cleat in the back. I could smell the fear-sweat coming off them. The whole van was steamy and stunk up, like a gym on a humid night.
I tried to figure out where we were going, but it was hard to tell. My senses said we were heading north, up the coast somewhere. Nobody was talking. I tried to discern how many people there were from their movements. The two men who’d grabbed me were in back with me and a driver up front.
“You want to tell me what this is about?”
“Shut up.”
The van bumped over rough gravel, probably a semipaved beach parking lot somewhere up the coast. It had to be around 6:30 p.m., probably not anyone out at this hour. They cut the zip ties, yanked me out, threw me on the ground. Rip—the skin on my forearm shredding. Fuck them. I owe you now. I could hear the waves crashing a few yards away.
Damn! A kick in the ribs.
“Stay the fuck away from Emily Lambert. Hear me?”
“I hear ya.” I felt him too. The kick wasn’t hard, but it hit the right spot to give me a blast of pain.
“Or we’ll be back.”
“Did anyone tell you boys that kidnapping is against the law?” I loosened the drawstring on the hood. A drift of fresh air blew in through the gap.
Light from the open van door sliced across one of the men’s faces as he bent over me. Familiar face—one I’d seen in a photo. Dirty-blond hair and nicely cut gym rat muscles, the kind you’d find at Muscle Beach. Erin’s husband, maybe, from what I could tell through the gap in the hood. Another kick. Wasn’t very sharp. These weren’t hard guys. They wanted to scare me off—why? They piled in the van. I threw a rock at the taillight, shattering it. They hit PCH heading south. I tried to figure out where I was. Maybe Will Rogers Beach. I had a good walk ahead of me.
I tucked the hood in my pocket, walked PCH back to Windward. Got home at seven bells on the dog watch. I didn’t always think in those terms anymore, but I always liked dog watch. And I was dog-tired. I slid down into the hole, sealed th
e hatch, salved my scraped arm. Put a couple of tortillas on the open-flame burner, spread butter on them and then hot sauce. And that was dinner. I set the alarm clock, lay down on my bed, and drifted into some kind of dreamland where all the freaks on Venice Beach came out one at a time and kicked me in the shins, like in some demented Fellini movie. The alarm went off at midnight sharp. I jumped in the shower, dressed, and climbed up the ladder.
An eerie, cold, wet wind blew in off the ocean. I pointed the car east and drove, blasting Brigitte Handley and the Dark Shadows on fairly empty, fairly quiet weeknight streets. The part of Hollywood I was headed to wasn’t quite as romantic as the one people imagine when they think of Hollywood. It was the part where people lived and played, changed diapers and had sex, though maybe not in that order.
I parked a block away from my destination and walked that block like I owned it. A Nora Jones song filtered down the street from an open window somewhere. At 0130 not even a TV flickered through a window in the quiet house. I let my eyes adjust to the darkness, padded down the driveway toward the back of the house, looking for the outcroppings of a security system. Found it, disabled it.
Breaking in was easy-peasy. I crept through the house on my steel-toed Doc Martins till I came to the master bedroom. I pushed the door open, quietly took a seat on the rocker by the foot of the bed, and rocked slowly.
“W-what’s going on?” Erin jumped up in bed. Her husband lurched up beside her. I shined the sun-bright LED flashlight at the end of my 9-million-volt stun gun in his eyes. He shielded them with a hand.
“Did you really think I couldn’t figure out who you were?”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Don’t play fucking games.” I hit the trigger on the stunner. Zzzzzzzzz, it crackled. “You want this upside your neck?”
“What do you want?”
I enjoyed watching them squirm. “I think you know more than you’re telling. You want to keep me out of the loop—fine. But stay the fuck away from me. You’re in a league you’re not equipped for.” I held up a piece of taillight from the van. “Fuck with me again, I’ll turn you in. This piece of taillight belongs to your van, the one in your driveway. The one with the broken taillight I just snapped a picture of.”
“Not legal,” Erin said.
“Neither is kidnapping. Let’s call it even and forget about it. When you decide to stop playing games, you know where to find me.”
The hole seemed particularly reassuring that night. Next morning I wrote up a report for Lambert. Jammed by his house.
“You’re not making much progress.”
“I’ve only been working the case a couple of days.” I didn’t tell him about my being kidnapped or my field trip to Erin’s house in the middle of the night. “You sure you don’t know what might have happened to Emily?”
“Are you accusing me—”
“No, just that you might know about someone who could have been angry with her—or you.”
“I wish I did. I really want to find her.” He sounded sincere, but what did that mean? Like Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Maybe he was a player in more ways than one—and maybe he was playing me. Driving back to the office, I tried to figure out my next step.
I looked through the photos again. A woman approached on one of the monitors. She glanced up and down the street, as if she was embarrassed going into a PI’s office. I was up and out of the hole by the time the little bell over the door rang.
“Mr. Lassen.”
“Erin. I’m surprised to see you here.” I guess my late-night visit with the stun baton had worked.
“I’m sorry about what happened. We were just trying to protect Emily.”
“Protect her?”
“She’s been kidnapped.” She sank into one of the chairs.
“Have you heard from someone? Has there been a ransom demand?”
“No, but I think someone wants to get to her husband.”
“How does your kidnapping me help Emily?”
“Well, if she was kidnapped and you’re nosing around, they might hurt her.” She squirmed. “I’m not sure how to say this, so I’m just going to tell you everything. I’d been getting texts from Emily every day saying she’s okay. But I haven’t heard anything now in three days.”
“Texts?”
“Yes, but not from her phone, from a number I don’t know. I guess whoever kidnapped her is making her do it so we know she’s okay.”
“Anyone can send a text. No phone calls?”
She shook her head.
“How do you know it’s really her?”
“She always signs off ‘Lee-Lee,’ what we called her as a kid. No one else would know that, but these are signed that way.”
She showed me the messages. Short, terse. No cops or they kill me. Lee-Lee.
“We can’t go to the police. Don’t you see? And that’s why we did what we did last night. We wanted to scare you off.”
“I get it.” I thought I did, but my suspicious nature made me wonder if she was telling me the whole truth and nothing but. “Does Lambert know about these?”
“No.”
I understood her reluctance to share the info with Lambert at this stage. She showed me the last text message. It said something about curtains.
“Curtains?”
“It’s our code. For where we used to go camping with our family in the Angeles National Forest. There was a wall of trees like a huge curtain.”
“What do you think it means?”
“I think they might be holding her there.”
She told me how to get to the place.
I hit Highway 2 in La Cañada Flintridge, drove up into the forest, looking for the turnoff that Erin had described. She couldn’t remember exactly how to get there. The Angeles National Forest is known as L.A.’s body dump, and I was looking for a body, hoping not to find one, at least not a dead one.
Driving in circles for an hour, waiting for the GPS to come back online, I wondered if Erin had sent me on a wild-goose chase. Then I saw it. Rabbit Run Road. Not much to the little dirt road. It ended in a small campground. I parked, walked into the site. Deserted. A sliver of red flashed through the patchwork of leaves, glinting in the sun. Red Mercedes SL Roadster, behind a curtain of trees. Covered with dust and leaves, it looked abandoned. Hadn’t been broken into . . . yet, but unlocked. Both of which surprised me. I guess it was so far off the beaten path, and especially in the cold of winter, nobody had found it.
I slipped on latex gloves, pulled out my little point-and-shoot—I liked it better than my phone for things like this. Snapped pictures of every inch of the car and surrounding area. The car was empty. No purse. No personal items. No dead body. Nothing. Looked like it had already been cleaned out. Maybe whoever took Emily Lambert had sanitized it to get rid of any incriminating fingerprints or DNA evidence they might have left behind.
I did a three-sixty around the car, then walked in successively larger concentric circles, trying hard not to disturb the land, hoping I wouldn’t find Emily’s body in a shallow grave. No footprints or breadcrumbs or anything. Someone had tossed her purse in a pile of leaves a few yards from the car. Emily’s wallet remained, but her cash and credit cards were missing. Driver’s license was where it should be.
Heading back to the car, something caught my eye. Two-inch-wide dark tape wrapped around a tree branch, one end flapping in the breeze. Duct tape? Had they held her here? I walked over. No, gaffer’s tape, similar to duct tape but used on movie sets, and I’d been on enough of them to know the difference. Walked back to my car, found a spot where my phone would work, called the cops. And waited, and thought. Gaffer’s tape, movie sets. Lambert made movies. Was there a connection?
Something else caught my eye, shiny and sparkly, half covered by dirt. I picked up an earring. A familiar-looking earring.
I played Stratego on my phone till a black-and-white sheriff’s SUV came tro
lling up the road.
“Jack Lassen?” Deputy Cantwell said. I knew his name from the badge on his shirt.
“Yes.”
He made sure I wasn’t armed. Luckily, I’d left my Beretta Nano in the car.
“Where’s the car?”
I pointed.
“Stay here.”
The deputy walked to Emily’s car. Made sure there were no dead bodies in the passenger compartment. Popped the trunk. Clean. Scanned the immediate area around the car. Said something into his shoulder mic. Came back to me.
“You sure you didn’t check out the car?”
“Me?” Mr. Innocent.
“How did you come to find the car?”
“The owner’s husband hired me to find her. She’d been missing.”
“And how did you end up here?”
“Look, I don’t want to tell the story eighty-six times. I’ll just wait till the detectives get here.”
He shot me a pissed-off, don’t-fuck-with-me look but basically left me alone. He looked around, mostly just waiting for the detectives and criminalists to show. They took their sweet time. And when they did they gave me the third degree. I gave them most of what I had and they let me go down the mountain.
Halfway down, I pulled into a turnout. Figured I was far enough away from the scene of the crime that they wouldn’t notice. Pulled out the earring. Familiar. I’d seen it before. On Haley at the beach. She’d had two. I wondered if now she only had one. Ex-wife, jealous of new, arm candy wife. Thrown to the wolves with a prenup that gave her virtually nothing. Maybe she’d hatched a kidnapping plan with a new boyfriend to make up for being shorted on alimony? It’d been done before.