You Know Who I Am (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries Book 2)

by Diane Patterson

  “I’m going to go in and take a look around,” I said.

  In my earpiece, Stevie said, “Are you certain that’s a good idea?”

  I pulled a pair of latex gloves on. “We’re married. I get half of everything, remember?”

  So I let myself in and looked around. Colin’s new digs in Los Angeles made the apartment Stevie and I had left in Las Vegas that very morning look like a palace. The construction was cobbled together out of plywood and glue, with terrible insulation and carpets that closely resembled secondhand samples and weren’t cut to fit the floor space closely. There were no closets at all. The bathroom had a tiny stash of supplies stuck under the sink in a basket.

  “Oh yes, this is the right place.”

  In my earpiece, Stevie said, “Then please do this as fast as possible.”

  My sister: always worrying.

  The bedroom had a futon on the floor, a chest of drawers against the wall, and a clothing rack like you might see outside the dressing room in a department store. The bed was a mess. The clothes I could see on the rack were Colin’s standard mix of fitted tees and form-fitting sweaters and pressed denims. The man definitely liked to show off his physique as often as possible.

  The clothes on the floor looked like a mix of Colin’s standard wardrobe and a few more feminine pieces heavy on the lace and paisley. Since I would bet money I didn’t have that Colin wasn’t a secret cross-dresser, he clearly had a lady friend.

  Of course he did. Colin always had someone.

  The only thing on the counters in the kitchen was a pile of mail, including a utilities bill for this apartment made out to the mysterious Anne da Silva. The only cabinets in the place were extremely low-end kitchen units that could easily have been swiped off the sidewalk after someone’s remodel. I checked all of them: they contained three pots and pans, a few dishes, and Colin’s extensive collection of hard liquor.

  I recognized several of the bottles I had bought in Vegas. They were my favorite brands, not Colin’s. Typical bastard: Steals my things, takes my drink.

  My liquor. But not my bracelet.

  I slammed the last kitchen cabinet door shut.

  The door made a different sound than the other door I’d also shut a little too fast.

  I reopened each kitchen cabinet door and then slammed each one closed again. One of them made a lower-pitch thud that didn’t last as long as its compatriots.

  I knelt down and checked the cabinet, which was the one with the liquor. I took some of the bottles out and then felt around the cabinet.

  The back of the cabinet had been removed. How on earth he’d done it I had no idea, but Colin was a clever one with the hacksaw and the screwdriver, and that skill didn’t stop at the edge of the stage. The back of the cabinet box was now a case he’d wedged in there, hard to reach and almost invisible in the dark behind liquor bottles. I removed the rest of the bottles out, and then wrenched the case out.

  It was a large briefcase.

  What. The. Hades?

  The briefcase was locked. Something hidden that well had to have interesting things in it, right? I fiddled with the combination and it popped open on Colin’s birthdate. My poor dear estranged husband, always sticking with the classics. Inside were a bunch of boring-looking papers, a novel, and some actress’s headshots. Maybe she was on some show Stevie liked.

  The briefcase also had what had to be one of the worst false bottoms I’d ever seen. It might fool most civilians who wouldn’t notice something tiny out of place, but to someone like me, the fake edge around the bottom of that briefcase stood out like a Maserati in a Safeway parking lot.

  Of course, given where he’d hidden this briefcase, he wasn’t expecting snoops to get this far.

  I poked one fingernail under one edge of the bottom and lifted it up.

  “Holy mother of Poseidon,” I said.

  “What is it?” Stevie’s voice asked.

  The bottom of the briefcase contained five neatly arranged packs of hundreds. Each packet was worth ten thousand dollars. Colin had fifty thousand dollars casually stuck inside the wall of this stupid, crappy apartment.

  “Found a little stash of mad money,” I told her. I fitted the bottom back into the case and closed it back up. I returned all the liquor to the cabinet and swept up all the sawdust. The case came with me as I continued to search the apartment.

  Why did Colin have an extra fifty thousand dollars lying around? And were twenty-five thousand of them legally mine? Because I could use the cash.

  After finding the briefcase, I did two more thorough sweeps through the apartment to reconfirm that my bracelet was not there.

  He had my bracelet. I had his briefcase. We were going to make a trade. And then I was going to be completely done with Colin Abbott.

  I returned to the car. Stevie, small and curled up in the passenger seat, put down her book as I got in.

  “It’s not there.” I opened the case and started pulling up the bottom. “This was.”

  Stevie’s sudden gasp reminded me how long it’s been since we were around so much money. While growing up, this would have been the Christmas bonus for the employee my mother didn’t like. “How much did you take out of here?” she asked me.

  “None!” I was shocked. Pocketing a few dollars hadn’t even occurred to me. Dammit, I was getting sloppy.

  “Well, don’t,” she said. “We don’t know where it’s from.”

  “As in, are the bills sequential, listed as stolen by the Treasury Department.”

  “Yes, precisely.”

  “This money could go to a very good cause, like buying us a hotel room tonight.”

  She shook her head. “No, Dru.” She held her hand out, and when I figured out what she wanted I slapped a pair of vinyl gloves into her palm. She slipped them on before refitting the false bottom into the case.

  “Fine.” I had a thumping headache. I was so close to the son of a bitch I’d married and no closer to my possessions. In the plus column, yet another day when a SWAT team wasn’t lying in wait for me, so our father hadn’t found me.

  The bottom of the suitcase fitted in snugly; Stevie started replacing all of the items that had been in the suitcase. She stared at one of the head shots in it.

  “Who is that?” I asked.

  “Penelope Gurevich,” she said. “She’s an actress. She’s on a nighttime soap opera called The Night Glen. It’s got vampires and werewolves and witches and kissing and stuff.”

  Kissing. Stevie is so cute. “Do you watch it?” I asked her.

  She shook her head. Probably the kissing bothered her.

  “What’s that other stuff?” I asked her.

  She waved the paperback. “This is a novel.”

  “Thanks for the update.”

  “You asked.” She glanced at the back before flipping through it. “Techno-thriller. Not my thing.”

  “Not Colin’s either.”

  She skimmed the papers. “Rental agreement for the apartment,” she said, holding up one set.

  “Let me guess. The renter of record is Anne da Silva.”

  “You are correct.”

  “I’m not here solely for my looks.”

  She made a face at me, and then returned to the papers. “Not much. Flyers from nightclubs.”

  Annoying. I wanted a piece of paper that said, “I left my wife’s bracelet at the following location.” I gripped the steering wheel hard a couple of times and let go, trying to work off some of my nervous energy. “Where should we head now?” I asked her.

  “You said that if it wasn’t here, he probably left it at Anne da Silva’s house.”

  That scenario seemed most likely. But that might as well be a wild goose chase.

  And I didn’t have to go chasing all over this horrible city to find where he might have hidden it. Now I had something he’d probably want back. He was going to come to me.

  “Where would you like to spend the night?” I asked her.

  “Wherever you thi
nk is best. Somewhere safe.”

  We had entered the US at points far east—from Montréal down through Vermont to be exact—and kept heading west. Down to Charleston, up to Chicago, down to New Orleans, through Texas, up to Nevada. It’s said that immigrants to America kept heading west in order to find the American dream. When you’ve gotten to California, you’ve gone as far as you can.

  I looked at my sister. “What’s the point farthest west from here?”

  “Do you mean directly west from here, or—”

  Oh. My lovely, literal sister. “Driving. If we drive west.”

  “Oh,” she said. She didn’t need to look at a map; she knows her geography. “Santa Monica.”

  “Let’s go make camp in Santa Monica,” I said.

  #

  Stevie directed us on to Santa Monica Boulevard and we drove ten miles to the town of Santa Monica. The landscape changed from the busy, trafficky intersections of Hollywood, with its tattoo parlors and gigantic billboards of upcoming movies, through Beverly Hills and its neatly manicured sidewalks no one was walking on and Westwood, UCLA’s hometown, to Santa Monica. It seemed like an upscale seaside enclave, with the nicer houses on one side and the seedier ones on the other.

  The ten-mile drive took an hour and thirty-five minutes. Traffic in Los Angeles was everything it has been advertised to be. I couldn’t wait to conclude our business with Colin and be on our way, to wherever our next destination was.

  We parked on a residential street a few blocks off Santa Monica Boulevard, right under the “No Parking Without Permit” sign. The sign made Stevie anxious. “Dru, we can’t pay the parking ticket,” she said.

  “We won’t have to pay any parking tickets we don’t receive,” I said. “Let’s both visualize us not getting one and we won’t.”

  Stevie stared at me. “That’s not how reality works, Dru.”

  If she only knew how many times I used my stunning powers of visualization to envision us getting out of a jam without any damn idea about how that might actually happen. “It does work that way, love. It absolutely does. It has to. Trust me on this one.”

  We tucked the briefcase under the backseat before walking over to Santa Monica Boulevard. Stevie stuck to my side like glue, looking at all the people walking by with a mixture of concern and fascination. Our first stop was at a cell phone store, where I bought a prepaid phone with a 310 area code. The first person I called, of course, was Colin.

  His voicemail answered, because he was a smart boy and didn’t recognize my phone number, I assume. After his terse greeting and a beep, I said, “Don’t hang up, lover. I have your briefcase. Yes, that one. If you want it back in one piece, call me immediately.” I rattled off the phone’s number and hung up. Then I glanced at Stevie.

  Still stuck to my side, she was gazing at the Third Street Promenade. It looked like an outdoor pedestrian shopping area, hugely busy, with lots of scantily-clad Angelenos walking around and buskers and musicians and mimes looking for their spare change. Stevie was always fascinated by bustling areas like that, even though actually being in one made her nervous and practically immobile with fear.

  We are unbearably attracted to what we fear the most.

  I have never analyzed what that might say about me.

  Stevie desperately wanted to be the sort of person who could hang out and giggle and not care about anything except maybe getting her nails done.

  One of these days, when we lived in the same locale for long enough and her head seemed to be in a good place, I would encourage her to take the steps needed to break out of her shell. Or at least loosen the edges a little.

  “You want to go over there?” I asked her.

  She shrugged. Not the sort of thing she wanted to have to make the choice about, I guess.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go take a walk and see what’s on the Promenade. Maybe they have a cupcake bakery.”

  “Do you think they do?” Stevie asked.

  “Cupcakes are very trendy these days, and this area looks intensely trendy,” I told her. “I suspect we’ll be in luck.”

  We did find a cupcake bakery. Stevie asked me to buy her a Meyer lemon cupcake, and I asked her for guidance on what flavor I should get. She told me to get the chocolate fleur de sel. I had one small taste of it—it was very good, although the chocolate wasn’t bittersweet enough for me—and then held on to it, waiting for Stevie to finish hers and ask for “a bite of” mine.

  My sister generally eats very well, but she does like her sweets. Once, when she was five, I found her in the room-sized pantry of our father’s house in Sussex, her face smeared with chocolate. She stood there, a tiny little elf, deeply worried that I was going to narc on her. I was eleven. Who was I going to tell who’d even care? I took her to wash up and then sat with her while she lay in bed with a tummy ache.

  While we sat on the bench and waited for Stevie to finish off two good-sized cupcakes, we noticed a number of bags going by with a Union Jack on them. I finally asked one of the pedestrians going by where the bags were from, and she told us there was a British shop around the corner. Stevie turned to me, her upper lip smeared with frosting and her eyes wide. I cracked up as I used a napkin to wipe her mouth off. “Yes, darling, we can walk over there and check it out.”

  Stevie missed Old Blighty something awful, even if she hadn’t been there in eleven years, if she hadn’t seen much of it while she was there, and some of the things that had happened while she was there didn’t bear remembering. Her nostalgia was greater than her common sense. I’m not afflicted with sentimentality about anything. The present moment is always better than the past. Always.

  We walked over to Ye Olde King’s Head Pub, Restaurant, and Shoppe, which was right near the Promenade but not on it. The Shoppe interested Stevie the most: lots of teacups made out of fine china cheek by jowl with tacky souvenirs and electric kettles, and shelves and shelves of British food items like every single Cadbury bar ever made and boxes of PG Tips tea, which one of our nannies always compared to the sweeping left on the floor after the good tea had been sold.

  She was Indian. She also didn’t last very long, because, as so many nannies had done, she slept with our father. I can’t remember her name.

  My sister had her nose practically through the plate-glass window, looking at all the treats that she wanted to remember but didn’t really know. She looked up at me. “Can we…” she asked, pointing in.

  “Of course.” As I opened the door for her, my phone rang.

  The new phone.

  The phone only Colin would have the number for.

  “I’ll be with you in there in two shakes. Don’t touch anything.” I pulled the phone out and moved to an area under an awning, out of the mid-afternoon December sun and away from any casual passersby.

  I felt ever-so-cheery. “Hello darling!”

  “Jesus Christ, Drusilla,” he said.

  It amused me to no end that at this moment he was perhaps a tenth as enraged as I had been since he left. “I’ve been simply fabulous, sweetheart. How have you been getting on?”

  “What do you want?”

  “A simple exchange of possessions. I have something you want, you have something I want. Let’s make a deal.”

  “You have to give me that briefcase right now.”

  “I have to, do I? That’s not how this is going to work, husband dearest.”

  “You have no idea what you’ve done—”

  I definitely hate it when men talk over me when I’m in the middle of speaking, as though I’m not saying a word. This is how you deal with an annoyance like that: you simply keep talking. It then becomes their problem whether or not they hear a word you say.

  “First, I need to make sure you still have my bracelet. If you still have it, you have a hope in hell of getting your briefcase back.”

  “For God’s sake, Dru.”

  “What’s got you rattled, Colin? You have been a bad boy. Bad boys get punished. And I am very, very a
ngry at you. So now we’re going to do this the way I want to. Honk once if you understand.”

  “It has to be tonight.” The words were so rushed, one on top of each other. He was desperate, no doubt about it.

  Desperate men don’t get to set the time schedule. “You send me a picture that you have my belongings,” I said, before rattling off a gmail.com address Stevie had set up for us, “and then I’ll call you, all right? Not before. Not one goddamned minute before. That’s how this is going to work. Awesome, as the kids say. Oh, and by the way, Colin?”

  “What?” He spat the word out. He was hugely furious. I had to stop myself from giggling.

  “Let’s have ourselves a divorce, shall we?” I dropped the phone in my pocket.

  CHAPTER THREE

  WHEN I WENT back into the Shoppe, Stevie was in the corner looking at the candies. I put my hand on her back and she jumped. She had been in that apartment in Las Vegas for every day we’d lived there. Every single day. No wonder she was so nervous being out among all of these laughing, lightly clothed people.

  I rubbed her back a bit. “Candy after two cupcakes?”

  “I was only looking.”

  My sister cracks me up. I tugged on her thick black braid. “All right, we can buy a few but you have to wait until after our next meal to eat them, yes?”

  She nodded and then a smile burst out. My sister is quite pretty when she smiles. She doesn’t do it nearly often enough.

  She picked out several candy bars and a box of tea biscuits. While I paid for them at the register, Stevie looked through the door into Ye Olde King’s Head Pub. I heard a sharp intake of breath, which inevitably signals an approaching storm of anxiety and fear.

  I had to push the paper bag into her hand before she grabbed it. She kept staring into the pub.

  I followed her line of sight and ended up at two men setting up a darts match in the far corner. The younger man—tall, nicely built, lovely glossy brown hair—was testing out his throw from the toe line. The older man—shorter, with a middle-aged man’s body and a fringe of white hair around the crown of his head—was laughing with a few spectators as he opened his box of darts. Took me a second to recognize them as actors. Well-known enough to have drawn a good mid-afternoon’s crowd.