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

by Diane Patterson

  The briefcase I’d taken out of Colin’s apartment was lying on the ground by the coffee table, reminding me I had called Nathaniel for a reason. “Believe it or not, I can top your news,” I said. “I don’t want to talk to the police yet. And I don’t think you’re going to want me to talk to them after I tell you about this.”

  “That you couldn’t tell me over the phone?”

  “Yes.”

  Nathaniel picked up a pen and started clicking it. Click-click. Click-click. I wanted to rip it out of his hands and throw it across the room. Click-click.

  “Tell me hypothetically.” He gave me a thousand-mile stare, looking through me, rather than at me.

  “This is a real problem.”

  “Give me the hypothetical version first.”

  Ah. I got it. If he knew about whatever I was going to tell him, then he had to do something about that information. If it were only a story, then he and I were having a simple chat and no one needed to do anything.

  “Hypothetically speaking…Monday afternoon I arrived in Los Angeles and went to Colin’s apartment. He wasn’t there. I found a briefcase. That had money in it.”

  “How much money?” he asked.

  “About fifty thousand. More or less.”

  Nathaniel closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose.

  I swung the briefcase up onto the sofa between us and opened it. “There was a false bottom.” I showed him how it worked. Then I snapped the case shut and pushed it over to him.

  He swore under his breath. “Any idea what this money’s from?” he asked.

  “None. I swear. The bills are non-sequential, though.”

  “This isn’t good.”

  “What if there were something else?” I said. “More than likely related to his murder?”

  Nathaniel tapped that damned annoying pen against the coffee table in a slow, irregular beat. He shrugged. “In this hypothetical situation, are you certain this evidence is important?”

  “Ninety-nine percent sure.” He glared at me, but I’ve been glared at by better. “How do I know? I’m not the one who did it. For the sake of this scenario, let’s say it is.”

  He sighed. “What sort of evidence are you wondering about?”

  “What if Colin had some photographs, let’s say, of a famous or semi-famous young actress in compromising positions?”

  Nathaniel looked unperturbed by the idea. “Then she gets her own TV show on FOX.”

  “What if they were taken when she was about thirteen years old?”

  That earned a few taps of the pen against the table and a thoughtful expression on his face. “That’s bad.”

  “What’s worse is who is—who might possibly be in the pictures with her.”

  He clicked the pen a few more times. I wondered how he’d react if I grabbed the pen out of his hand. He’d look surprised, momentarily taken aback, and then he’d playfully try to swipe it out of my hand and I’d pull away, smiling devilishly, of course, and he’d come over to take it from me, and he’d throw it over his shoulder and say, “To hell with the pen” and then—

  “How would Colin have them?” He leaned back on the sofa.

  It took me a second to snap out of my on-the-coffee-table fantasy to pay attention to what he was saying. Clearly I hadn’t gotten enough sleep. “No idea yet.”

  He sat up straight. “Tell me you haven’t been doing a little searching on your own.”

  I said nothing.

  “You haven’t, have you?”

  “You told me not to tell you.”

  “Stay out of it. Let the police chase down what’s going on. Jesus, interfering in an investigation will buy you so much trouble, you have no idea. Where are these pictures? Are they in here?”

  That’s when I realized: I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t hand the pictures over. I knew I would have to, eventually. I didn’t want them anywhere near me, not just because they depicted a crime and a reputation-destroying crime at that, but because they had the stench of murder around them.

  But once they were out of my hands, Zeus only knew where they’d end up.

  And Penelope would get violated again.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know where they are.”

  His brown eyes stared right at me.

  “The actress in question thinks I have them. She thinks Colin had them. She’s very eager to get these photos back. She thinks I might have them, because…” I stood up and started to walk around, trying to work this out. “Penelope was at Colin’s the night he died. He gives her the photos…but he must not have, because the next day she comes to me looking for them.”

  “He gave her fakes?”

  I nodded. “He gives her photos, she tells him he’s fucked, he’s on the hook for blackmail, he calls me…and the next thing you know he’s dead. The real photos can’t be in Colin’s apartment, because the police would have found them. I mean, I assume they would. She contacts me, offers me fifty thousand to give them up.”

  “If you don’t have these photos, how do you know what’s on them?”

  I couldn’t think of a reasonable explanation for that. “Let’s call it a wild psychic hunch. Hypothetically.”

  Nathaniel shook his head. He ran his long, slender fingers through his blonde hair before lacing them together behind his head. “In this hypothetical situation, here’s the problem. You have a briefcase full of money. That’s probably evidence of a crime, but we don’t know whether it is or not. You have this evidence. You say you got it from Colin before he was murdered, which might be true, might not. Everything else is conjecture. Where he got it, why he got it, who wants it, what anybody has done about it. Trust me, no one is going to admit to a goddamn thing, because we’ve already got you and Colin involved. Guess what? That’s conspiracy.”

  “Conspiracy to do what?”

  “Blackmail? What’s the first thing anyone says when they’re asked how you felt about him?” He waited for me to say something. “He ditched you in Vegas and he owed you money.”

  “If you’re going to put it that way.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, I’m going to put it that way.”

  “Penelope Gurevich—”

  “The one in the supposed pictures?”

  I nodded. “She had a much better reason for killing my husband. Is she a suspect?”

  “The cops are not happy with this case. They’re afraid it’s going to blow up in their face, like a few other high-profile ones have. You might have heard about one or two of them. If what you’re telling me is true…”

  “It is.”

  “How did Colin get these photos to begin with?”

  I held my hands up. “I have no idea. Zero.”

  “In case you’re interested, something like these pictures you described would be considered a reasonable motive for murder.” He ran his hands through his dirty blonde hair. “I have to give the police the briefcase and the money. Do not say a goddamn word about those photographs unless you have them and you’re prepared to say how you got them and when you got them. They’re going to have lots of questions for you. You’re not going to answer them. You don’t say a word to them unless I say you can, do you understand me?”

  I felt a shiver run through me. “I understand.”

  He tapped the envelope with his pen. “Give me everything. Everything you took out of his apartment.”

  I got him the briefcase and the money. He shook his head and put the plastic bag of money into Colin’s briefcase, and then snapped both briefcases shut. “I’ll set up an interview. I’ll call you as soon as I hear anything.”

  “My schedule is open.”

  As it turned out, Nathaniel didn’t have to go to the cops. When Nathaniel went out to the car to put the cases in the trunk, Gruen and Vilar were walking up the driveway, followed by a couple of uniforms. The detectives showed him the search warrant they’d brought.

  I hoped to whatever deity might be watching over me—Zeus or whoever—their search warrant did
n’t cover the interior of the cabana by the pool.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  NATHANIEL TOOK HIS sweet time reading over the search warrant. I had the impression that cops as a general rule didn’t wait for the searchee to figure out the warrant was good—they would start searching and you could complain about it later. But with Nathaniel, they waited. Nathaniel was a good attorney to have in my corner.

  Made me very happy to have him on my side.

  Made me resent Roberto knowing I’d need him.

  While he read it, I said, “Can I go upstairs and talk to my sister?”

  “Who?” He then quickly held up his hand, signaling he didn’t want to know. “Yes. Does she have a lawyer?” Before I answered, he’d whipped out his cell phone. I hoped he was calling someone very expensive. And knew who to charge it to.

  This had been a very bad day for Stevie. And now a house full of cops? Fuck. I ran upstairs and found her in the smaller bedroom, completely focused on her laptop. She hadn’t even heard the cops arrive. I told her to grab the computer and come with me.

  Vilar and Gruen stood near the front door. “May I ask what your name is?” Detective Vilar said.

  “My sister never even met Colin Abbott,” I told him. “She’s going to go sit outside and wait for me there.”

  “Not with that, she’s not,” Gruen said, pointing to the computer.

  Nathaniel held up the search warrant. “You can look for anything from the past year, solely related to Drusilla’s marriage to Colin Abbott. And nothing else. Is that computer yours?” he asked me.

  “I don’t even know how to turn it on,” I answered, completely truthfully.

  “Get another warrant.” He looked at me. “What do you have that pertains to you and Colin?”

  I wasn’t big on relationship souvenirs. I drew a blank.

  Nathaniel pulled me into the corner of the living room. “Have you ever been through a house search before?”

  I considered replying, “There’s very little I haven’t done before,” but this wasn’t the time. “No. I assume they’re going to want to talk to me, too?” He nodded. “I’ve never had to talk to the police for something like this.”

  Mostly because I’d always managed to be elsewhere for something like this.

  Also not something to mention at the moment.

  “This is how it goes. They ask a question, you look at me. I either nod or I say you’re not going to answer that. You don’t say a damned thing without my say-so. Can you do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t believe anything they say. Cops can lie their asses off anywhere except under oath, and, frankly, they do it plenty then, too. Do not react to anything they pull out, because that’s what they want, a reaction. Do you understand?”

  I glared at him. “Yes. Understood.”

  He turned to look at me, his gaze focused on me. He had scary, intense eyes, dark brown under blonde eyebrows. The look was so intense I was glad I was on his side of the table. “You are number one on their hit parade. You answer wrong, you go home with them. Can you do this?”

  I cracked a half-smile. “If I answer right, do I get to go home with you?”

  Not so much as an eyebrow rose in response. He kept staring at me with those dark eyes. It was unnerving and I blinked first. I nodded.

  “Get serious. And get focused,” he said. He opened the door.

  The uniformed cops, gloves on, started searching the kitchen. People often hide things in the kitchen—in the freezer, in the rubbish bin—in the mistaken belief that no one else in history has ever thought of hiding things in those places. One of them found our fireproof security box out of the hall closet. He brought it over to Gruen.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “It’s where we keep important papers,” I told him.

  “Open it.”

  “Do I have to?” I asked my lawyer.

  “Let me look through it. If there’s anything in there that relates to Colin Abbott, I’ll remove it.” Gruen started to object, but Nathaniel kept right on talking. “You’re not going on a fishing expedition. Your warrant covers Mr. and Mrs. Abbott and that’s it.”

  We took the box into the kitchen, because the uniforms had already left, and stood at the counter. I opened the box. Right on the top were five passports. For different nationalities. And different names. All of which had pictures of me in them at various ages over the past eleven years. “What the hell?” he muttered, as he flipped through them.

  “You want me to explain?”

  “No,” he said. “These names—who picked them? A fourteen-year-old?”

  Now, that wasn’t fair. Some of them I picked when I was fifteen. If I had my druthers, I wouldn’t be stuck right now with a moniker like Drusilla Thorne, but that was the name in the box in Chicago, and you dance with the one that you got. “Stevie’s passport is in here, too.”

  “How many does she have?”

  I pulled the red jacketed passport out. “Just the one. And I’d honestly prefer they not see it. She’ll answer to Stevie Thorne.”

  Nathaniel glanced inside: the name meant nothing to him, although with a relatively easy web search and some guesses it wouldn’t be hard to figure out who Stevie was.

  He scanned through the rest of the papers: visas, birth certificates, and a few pictures of Stevie’s mother. One paper was written in Hungarian. My first marriage certificate. I glanced at the date: it had been ten years.

  He removed the only two papers in the box that might have any bearing on Colin’s murder: my marriage certificate, and the naturalization form Colin had asked me to fill out. He’d never asked for it back. Now I knew why.

  “We need to give them the briefcase,” Nathaniel said.

  “Do we?” I asked.

  “Yes.” He walked over to Gruen with the papers from the box. “Marriage certificate and proof that my client thought Colin Abbott needed a green card.” Then he headed out the door, probably going to his car.

  Gruen glanced at it before handing it back to me. “How long did you know Abbott before you married him?”

  Couldn’t be that hard for him to find out. “Two weeks,” I said.

  “You came to Los Angeles on Monday. Why?”

  I said nothing, smiling placidly, until Nathaniel returned, Colin’s briefcase in hand. Gruen repeated his question. Nathaniel nodded and pinched his fingers together. Keep it short. Got it. “I came to talk to my husband. He wasn’t there. I did go into his apartment—”

  “How?” Gruen asked.

  “For the purposes of this conversation, the door was open,” Nathaniel said. “She was married to the occupant.”

  “I found this briefcase. There was money and his passport in it. I wanted to talk to Colin about a divorce without him doing a runner on me again. I took the briefcase. Monday night I was going to give it back.”

  “Do you have any idea where this money might have come from?”

  I shook my head. “I haven’t any idea.”

  “Your husband paid you to marry him, didn’t he?”

  Nathaniel cut in. “Whatever arrangement my client might have had—”

  Gruen pulled a sheet of paper out of his jacket. “How much money did he pay you?”

  “Ten thousand,” I said.

  Gruen nodded. “Where did he get the money?” he asked.

  “His piggy bank?” I shrugged. “I have no idea, Detective.”

  “You hadn’t seen your husband in the past two months?” Detective Vilar asked.

  I shook my head.

  “You might be interested to learn where your husband did get the money he paid you.” Gruen took out a couple of papers.

  He handed one to Nathaniel, who scanned it without reaction before handing it to me. “This is an affidavit from Penelope saying she paid Colin Abbott fifty thousand dollars on July twenty-second.” He handed another paper to Nathaniel. “Same day, he deposits fifteen thousand into his bank account. He paid you ten, you said? T
he day you got married. What day was that?”

  His lips curled in a way that made me think of woodcuts depicting the Inquisition. He looked a hell of lot less attractive like that, for which I was utterly thankful: guys who are hot to do me violence turn off my libido, and I did not need to be attracted to a homicide detective.

  When Nathaniel nodded, I said, “July twenty-third.”

  Colin got fifty thousand in July. Between the fifteen he put in his own bank and the ten he paid me, that accounted for half. What had he done with the other half?

  “Penelope says that in January of this year, she paid him another fifty thousand dollars.”

  And then she paid him more money Monday night. And offered to pay me even more.

  “What did you do with the money?” Gruen asked.

  Nathaniel held up a hand, silently warning me not to say a goddamn thing. “Are you arresting my client today? No? This interview’s over. The next time you talk to her, have an arrest warrant.”

  “We will.” Gruen said that, of course. Staring at me. I stared at him right back. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, either. I was going to have to go out and get laid. And fast, before I ended up in the women’s penitentiary.

  “Is your contact information up to date?” Vilar asked in that oh-so-mild voice.

  I nodded. “By the way, Detective Gruen?”

  He stopped in the doorway and looked back at me.

  “If it turns out that cash from the briefcase isn’t from a crime, do I inherit it?”

  He stared at me for a second. Then he left without a word.

  Nathaniel waited until the sound of the door closing had dissipated.

  He gathered his notes and made ready to leave. At the door, he stopped. “You can expect to be arrested in the next day or so. I’d think about taking a plea. If they can’t make the murder charge work, they’re working on a blackmail angle. Which is a hell of a good motive.”

  “I should tell you right now I am not pleading anything except Not Guilty.”

  Then he turned and left. Story of my life.

  Twenty-four hours. Well, one way or another it would be over soon.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN