I decided to wait for him to finish that thought and not offer my own opinions.
“I knew, when I met you. I knew you were dangerous. You didn’t want your photo taken. In this town? Who doesn’t want her photo taken? And then the way you handled Liam and Rachelle. And then the way you handled me. I thought, this is it, I’ve found her.”
Sounded like he was getting romantic. “You’d found who?”
“The person to take care of me.”
The way he said it didn’t fill me with a lot of confidence that he meant “nurture.” It definitely sounded more like he meant “murder.”
I finished my drink and decided to make another one. Or three. On my way over to the bar area, I hit the buttons for the heat lamps to get them started up, and then I left my cocktail glass in the sink. I reached for the iced tea glass. “And you invited me into your house anyhow?”
“Different is always interesting. And you were so…coiled. Most women are like, well, fine, now we have to have sex. You wait like a cobra. It was terrifying.”
“And even with that opinion you thought we would?”
He shrugged. “Everyone does in this town. It’s a way to pass time.”
“Don’t lie. People do it everywhere. They just act like they don’t.”
He laughed. “True enough.”
“You needn’t worry. Your person is safe from me at the moment.”
“After today, I admit I’m hoping it’s safe from you for forever.”
I sat back down with my triple rum and soda and mint garnish. “I may be out of your hair soon enough. One way or the other.”
He rubbed his hand through the band of hair around the back of his head. “What hair I have left.”
“Gary, are you in the habit of bringing home people you’re not especially certain of?”
He puffed in silence. The sound of the smoke expelling from his lungs seemed incredibly loud. That, and the machinery for the pool, buried somewhere off in the darkness.
“My father committed suicide.”
Interesting change of subject. “I wish mine would have. Were you thinking of being like yours and committing suicide, too?” Then it dawned on me that was exactly what Gary had been doing. “You bring home scary women and hope one of them will do it.”
He didn’t argue with me.
“That’s a stupid way to live. You’re rationalizing insanity. You need to take your goddamn pills, Gary.”
“How do you explain how you live? What’s your rationale?”
Dammit, I had already finished my second drink, in a tall iced tea glass. I had to slow down. I put the glass on the fire pit table. “It’s never dull, I’ll tell you that.”
My head flopped against the back of my extremely comfy wing chair, and I thought that with the heat lamps maybe it would be warm enough for me to sleep out here in the outdoor living room, staring out at the Pacific Ocean. “Don’t get involved in murder. It’s a terrible solution for things.”
“Is it?”
“I’ve made a decision. I’m going to avoid murder from now on. I want you to vow you’ll do the same.”
He didn’t say anything.
“What do you want, Gary?”
“From you?”
“No. In your life. Right now.”
“I want to feel something.”
I briefly reconsidered my decision not to have sex with him, and then decided I’d been right the first time. That wasn’t the sort of feeling either of us needed at the moment. And I wasn’t the slightest bit into him, which always portends boring sex, if not outright bad sex. “Tell you what, Gary. If I make it through the next several days alive and not the slightest bit incarcerated, I can make your life very interesting indeed, no sex involved at all. In return, you will stay alive and you will stop bringing home inappropriate girls your mother wouldn’t approve of.”
“Pray tell, how will you make my life interesting?”
“What can I say? I’m a magnet for trouble. You can live vicariously through me.”
“What about your sister?”
My usual reaction to anyone, particularly a man, talking about Stevie flared up. I was drunk and needed to cool down. “She’s fine. Don’t worry about her.”
“She’s not fine. I saw her face today. I wouldn’t be surprised if she threw up, too.”
I had to agree with him there. “That’s why I deal with these things, Gary. I can handle it. She can’t. Let me deal with her. I can deal with you, too. You sit tight for the next couple of days and take your medications.”
“What do you want in return?”
“For what?”
“Let’s say wondering what in the hell you’re going to do next is enough for me. And I stick around to see what fun and excitement you drag to my doorstep. What do you want?”
I thought about a million responses to that, most of them sarcastic and rude, some of them straightforward and complete lies. I was drunk, but I’ve made plenty of bargains while completely toasted on any number of chemicals. Even followed through on some.
“You let us stay here,” I said.
“You’re a cheap date.”
“I play nanny and make sure you’re alive tomorrow, and you let us stay here for a while. Stevie is not doing well at the moment. I have more problems than you know about and I need to figure out what I’m going to do about all of them. Just let us stay here for a while.” I banged my head against the soft leather backing of the chair. “Please.”
We sat like that for quite a while. I don’t know how long.
“What happens when I finally demand you sleep with me?” he said.
“Then maybe you get your wish and I kill you.”
He stubbed his cigar out on the fire pit table. “Sounds fair enough,” he said. “I’m in.”
I wondered if by morning I would remember that Gary asking me to sleep with him was his version of a suicide note.
I made it back to the guesthouse and passed out on the living room sofa.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I WOKE UP at six, hung over and still mildly drunk and anxious to get to Anne’s house.
I needed to know what Anne knew about Penelope and her Uncle Ian Jack.
Too early for that. Time to run. I set out down the hill.
Running on the beach in the early morning was a wonderful experience, much better than running in Vegas in the middle of the night or Firenze at any time of day. The chill of the Pacific Ocean air, the damp of the sand making each footstep that much harder to push off, the lack of sunbathers in my path. That run made me light-headed, I was so giddy.
Which is why I almost missed Detective Gruen standing at the wall separating the pedestrian/bike path from the beach. I stopped to do my mid-run stretches, which allowed me to survey the area: the other runners with fierce concentration or exhaustion on their faces, the homeless sitting on the benches, the coffee drinkers out for a walk and checking out the female runners in their tights. Even in the twilight of the morning, I could make out people’s faces at forty, fifty meters away.
The woman in the shocking pink sprinter suit caught my attention first. For one thing, that much pink was hell on the eyeballs at this hour of the morning. For another thing, it wasn’t keeping her warm enough, because her nipples were clearly outlined by the fabric. When she deliberately bumped into the man leaning on the wall, sipping his coffee, I was embarrassed for her. Touching a man is the clearest way to indicate interest in him, but there’s such a thing as too obvious, which then becomes crass and desperate.
When the man stood up to brush off some of the spilled coffee and showed himself to be Detective Gruen, I forgot all about whatever her intentions might be and began to concentrate on his. I turned as if I meant to do another six-mile lap down the beach. He couldn’t suspect I had recognized him from this distance. I had time to think. And calm myself down.
The likelihood that he happened to select this stretch of Santa Monica Beach at this hour of morning to drink h
is coffee was: nil. He was waiting for me. Or tailing me.
The best way of dealing with a surprise is to deal one in return. So a mile down the beach, I ran up to the pedestrian/bike path, crossed the boulevard, and headed back to the detective’s perch. I came up behind him from the opposite direction he’d seen me go.
“Why, Detective, fancy meeting you here.” I leaned up against the wall next to him. “See anything interesting?”
To his credit, he didn’t startle. He turned his head slowly toward me. “Yup.”
I sniffed the air over his cup of coffee. “Mind telling me where you got that? I’ve gone a good twelve hours without caffeine.”
“I’ll be happy to show you.”
We’d gone about ten feet when I stopped dead and looked at him. “Wait a second. Are you even allowed to talk to me without my lawyer present?”
“The courts haven’t ruled on the subject of getting coffee yet.”
I grinned at him.
He took me to a local hole-in-the-wall coffee place staffed by a tall and lanky teenager named Mike and a purple-haired barista named Mo. I dug out the few crumpled bills I’d stashed in my tights’ inner pocket for a large Americano, no cream and sugar thank you, and the detective and I sat on a concrete planter on the Third Street Promenade.
The coffee was not bad. I looked at Gruen over the edge of my cup. “Tell me, Detective, do you live in Santa Monica?”
“Couldn’t afford it.”
“I thought Santa Monica had rent control.”
He shrugged.
I leaned back against the tree. “I haven’t been here in Los Angeles long, but I’m certain Santa Monica is nowhere near Parker Center, which is where your police division is headquartered. So if it’s not near your house, and not near your work, what brings you down here first thing in the morning?”
He stared right at me. I hadn’t gotten to see his eyes up close. He had wonderful hazel eyes, large and with eyelashes any woman would envy. We stared at each other for three or four years. When I started to grin, he looked away. Ha! I won.
“What can I say? I like the ocean.”
“Tell me, did that woman manage to get your phone number? Offer to take your clothes to the dry cleaner’s for that nasty coffee spill?”
That surprised him. “You saw her?”
“Does that sort of pick-up technique work in this city?”
He laughed. “I told her I was a cop. She moved on.”
It was clear more than one woman had moved on when she’d found out he was a cop.
I, on the other hand, seemed to have something of a death wish. When it came to police officers, I couldn’t stop myself. Everywhere Stevie and I moved to, the poster boys of local law enforcement tempted me into playing with fire.
My first husband had been a cop, as a matter of fact. An honest cop, a rarity amongst his compatriots in that overworked, understaffed rural force. I’d ended up a widow pretty damn fast for a reason. I’ve kept dating them, but I haven’t made the mistake of getting serious with one of these boys again. Or with anyone, but definitely not cops.
I gave Gruen a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. “You must find surveillance taxing if you keep getting interrupted by overeager women. Which I’m sure you do, don’t you?”
He didn’t answer that. He also didn’t deny he was watching me in a professional context. If anything, he seemed embarrassed by both the woman and my flirtations. It was time to take a ninety degree turn in our little chat. Keeping others off-balance is an excellent way to control a conversation. “You’re right. Enough of this foreplay. Let’s get right to why you’re following me.”
He went from self-conscious to all business. “You found Anne da Silva pretty fast. And you sure had some interesting information for us yesterday. I wonder what you’ll get next.”
“I can think lots of ways you can keep an eye on me, Detective. And I’m sure you can think of a few that don’t border on police harassment. Which this is, you know.”
Wow. Was that the wrong thing for me to say. Nothing about his gaze was flirtatious any more. Without moving an inch, his body got rigid and he watched me like a specimen in a jar. He was sizing me up in some way. As he reached into his jacket, I half-expected him to pull out handcuffs or a gun and then read me my rights. Instead, he pulled out a single sheet of paper, unfolded it, and held it up. “I got a lot of questions about you. And every single thing you say or do makes me more curious. So I asked a friend of mine with the feds to run your prints through a couple of databases.”
Did he? That was going to be interesting. My hand started shaking, so I concentrated on steadying the muscles holding my cup. “Can’t imagine what you’d find in any of them. Not to mention use what you’d get out of any of them. Legally.”
He shook his head. “Came up with nothing. Mostly.”
I tensed up even harder. Because if it were a simple case of finding out my real name, he would have handled this whole conversation much differently.
I fought the urge to get up and run as fast as I could, away from him and away from that paper. Six-minute miles, I could make it back to Stevie in twelve, maybe fifteen minutes, tops. We could be gone before anyone arrived.
He smoothed the paper out over his thigh. “Kind of baffling what came back, though. Wanted to ask you about it.” He handed it to me.
I didn’t look down. “We probably need to do this with my lawyer present.”
He shrugged. “Okay. You don’t have to say anything.”
Only then did I look down at the paper. The first thing I noticed was the empty gray box in the upper lefthand corner. Where a photo ought to go, but there was none there. Might be lots of reasons there might not be a photo. Then I glanced at the upper righthand corner, where I expected a name to be. Instead, I made out the words NAME WITHHELD.
Okay, that was interesting. My fingerprints connected to a nameless record.
Even more interesting, underneath the name said DECEASED.
“How long have you been dead?” Detective Gruen asked me. He took the paper from me, looked at it, and then handed it back. “I guess it says right there. You died seven years ago.” He looked me up and down. “Have to say, you look great for a dead woman. All that running keeps you in shape.”
Seven years ago. Which would make it four years after I disappeared.
Holy Zeus in a chariot, Mama and Roberto had wasted no time. Once I was out of the picture, they wanted to make it very hard for me to get back into it.
I concentrated on the flower arrangement in the concrete planter across the way from us. “You know what they say, Detective. Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse. I’m doing my best.”
“You’re not in Witness Protection. You have no record. You’re dead and you have no name. How did you manage that? Who are you?”
Whoever said you can’t go home again had nothing on me. I couldn’t go home, because I didn’t fucking exist anymore. I’d been erased, quietly and officially. No wonder Stevie hadn’t seen many stories online about me in the past few years. What was Stevie going to say when I told her about this? Had she known this already? No, I couldn’t believe she would have seen something like this in the news and not told me.
Gruen studied me like we were in Interrogation Room One. Then he did something I didn’t expect. He smiled. “You didn’t know about this.”
After a minute, I trusted myself enough to put the coffee down before I spilled it all over my lap. “You figured that out all on your own?”
“The badge says Detective.”
Why would this federal database have a record for me that was, essentially, a non-record? It contained no useful information. Anyone running my prints wouldn’t know anything more about me after getting this record than before.
I stood up and dusted myself off. “Lucky you, Detective Gruen. You will undoubtedly be getting a visit from Ed and Fred, your friendly neighborhood feds. Soon. Maybe this morning. What will you say when they ask wher
e you got my fingerprints?”
“I’m going to tell them.”
“I don’t suppose you’d ring me when they showed up, would you?”
He grinned and shook his head. “I don’t suppose I would.” He finished his coffee and crumpled the cup. “You planning on leaving LA?”
“That’s going to depend on Ed and Fred, isn’t it?” I threw my cup at the nearest trash bin: a perfect shot, with a short wave of coffee cresting over the top. “Thanks for the chat, Detective. It’s another work day. Why don’t you find out who killed my husband?”
He tossed his cup, hit it off the rim, and watched it drop into the bin. “So what did you do?”
What the hell. If I was right about that record setting off any number of alarms, my time here was going to be very short, one way or the other. “I haven’t done anything illegal in the city of Los Angeles or any of its environs.”
“You sure about that?”
I shrugged. “The day is young yet.” I gave him my standard flirtatious grin, but I sure wasn’t feeling it. I was wondering why in the hell I’d ever left somewhere safe and homey and loving like Las Vegas to come here. “Let’s talk again soon. I have to run.” Before he said a word, I took off running down the Promenade, turning onto the sidewalk at Wilshire Avenue, heading toward the beach and then the guesthouse and maybe an FBI “Welcome Home!” party. Or worse.
I did not have much time left to find out what Colin had gotten me into.
When this was all over, I was changing my name for the last time, moving to New Zealand, and living out the rest of my life on a sheep farm. Alone.
#
Stevie was putting a tray of little somethings into the oven when I burst through the door into the guesthouse.
“Did you know I’m dead?”
“Again?”
“Legally dead. I’m serious. Gruen ran my fingerprints through the FBI. Or something. According to the federal government, I am deceased. I have been declared dead. I am an ex-parrot.”
I put the paper he had given me on the kitchen counter, and Stevie scanned it. Her brief but sharp intake of breath told me she hadn’t known I’d been declared dead. If my family were like some others, my demise would have been pitched to the celeb magazines as a heart-wrenching story of a family’s loss. But Mama kept things private, and with very few exceptions celebrity magazines don’t go where they’re not wanted. Whenever you see a magazine cover, it’s almost guaranteed at least one PR person was involved in making that happen. No way would the media outlets risk incurring my family’s wrath. Their publishers spent too much time at the same parties on Saint-Tropez as my mother did.
You Know Who I Am (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries Book 2) Page 17