“Hello!” Emily called, from outside the front window.
“Crap!” Sofia muttered, under her breath. She looked guiltily at the yellow smiley-faced clock on the kitchen wall. Mr. Smiley said Emily was two hours early. Her sister was usually late, and Sofia had counted on it this morning. She hadn’t even showered, and wore beat-up clothes under her white painter’s jumpsuit.
Emily wore a red sundress and was, as always, perfectly turned out. When they were kids everyone said Emily looked like a little lady, Sofia like she’d fallen out of a tree, then rolled down a hill and into a duck pond.
Emily waved through the window at Sofia. Sofia waved back.
“Anyone home?” a little girl’s voice asked, right before something that sounded like a sledgehammer pounded on Sofia’s metal front door. It quaked, as if ready to come off its hinges.
Sofia sprinted to rescue it, tripped on the half-full tray she’d left in the middle of the kitchen, and splashed out yellow paint. Good thing she’d put down those newspapers. Too bad about her shoe.
“Now, Violet.” Emily sounded manically cheery. “Leave that.”
Sofia flung open her front door. Her seven-year-old niece held a wooden leg that Sofia could have sworn was usually attached to the table on her front porch. She caught Violet’s arm mid-swing and twisted it out of her hand. The bistro table stood at an accusing angle on its three good legs. The marble top looked ready to slide off.
Sofia summoned up her former child-star training and gave the whole family a bright smile. “It’s great to see you!”
She was being so perky her face hurt. But she meant it. It was always great to see Emily and her kids. She took off her paint-covered shoes and dropped the table leg on the chair seat. She’d have to fix it after the kids left. No point in putting it back on only to have them take it off again. Luckily, it was an IKEA table—easy to take apart and put back together.
Violet gave a shrug in the direction of the listing table with its three legs. “It was loose.”
Her brother, six-year-old Van, hastily stuffed something into his pocket. It looked like a screwdriver, but it couldn’t be. His parents kept all of the tools in their house locked up tight.
“We really appreciate you taking the kids!” Emily beamed up at her husband, Ray. He had on black board shorts and a white T-shirt. They looked as if they were about to head out on their honeymoon, happy and guilty at the same time. “I know we’re early. Is that OK?”
“Of course,” Sofia lied. If they’d come on time, the ceiling would have been done and everything put away. At least, that had been the plan.
“You can always call us if it gets bad,” Ray said. “We can come right back.”
“It’s only for the weekend!” Sofia said. “The kids and I will have some great adventures together. I thought today we’d go—”
Sofia’s phone played the first few bars from the theme of the old TV show Dragnet. Everyone looked at it.
“Sorry, that’s the agency,” she said, pulling the phone out of the pocket of her paint-splattered overalls.
Chapter 2
The agency was Maloney Investigations. Detective work involved a lot of drudgery sometimes, but she loved it, except when they called her on weekends. Her boss, Brendan Maloney, had been kind enough to take her on as a trainee private investigator when she’d decided to quit acting and get a real job. She’d met him on the set when he worked as a consultant to her TV show, and he’d taken her under his wing. She sometimes wondered if she’d be a zookeeper now if he’d been consulting on that.
“I’ll just be a minute,” Sofia said to the two kids.
She wanted to go inside and take the call in privacy, but she didn’t dare turn her back on Violet and Van. They’d dismantle her home in five minutes if she let down her guard. “Sofia here.”
“I know you were supposed to be off this weekend, but something’s come up. You’re needed in the office for a meeting.” Aidan Maloney, son of the agency’s owner, and Sofia’s sometime friend, sometime arch-nemesis. “Urgent business. Only you will do.”
“I’ll call you back in exactly one minute,” Sofia told him. She smiled at her sister. “Or maybe three minutes. But soon.”
She disconnected and looked at her sister and brother-in-law. They’d been planning this trip for months. Usually Sofia and Emily’s mother and stepfather watched the kids, but they were out of town on a cruise. If Sofia didn’t come through, Emily and Ray would have to cancel their plans.
“Is everything OK?” Emily bit her lower lip, and Ray squeezed her against his side. They were so darn cute together.
“It’s just a meeting.” Sofia took a deep breath of bracing sea air. She could do this. “I can still take the kids. Don’t worry.”
Ray jumped forward as if he’d been hit by a cattle prod. “Great!” he almost shouted. In less than a second, he had dumped two backpacks on the front porch and slapped a set of car keys into Sofia’s hand. “As long as you’re sure.”
Sofia was feeling a little dazed. “Yup.”
Ray hugged Violet and frisked Van, producing a screwdriver the child had hidden in his front pocket. That explained the table leg.
“Is this yours?” he asked Sofia.
She shook her head. Her stepfather had bought her a toolset when she’d moved into the trailer. All her tools had pink handles, even the drill. Van’s screwdriver was black.
“I found it in the parking lot,” Van said. “Just sitting there.”
Sofia tried to imagine who would have left a brand new Craftsman screwdriver in the parking lot. Nobody in Nirvana Cove would ever work on their car in the lot. The other residents would probably barbecue them if they did.
“I’ll put the screwdriver back there,” said Ray, “when we come to get you on Sunday night.”
Emily pulled each kid into a long hug and kissed the top of their heads. Violet squirmed away, but Van stood still and rolled his eyes, like only a six-year-old boy could.
“Remember, you can’t let Van have any tools.” Emily shook the screwdriver at him. “And they both had baths this morning and breakfast, so you don’t need to worry about that. Bedtime is nine, since it’s a weekend. I packed some books in their backpacks with the clothes.”
Sofia looked at the backpacks. Violet’s was pink and, rather incongruously, had a princess on the front. Van’s was orange and looked like a giant Lego brick.
“We’ll be fine,” Sofia said. “I bought a new Lego airport set for Van, and I got a bootleg copy of The Ultimate Fighting Challenge 2010 for Violet. It’s from back before they added those safety rules.”
“Cool!” the kids chorused in unison.
“You bet!” She was Cool Auntie Sofia, after all. She had a reputation to maintain.
Emily’s brow creased in worry. “I know you’ll be fine, but—”
“Time to go, honey.” Ray kissed Violet’s cheek and patted Van’s head. “Sofia’s a brave little soldier. She’ll get through. We’ve got places to go, things to do.”
Emily gave Ray a smile Sofia could only describe as lascivious. She was kinda shocked her sister had done that next to the kids, even if they were facing away from her.
“One more thing,” Emily said. “Absolutely no sugar. It makes them totally hyper. You remember when we watched that movie Gremlins and they fed the creatures after midnight? It’s like that, only worse.”
Holy crap, thought Sofia. More hyper? Only the Tasmanian Devil was more hyper than those two. “No sugar. I promise.”
Ray took Emily’s hand, and they practically sprinted back up the path toward the parking lot. They didn’t get enough time alone together, those two.
“Want me to show you my new move?” Violet asked. “I’m calling it the Nutcracker!”
Van shifted away from her and held both hands in front of his crotch. Sofia had a pretty good idea what the move might entail.
“Maybe later,” she said. “I picked up some fresh cherries from a road stand yesterday
. How about you guys have a snack while I clean up the painting stuff?”
Sofia’s pseudo-pet, a seagull named Fred, came in for a landing on her porch. He wanted his breakfast. Sofia usually left bread or lunchmeat out for him, and he stopped by whenever he saw her outside. He banked hard to the right when he spotted the kids, flapped his wings a couple of times and headed back to the beach. Fred had dealt with Van and Violet before.
Sofia grabbed each kid in a hug. Sure, they were active, but she adored them. Nothing wrong with knowing who you were and what you wanted. Half of Los Angeles would give their eyeteeth for that kind of certainty. She picked up their backpacks, noting that Van’s seemed ominously heavy, and led them into the house.
On cue, her phone rang. Dragnet again. Aidan again.
“I said I’d call right back,” she snapped.
“I didn’t get that message.” It was Brendan, Aidan’s father and Sofia’s boss. “Did I catch you at a bad time?”
Sofia looked at the open paint can in the kitchen, and the two kids staring up at her. “Not a bad time. Just gimme one second, Brendan.”
She plonked the cherries on the coffee table and muted the phone. “Please stay on the couch. Eat the cherries. Don’t swallow the pits.”
The kids nodded obediently, which made her suspicious. She went back to the phone. “Here I am.”
“I know you were supposed to have this weekend off, and I apologize,” Brendan sounded genuinely remorseful, “but a case has come up that I think you’d be perfect for.”
Please don’t let it be a honey-trap. Please don’t let it be a honey-trap.
The last honey trap had gone horribly wrong. She’d dressed in her best business slutty to see if she could pick up a client’s husband because his wife had hired them to see if he was being unfaithful. The guy hadn’t been interested, and he’d ended up dead not long after. Please not a honey-trap. “What kind of case?”
She pounded the top back onto the paint can with one of her pink screwdrivers. She looked around for a place to hide it from Van, but didn’t see one. Her brother-in-law had a giant toolbox with a lock. She needed to get a smaller version of that. She put the screwdriver back into the pink toolbox and slid the whole thing into the oven. Van probably wouldn’t look in there for it.
“The client is in the entertainment industry, and I thought you might be able to put her at ease,” Brendan said. “You’re good that way.”
Not a honey-trap! Just a simple meeting. How bad could that be? “Happy to help.”
“Her brother was the singer Craig Williams.”
“I see.” Sofia took everything out of Van’s backpack. Socks, superhero underwear, pajamas with pictures of tools on them—the only tools he was allowed to have—T-shirt, pants, and books. Nothing that could be used to take apart the television.
“As you probably know, Craig Williams was found dead in his apartment with a needle in his vein.”
Sofia stuffed Van’s clothes in the backpack. “Wasn’t he a heroin addict?”
“Yes, he was.”
Nobody had been surprised by his death, and police had ruled it an accidental overdose. But Brendan knew all that, so there must be something more than met the eye. “But it wasn’t an accidental overdose?”
“It’s open right now. What I’d like is for you to come in for the meeting with Mr. Williams’s sister. We’ll see where it goes from there.”
She wanted to say, ‘not this weekend,’ but she knew one of the reasons Brendan had brought her into the agency was because of her industry connections and understanding of how ‘the town,’ as people in the entertainment industry referred to it, worked. “I have Emily’s kids this weekend. She and Ray needed a break.”
“Bring them along,” said Brendan. “Aidan can watch them while we have our meeting.”
The thought of saddling Aidan with Violet and Van made the whole thing worthwhile. “I’ll be there in a half hour.” The sound of glass smashing came to her from the living room. “I gotta go.”
“A cherry pit went through the window,” Van said. “Sorry, Aunt Sofia.”
“We were having a spit fight,” Violet said, pulling a pit from her mouth, and holding it up for Sofia to inspect. “With the right technique, you can really get a lot of velocity on these little suckers. You want me to show you?”
Sofia didn’t have time to cross-examine them, but she didn’t see how they could have broken the window with a cherry pit. She peeled off her overalls. “Maybe later. Hey, who wants to go to a real live detective agency?”
“Me!” shouted Violet.
“Me, too!” shouted Van.
She left the paint in the tray. She’d heard you were supposed to let it dry, then peel it off and throw it away. She balled up the wet newspapers and tossed them in a giant black trash bag. The rest of the newspapers she left alone. Maybe she could get Violet and Van to help her paint the ceiling later.
She stomped on a cardboard box to flatten it, then had Violet and Van hold it while she stuck it over the broken window with the blue masking tape she’d been using for the painting. She’d get the glass fixed later, maybe after the kids fell asleep. Assuming they ever slept. They had a nine o’clock bedtime, but she just knew they’d pop up like jack-in-the-boxes after she’d tucked them in.
A few minutes later, Sofia had changed into some decent clothes and maneuvered the kids to the parking lot without breaking anything else. She lugged her heavy pink toolbox because she’d decided that the oven wasn’t secure enough, and the only safe place she could think of was the trunk of her car. After the window, she was taking no chances. She’d even double-checked that she’d set the alarm on the trailer. Without a window there, it would be easy to break in.
“I see two Ferraris and a Lambo!” Van’s eyes were big and round.
“A Lambo?” Sofia asked.
“A Lam-borgh-ini,” Van spoke slowly, as if he were talking to someone who was deaf, not too bright, or possibly both.
One of the park’s idiosyncrasies was that residents couldn’t drive to their homes but instead had to walk or take golf buggies to them, leaving the parking lot littered with expensive cars.
“Can I drive that?” Violet pointed to a blue buggy with a fish painted on the side and a surf board bungeed to the top.
“Maybe we can ride in one later,” Sofia said. “But I have to drive it. California state law.”
She didn’t know the law on driving golf buggies on private property, but she didn’t want to give Violet control of a moving battering ram.
Van had already reached Sofia’s car, a red Tesla Roadster. Sofia looked at it longingly, all plugged into its charger and ready to go. She loved that car. But it had only two seats, so it was going to have to stay where it was. She opened the trunk and put in the toolbox, safe from Van’s prying hands. The smell of leather drifted out.
“How are we going to fit?” Violet asked, eyeing the Roadster.
“I could ride on the roof,” Van volunteered.
“Me too!” screamed Violet.
“We’re taking your mom’s car.” Sofia pointed to her sister’s forest-green minivan. She hoped Ray had given her the right set of keys on the porch. He had to have because he was tooling up the coast in his lime-colored Mustang with his beautiful wife. They probably had the top down and the breeze in their hair. They’d earned it.
She beeped the minivan open. A streak of fresh bird poop ran down the windshield. She couldn’t help wondering if Fred was taking revenge. He could be jealous when it came to having Sofia’s full attention, and she didn’t put anything past him.
She hustled the kids into their car seats and buckled them in. So far, so good.
Her phone rang again. Dragnet. She really had to find another ringtone.
“Sorry, Brendan,” she said. “I’m on my way.”
“It’s Aidan. I thought I’d fill you in on some details before you got here.”
Sofia ducked her head to look inside the minivan. Violet
and Van were sitting quietly in their seats. Violet gave her a dimply smile, which made Sofia worry.
“This is a good time,” she lied.
“Three weeks ago Craig Williams was found dead in his apartment of an apparent overdose. There was a needle in his arm, heroin in his bloodstream. It looked pretty open and shut. It was all over the news. You probably heard about it.”
“I did.” She hadn’t envied Craig the pressures he must have faced as a superstar. “Brendan already told me.”
“Did he tell you that Craig had recently completed drug rehab and been declared clean? He passed a drug test when he left the center. It looked as if he might have beaten his addiction.”
“Sometimes it goes like that.” She’d lost a good friend, a teenaged actress on Half Pint Detective, to drugs. Everyone had thought Zoe was doing better, until her body turned up in a 7-Eleven bathroom. After that, the air had gone out of the show. Sofia had grieved, and it had shown on screen. She still thought about Zoe sometimes. By now she would have been twenty-seven, except that she would never be twenty-seven.
Sofia glanced into the minivan. Still nothing suspicious. Which was suspicious.
“His sister, Jenna Williams, is our client,” Aidan said. “She’s the only family member he was in contact with, and she thinks his death wasn’t an accident.”
This sounded like a terrible case to take on. Brendan was usually more careful about picking his clients. “What if it was?”
“Then we’ll have to—”
“If you hold my foot, I can take off the rear-view mirror,” piped a little voice from inside the minivan.
“Don’t touch the mirror!” She yanked open Van’s door and grabbed his wrist. Her phone clattered to the asphalt. She didn’t let go of Van as she bent to pick up her phone.
“—so you can see why there’s doubt,” Aidan was saying.
“Sure,” Sofia said into the phone. “I’ll see you in a minute.”
She ran around to the driver’s side and slipped behind the wheel. The minivan smelled like Hawaiian Punch. Violet and Van flashed innocent-little-angel smiles.
A is for Actress (Malibu Mystery Book 1) Page 24