C is for Coochy Coo (Malibu Mystery Book 3)

by Sean Black

  Brendan nodded slowly. “Sometimes things you thought you were okay with have a funny habit of resurfacing.”

  “If they do, I’ll tell you. But I’ll be fine. If acting taught me one thing, it was the importance of keeping my personal and work life separate.”

  Even as she said it, she wasn’t entirely convinced. The truth was complicated. Ever since she had met Daniel and been told they had to find his father, she had thought about her own situation. It would have been strange if she hadn’t. But she hadn’t been lying to Brendan when she’d told him she thought she could separate the two things. If they were going to find Daniel’s father, she would have to put any personal feelings to one side.

  She could do that.

  Sure she could.

  CHAPTER 16

  A idan was hunched over his desk, complete with its three monitors, fingers tapping at his ergonomic keyboard. Sofia watched him work the public databases, trying to gather information on the names Candice had provided. He took off his headphones, and glanced over his shoulder at her. “What’s up?” he asked.

  “I spoke to your dad. He didn’t have a fling with Candice. She was one of his CIs. Just thought I’d let you know.”

  Aidan gave a little nod of relief. “Hey, I’m sorry I tried to kick you out of the car on Wilshire.”

  “Is that an apology?” said Sofia. Aidan wasn’t big on admitting he was wrong.

  “It included the word ‘sorry’ so what do you think?”

  That was more like the Aidan she knew and had grown to tolerate. “Shall we just forget today happened?”

  “Sounds like a plan,” said Aidan.

  To be fair to both Aidan and Brendan, one of their good qualities was that they rarely held a grudge. They could get angry and blow up, but once it was done it was done.

  “So how’s the search going?” Sofia asked.

  They had split the list of names into two, with Aidan, who was way more experienced at locating people, taking the majority. Whatever his failings as a human being, he was really good at stuff like that.

  “You want the good news or the bad?” said Aidan.

  “Good,” said Sofia, figuring it might help maintain the new spirit of reconciliation and positivity in the office.

  Aidan ran his finger down the list on his desk. “At least one guy is dead so we can put a line through his name.”

  “How is that good news? If he was the father, that means he can’t help Daniel even if he was a match. Unless he died today and we can get his kidney on ice.”

  “Oh, yeah, I guess that isn’t good news,” said Aidan. “He’s been dead for a while. Suspected cocaine overdose seven years ago.”

  Wow, thought Sofia. Candice really had moved with a fast crowd. Despite what everyone imagined about Hollywood, drug use among people in the business wasn’t nearly as prevalent as the outside world assumed. At least, it wasn’t among people who were being paid to act or direct. Apart from anything else, it was close to impossible to insure an actor on a TV show or a movie if they were using drugs.

  “So what’s the bad news?”

  “Well,” said Aidan, “as far as I can tell, two have moved out of state. One’s in Europe and the other’s in Boston, which is going to make getting that DNA sample a lot harder, unless they’re really, really cooperative and eager to help.”

  “So how many do we have contact details for now?”

  “Four,” said Aidan.

  “And I have two out of my three. That’s half of all the names. I guess we at least have enough to start. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Do you want me to start calling them?” Sofia asked.

  Aidan unhooked his headphones from around his neck and tossed them onto his desk. “Are you nuts? We don’t call them.”

  “Why not?”

  Aidan sighed. Sofia was sure she was about to be subjected to what was now called ‘mansplaining’ but used to be called simply ‘being patronized’.

  “You really don’t understand very much about men, do you?” said Aidan.

  “Just as well I have one here to set my pretty head straight, then, isn’t it?”

  Aidan bulldozed right past her sarcasm. “Listen, we call a guy and tell him he may have a long-lost son. What’s the first thing that’ll go through his mind?”

  “Curiosity?” She knew that was probably the wrong answer, but she didn’t know the right one.

  “I’ll tell you what. He’s going to pick up his calculator and start figuring out how much thirteen years of child support is going to be. Then he’ll lawyer up, and do his damnedest to make sure we can’t contact him again, never mind get a DNA test to try to prove paternity. No, we need the element of surprise with these guys. And that means doing this face to face.”

  What Aidan was saying made sense. He clearly had much more insight into the devious mind of the typical Californian male than Sofia did. And maybe a degree of his cynicism was what they needed if they were going to help Daniel find his dad, and maybe get a new kidney out of it. Perhaps they could even do a deal in which Candice waived child-support payments in return for medical assistance. Kind of a cash-for-kidney arrangement. It would be a weird way to resolve things but, hey, they were in the world capital of weird. A couple of months back Sofia had actually driven past a place advertising drive-thru colonic irrigation. It didn’t get weirder than that. Until it did.

  “When do we start?” Sofia said.

  “Tomorrow. Meet here first.”

  * * *

  ON THE SHORT DRIVE HOME, Sofia found her mind wandering to her own biological father. She tried not to think about him, but it was impossible not to with this case. Brendan had been right. It did hit close to home.

  She wondered if he had walked out on her mom, Emily and herself because he wasn’t prepared to make the sacrifices to support them. After all he and Sofia’s mom had been young when they’d met. Maybe once he’d had a family he’d had second thoughts. But what kind of a man walked out on his kids like that? Her mom must have struggled to raise two little girls all by herself.

  Apart from making day-to-day life hard, there was the emotional damage. Sofia had been too young to remember what had happened, but it still stung to know that her father hadn’t wanted to stick around to see her grow up.

  Probably the worst part, at least until her mom had met her stepfather, was all the little things she and Emily had missed out on. Like having a dad to teach her how to throw a baseball, or play soccer. Her mom had covered most of that stuff, but it wasn’t quite the same. When Sofia had gone to a sleepover at a friend’s house and they had a mom and a dad, it had hurt, although single-parent families were common. She’d felt like she was missing out, that part of her was absent. And it was. That was what hurt the most: the feeling that she was somehow incomplete.

  But now, in helping Daniel, she could make him complete. Quite literally, if his father turned out to be a match, and was prepared to make it up to him.

  As she drove down Pacific Coast Highway to her little blue trailer in Nirvana Cove, the thought made her smile. This was why she had given up an acting career many people would have killed for: so that she could help people who really needed help. To make a difference. To do something real. To save a life.

  Even after a fairly disastrous start to the day, she had to admit it was a great feeling.

  CHAPTER 17

  O n evenings like this one Nirvana Cove, the ultra-upmarket trailer park in northern Malibu where Sofia owned a double-wide mobile home, was well named. An amber-orange sun was getting set to sink into the Pacific as she pulled the Tesla into a parking spot in the upper-level lot (no cars allowed on the rest of the property). She grabbed her bag from the front seat, plugged the Roadster into a charging unit, and walked down the path toward her trailer, enjoying the cooling breeze and the view of the ocean as the sun set.

  Fred the seagull was waiting for her. He let out a loud squawk as she got to the front porch, dove do
wn, and settled himself on the handrail. He tilted his head to look at her.

  “Okay, okay,” said Sofia. “Dinner’s coming right up.”

  “And what about me, Sofes?”

  She turned to see Gray Cole standing on the path, arms folded, head cocked inquiringly.

  “Shit! Sorry! I forgot I was supposed to be making you dinner. It totally slipped my mind.”

  Gray was her neighbor, and since she’d moved in, he’d become possibly her closest friend and confidant. He also happened to be a genuine, honest-to-goodness A-list movie star, and all-round heartthrob. He bestowed on her the dazzling, twinkly-eyed gaze beloved of magazine editors, and gave her that little-bit-naughty smile that had moistened a million movie-theater seats. “Don’t worry about making anything. You look like you’ve had a long day. Should I call Nobu and order us some takeout?”

  Nobu was the famous, and famously expensive, Japanese restaurant.

  “Gray, I hate to burst your bubble, but Nobu doesn’t have a takeout service.”

  “They don’t?” said Gray, puzzled. “Are you sure about that? I order from them all the time. They even send my favorite waiter to set the table.” He flashed his wicked smile, the one the general public didn’t get to see. “Sometimes he stays over. I don’t even have to tip him. Or maybe that is the tip.”

  “You’re bad,” Sofia chided him. Fred the seagull let out another squawk, though Sofia suspected it was more a reminder that he still hadn’t been fed, rather than agreement that Gray was a bad boy.

  Like a lot of A-listers in LA, Gray lived by a different set of rules. What he wanted, he usually got. The downside was that, in his case, he lived a double life. To the public at large he was a serial womanizing vagabond, who had dated and dumped some of the world’s most attractive women. In reality he was a serial womanizing vagabond who had dated and dumped some of the world’s most attractive gay men. He kept telling Sofia that one day he was going to ‘stop living a lie’, find himself a nice boy, and settle down. Sofia wasn’t so sure. Although keeping his private life private was a strain, Sofia suspected that, at least on some level, Gray enjoyed the secrecy, and getting one over on the media.

  “Okay, call Nobu, but tell them to hold the cute waiter,” Sofia told him.

  “Want me to see if they have a cute waiter who plays for the other team?”

  “No, thanks. No more waiters or bartenders for me.”

  “Things not work out with José?” asked Gray.

  José was a good-looking waiter at another Malibu restaurant, Moonshadows. He’d been Sofia’s regular no-strings-attached booty call.

  “It wasn’t going anywhere,” said Sofia, hoping Gray wouldn’t pursue it.

  He followed her inside the trailer. She flipped on the lights, threw her bag onto the couch, and went into the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator, pulled out a chilled bottle of white wine, grabbed two glasses from a cabinet, and poured them one each.

  She found some lunch meat for Fred, and laid it on a paper plate, then took it to the porch to give to her pseudo-pet while Gray called Nobu and ordered dinner.

  He joined her as Fred wolfed his meal. “Food’ll be a half-hour. I ordered you the shrimp tempura with the spicy sauce, and I also asked them to send us a bunch of sushi and sashimi. Oh, and a couple of daily dessert selections.”

  “How did you know the shrimp tempura at Nobu was my all-time favorite?”

  Gray put his hands on his hips. “How could I forget? You took me there the day after I lost out to McConaughey at the Oscars. All you could talk about for, like, a week was how good their tempura was.”

  “Oh, yeah.” That had been over two years ago. She remembered taking Gray out to dinner at Nobu to try to lift his spirits, but how had he remembered what she ordered? She didn’t know any other guy who would. If he hadn’t been gay, he’d have been the world’s most perfect boyfriend. Not only was he drop-dead gorgeous with washboard abs, he gave great fashion advice (“That top with that skirt? No! Just no! Now go change immediately, if not sooner”), he really cared about the people around him, he was generous to a fault, giving more money to charity than almost anyone else in Hollywood, and she could talk to him about anything. He was also pee-your-pants funny when he wanted to be. But, sadly, Gray loved men.

  He helped Sofia set a table outside on the porch. They sat and drank wine, talked and listened to the waves breaking on the beach below. Sofia brought out her iPod dock, and put Ryan Adams’s version of Taylor Swift’s 1989 on shuffle. Fred hung out for a little while. When he realized no more lunch meat was forthcoming, he took off from the railings, with a loud squawk, in search of a less stingy Nirvana Cove inhabitant.

  Sofia didn’t take Fred’s departure personally. He’d be back when the sushi from Nobu arrived. If he didn’t ambush the delivery man before he got to them.

  “What’s new at work?” Gray asked, opening a much nicer bottle of wine he’d insisted on fetching from his trailer. He might live in Nirvana Cove because he liked the privacy it offered and the sense of community (a hard combination to find in Los Angeles), but his tastes still ran to three-hundred-dollar bottles of wine and Nobu takeout. Things Sofia couldn’t afford to indulge in any more. Private detectives didn’t earn like movie stars did.

  Sofia took a sip. Holy guacamole! That was some nectar of the gods.

  She gave him a quick rundown of the past few days. She skimmed following Brendan, because she didn’t want to sound like a complete doofus, and saved the detail for Daniel, Candice and the twelve possible fathers.

  Gray’s two main observations were:

  Regarding thirteen-year-old Daniel making a pass at Sofia while in his hospital bed: “Hey, give the kid some credit. You never score a shot you don’t take!”

  On Candice’s promiscuity: “Sounds like a gay man trapped in a blonde woman’s body to me.”

  Sofia wasn’t sure she agreed with either point. A thirteen-year-old should not have been saying the kind of things Daniel did, whether he was sick or not, and she wasn’t sure all gay men were as flighty as Gray. She’d met lots in long-term committed relationships.

  The delivery man arrived from Nobu. He was drop-dead gorgeous, too, and, from the way he started flirting with Gray immediately upon arrival, either gay or completely dazzled by the power of movie-star celebrity. Gray took his number, Sofia dealt with the tip, the delivery man went on his way, a little disappointed, and a few minutes later Fred was back in his usual spot on the railing, begging for sushi.

  “Oh, my God!” said Sofia, popping a mouthful of the delicious shrimp tempura into her mouth. She was not sharing this with Fred. Let him catch his own.

  “Better than sex?” Gray asked her, popping a piece of sushi into his mouth with a wolfish smirk.

  Sofia thought about it. “Depends on the sex. Better than average sex? No question.”

  “You must be having some pretty shitty average sex, girlfriend.”

  “Right now I’m not having any, average or otherwise,” Sofia confessed.

  Gray put down his fork. “Whoa. Back up, Sofes. You dumped booty call José without a replacement lined up? What’s up with that?”

  “Maybe I want something more.” She didn’t know if she did or not. It had only just occurred to her. She had been so busy with her new career that dating had taken a back seat.

  “What? Like a relationship?” asked Gray. He sounded slightly horrified by the idea.

  “It might be nice,” she mused.

  “I’m not enough for you?”

  “You’re gay.”

  “So, have me for the friend stuff, and José or his replacement to keep your pipes tuned,” said Gray.

  “I’m not sure I can divide things up into neat little compartments. That was the problem with seeing José. There wasn’t any romance, or feelings. It was like we were just using each other to masturbate or something.”

  Gray looked genuinely puzzled, which made Sofia a little sad.

  “Have you never wante
d something than a casual hook-up?” she asked him.

  “Serious answer?”

  “Serious answer,” said Sofia.

  “Okay, hang on a sec. This is going to take more wine.” He reached over, picked up the three-hundred-dollar bottle, and freshened their glasses. He took a long sip, leaned back in his chair and let out a sigh. “I have. I do. Sometimes. I mean, I love my life. How could I not? I’ve been completely blessed. But, yes, sometimes I wonder what it would be like to settle down with someone and have a family. Y’know, like your sister and her husband with Van and Violet.”

  Gray absolutely adored Sofia’s nephew and niece, and the feeling was mutual. He was pretty much an unofficial uncle. He asked Sofia about them constantly, played with them for hours on the beach when they visited, had taught Violet some serious fencing skills he’d picked up on a movie, and even happily tolerated Van’s habit of taking to pieces every single thing he could lay his hands on to see how it worked.

  “You’d make a great dad,” Sofia said.

  Gray looked up and held her gaze. “Thanks, Sofes. You’ll be a great mom one day too. And if you ever, you know, get to a stage where you want to go for it but you haven’t settled down with anyone . . .”

  Whoa. Had Gray Cole just said he’d have a baby with her? It was something he’d talked about before. Having a child. He was pretty keen on the idea. But he’d always spoken about doing a Brad and Angelina and adopting. He’d never said anything about using his own little guys. Though it made sense. After all, he was one of the most handsome, charismatic and charming men in the world.

  “This wine must be really good,” said Sofia, picking up the bottle and studying the label.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Last time I checked, we played on different teams. Even if you do wear the regular uniform.”

  Gray contorted his face. “Ugh. I wasn’t talking about us . . .” Gray formed a circle with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand and jabbed the index finger of the right through the hole.