by Meg O'Brien
Craig no longer owned a car, so the fact that his old BMW wasn’t here didn’t tell me anything. I finally decided that he must run to the beach in the afternoons as well as the mornings, since he wasn’t hunkered down at his computer—as he’d sworn he was doing 24/7.
Unless he’s hitting the bars again.
I took out my cell phone and called Nia. “He’s not here,” I said. “Have you had any luck?”
“No, I’m sorry. I gave his description to the bartenders at all the bars around there, from Playa del Rey to El Segundo, then to Manhattan Beach and LAX. Even the bars that are probably too expensive for his budget. No one’s seen him for a couple of days.”
“Does that mean he has been in some of those bars recently?” I asked.
“Two of them,” Nia said. “I wondered if he’d been drinking, and I asked if they’d had any trouble with him. Both bartenders said that the times they’d seen him he was drinking only coffee. They said he drank a lot of that. Also—you’ll like hearing this—he always had paper and pencil with him, and spent a lot of time there writing. That’s when he wasn’t talking to customers or the bartender about writing, of course. He did a lot of that, too.”
I relaxed a bit. “I’ll go down to the beach and look for him,” I said. Glancing at my watch, I saw that it was one-fifteen. Less than an hour left now to present him with Paul Whitmore’s “final” offer.
“Tell you what, Nia. How about if you call Whit-more right now and tell him the story about Maui. It’ll sound better if we get back to him before his so-called deadline, and that could give me more leeway. I’m willing to bet that if he thinks Craig is in a beach house in Hawaii, pounding away at his computer, he’ll give me more time.”
“He does seem to want Craig real bad. Funny, don’t you think?”
“Funny how?”
“Well, word gets around real fast in the writing community, especially here in L.A., and especially if it’s news about a writer going downhill. Wouldn’t you think Whitmore and Bronson & Bronson Publishing would have heard about it by now?”
“As a matter of fact, I have thought of that,” I said, “which is why I’ve been doing damage control with Whitmore. But he really likes this book of Craig’s, and he doesn’t seem too concerned about a long-term contract. Which, in itself, makes me wonder. The book I sent him doesn’t, in my opinion, call for that kind of money or commitment. It’s almost as if something’s going on that I don’t know anything about.”
“You know,” Nia said, “I’ve been thinking the same thing. Craig’s always been a good writer, but this mafia book isn’t anything new, is it? Just the same old, same old?”
“I found it gripping when I read it,” I said. “But I’ll admit to being a bit stunned that Whitmore offered six figures for it, let alone seven. Listen, I’ve got to run. So call Whitmore and tell him the Maui story, but tread easy…oh, hell, you know what to do. You’ve got great diplomatic bones.”
“Thanks,” Nia said, chuckling. “Are you still going down to the beach, then?”
“Yes. I’ll let you know how it goes with Craig.”
I closed my cell phone and looked back at number twenty-six one more time. It was then I thought I saw a flicker of movement at the curtain inside Craig’s window.
I was tired and hot and responded accordingly. That bastard! Was he just not answering the door? How does he expect me to help him, for God’s sake?
Then, calming down, I realized that Craig couldn’t know I had good news for him about Lost Legacy. He’d probably spotted me out here and thought I’d come to nag him about the three-thousand-dollar advance I’d loaned him against his next potential check from Bronson & Bronson.
Or he was just being typically hermit-like. Some writers develop agoraphobia while writing a book and never even go out to the store for food. They’d starve rather than leave the house and the book for even a moment. Many never answer their telephones or collect their mail for weeks, unless they think a check will be in the box.
Craig Dinsmore hadn’t been like that in recent months, however. He was more the kind who needed to gab about his work, and as Nia had confirmed, he’d been out this week to the bars, doing just that. So if he was inside now, writing, and just didn’t want to answer the door, I should feel relieved. That meant he was working hard on the next book, a follow-up to Lost Legacy, and if that was the case, his money troubles were over. And so, thankfully, were mine.
Still, where writers are concerned, I’d learned never to take anything for granted. No deal is a deal until it’s signed.
I went back up onto the rickety little porch and banged on the window. “Craig, I know you’re in there! Open up! I’ve had a new offer from Whit-more, and it’s big. We need to talk!”
I listened intently and heard a sound like a bump inside.
“Craig, this is your life we’re talking about!”
I shook the door handle, hoping it might be unlocked. It wasn’t.
Resolutely, I trudged back to the lobby and pretended that Tinkerbell wasn’t there, poised on her haunches to spring. The inside of the lobby was dusty and smelled of mold, making me sneeze.
“I need the key to number twenty-six,” I said, dabbing at my nose with a Kleenex. “My friend isn’t answering, and I’m afraid he’s had another heart attack.”
“He’s got a bad heart?” the old man said nervously.
“Yes,” I lied. “And if he dies here, the cops will be milling about forever. They’ll want to go through your room, too—your office, your books, everything.”
I had guessed right that this would not be a good thing. The old man’s toughened hand quickly scrabbled along a board with hooks and came up with a key that had “26” on it.
Back at Craig’s room, I slid the key into the lock and pushed in fast, before he could know what I was doing and push me right back out.
“Listen, Craig! I’ve been negotiating my ass off to get you a good deal—”
I stopped in my tracks. He wasn’t here. There was only the one room, with a door to what must be a bathroom in back. Was he in the bathroom, then?
I walked closer to the door and called out, “Craig? It’s Mary Beth. Are you in there?”
No answer.
Then who had moved that curtain? Was it just the wind, coming through that plastic-covered window?
But there hadn’t been any wind that I had noticed. Not enough to have caused even a ripple.
On a round table in front of the window was a laptop computer that seemed fairly new. I wondered if Craig had bought it with money from the sale of his car. To the left were several used foam cups with dregs that must have been coffee, as well as the last crumbs of some sort of pastry. There was also an inexpensive, drugstore-variety answering machine that held nineteen unanswered calls, according to the blinking green light. A small portable printer was attached to the laptop and next to it were sheets of manuscript paper, about an inch high. An El Segundo library card was propped up against a lamp, and on the floor around the table were odd crumpled sheets that Craig had obviously tossed away as not right.
So he had been working. That was good. I started to turn back to the front door, but couldn’t resist a peek first at the finished sheets of manuscript. They were upside down, so I turned the entire stack over and saw the title: Under Covers.
Odd. Did he mean Undercover? A spy novel? That didn’t sound like Craig. He was more into investigative nonfiction like Lost Legacy, where real-life mafia slugs were found under upturned rocks.
A look at the next few pages revealed that the title was a play on words, and the book seemed to be a fictional account of the Hollywood scene “between the sheets.” He’d written about old Hollywood in the 1940s, accounts of wild exploits of high-level directors with young female stars, sexual harassment, and the fact that actors were forced to cover up their homosexuality to make them more of a heartthrob to female viewers. Names of stars, though, had been changed to protect the noninnocent.
&n
bsp; I’d had no idea Craig was writing a book like this, and I couldn’t see Paul Whitmore paying the same thing for this book as he was offering for Lost Legacy. While its mafia-don story had been told before, Craig had added a psychological edge to it that had made Whitmore take notice. This book, though it seemed well written, was as stale as yesterday’s news. The casting-couch angle had been done before, over and over. In fact, some of it seemed familiar, as if I’d read it somewhere before.
What the hell was going on?
I’d taken a speed-reading course years before, so it didn’t take me long to read the first few chapters. Confused and concerned, though, I stopped reading at page thirty-four. Setting the page down, I did something I’d never done before. Pushing the “on” button on Craig’s computer, I sat on his chair and tried to bring up the Under Covers document. I was pretty good with computers, but there was something odd about this one: there were no documents on the hard drive. None at all. No letters, no memos, no books. If anything had ever been on the hard drive, it had obviously been wiped clean. Puzzled, I opened the CD-Rom drive and the floppy disk drive, but both were empty.
Before I had time to think it through, I heard a slight noise that seemed to be coming from behind the motel. A thud? Someone hitting the wall back there? Images of O.J. and Kato Kaelin came to mind—someone running into an air conditioner with blood on his hands.
Then I realized the sound must have come from the bathroom. Without thinking, I strode over there and threw the bathroom door open, determined to confront Craig about why he hadn’t been answering his calls and why the hell he was hiding from me. It was his own fault, I thought, if I caught him on the john.
But Craig wasn’t hiding at all. He was right there on the floor, blood all over his forehead that was slowly seeping onto the old, grubby tiles.
In shock, I could barely move. I looked at the window, which was open. Cheap plastic curtains in a gaudy flower pattern were blowing in a light salty breeze that came off the ocean from this side of the motel. There were marks on the sill that seemed to be blood, marks that might have come from a killer, possibly escaping that way.
I knelt down beside Craig, feeling for a pulse. I couldn’t find one anywhere. I touched his cheek. Still warm. He hadn’t been dead long.
Stroking his forehead, I couldn’t hold back tears. The poor guy never got the chance to get out of the hole he’d dug himself into. And we were so close to getting what he wanted.
Then, as if in a nightmare, I saw that the blood had originated at a large gash on Craig’s forehead, and that lying by his side was a bloody Chinese dildo—made of ivory, and intricately carved to please, I supposed, in all the right places. It looked very much like the one in Tony’s apartment the night before.
I knelt there for a long moment, so staggered I wasn’t able to stand. I guess I noticed the draft, finally, that slammed the front door shut. Grasping the bathroom sink, I pulled myself up slowly and realized there was blood on my skirt and my knees.
I was still standing over Craig’s body, blood all over me, when the police banged on the front door and piled in. “Don’t move!” they ordered, guns pointed directly at me.
I didn’t even breathe.
El Segundo is a smallish town along the coast, south of Santa Monica and north of Redondo Beach. It’s a nice town, growing perhaps too quickly, but the cops, I’d heard, were generally pretty friendly.
My experience, however, was a bit strained because I’d been found at a crime scene, with blood all over me.
Inside the El Segundo police station, I’d been allowed to wash most of the blood off me. A female officer stood outside the bathroom door, “just in case I needed help.”
Yeah, right.
After I’d done the best I could, I was escorted to an interview room where a Lieutenant Davies sat across from me at a table. He didn’t tell me much, but I knew by now that he was wondering if I’d also killed Tony and Arnold. Although the ESPD and the LAPD were entirely separate entities, surely they shared information when something as important as murder was involved.
The one thing that probably kept me out of jail, at least for the moment, was the open bathroom window and the blood on the sill. I could have set that up, they thought at first, to make it look as if someone else had killed Craig Dinsmore and then escaped out that window. But when my prints didn’t turn up on the murder weapon and there was a third, unidentified person’s blood type on that sill, they couldn’t charge me.
Which did not, however, exonerate me entirely. I could have been an accomplice, the lieutenant said, and just didn’t make it to the window before the police broke in.
“I’ve been wondering about that,” I said. “How did you know to show up when you did?”
He hesitated again, but shrugged. “We had an anonymous phone call saying a murder had been committed in that room.”
“Do you mind telling me when that call came in?”
He hesitated, but said, “One-forty or thereabouts.”
“So, whoever it was, they called you while I was in Craig’s room.”
He didn’t answer that, and for good reason, I thought. If I were an accomplice to the crime, why would the other killer call the cops at a time when I’d be caught there?
I spent the next couple of hours in the interview room dealing with questions I had no answers to. In between questions I had time to think, and I figured that whoever had killed Craig did it while I was pounding on the door the first time. When I came back with a key, the killer was just getting ready to go out the window, but he hesitated when he heard me come in. The noise I’d heard while I was looking at Craig’s manuscript must have been the killer climbing, finally, through that window. I’d been so quiet, he probably thought I’d gone.
Or maybe he was afraid that I might decide I needed to pee.
“Ms. Conahan,” the lieutenant said at last in a hard voice, “I don’t believe in coincidence. There were two murders last night in Brentwood, and the LAPD says that both men were closely connected to you. Now there’s this third murder. I would think you might be getting nervous about that.”
“Well, I’m not nervous,” I said calmly. “I’m sad. I’ve lost two very good authors and an ex-husband who didn’t deserve to die. But I didn’t do anything, so there’s nothing for me to be nervous about.”
Lieutenant Davies fell silent, and I suspected he was using that psychological technique of not speaking, which usually forces the other person to break the silence by saying something.
He’d probably never had an agent as a suspect, and didn’t know that we were well-versed in those kinds of tricks, from constant negotiations. Though, come to think of it, the odds that no agent had ever committed murder upon an author were probably worse than an old, broken-down nag winning at the Hollywood Park racetrack.
I reached for my purse on the table and stood. “Unless you intend to arrest me,” I said firmly, “I’m leaving. I have work to do.”
It was a bluff, but a safe one. If he’d had enough evidence to hold me, I’d be booked and behind bars by now.
The lieutenant smiled, but it was a tight smile, not quite making it to his eyes. I noticed that his teeth were very white against his tanned skin, and that there was an odd little scar on his left cheek. Overall he might be considered quite handsome, but the eyes took away from that. They were all business, not giving anything up.
“I have to ask you not to leave town,” he said.
“I wasn’t planning to,” I answered.
He nodded and stood. “I’ll walk you out.”
I stopped by the office before heading home, and found Nia still there. She hadn’t left at three after all, but was in my workout room, which connected to the office. She was sweating away on the exercise bike, a cordless phone from the office on the floor. The door from the workout room to the reception room was open, which meant that she’d been listening for anyone who might walk in.
“Hi,” I said, dropping my purse on a chair
and stepping behind the Chinese screen that served as a changing room. Pulling off my suit and tugging on workout clothes, I did my usual stretching exercises, then climbed on the treadmill next to Nia and started it up.
“Anything new?” I asked.
“I talked to Paul Whitmore after your last call about Craig, and it was weird. After how hot he seemed for Craig’s new book, he didn’t sound all that upset to hear he was dead.”
“Really? How did he sound?”
“Quiet. Didn’t say much, just to tell you he was sorry to hear it. Hung up rather quickly.”
“Hmm. He was probably signing another author already. Whatever it takes to keep the coffers filled.”
Not that I was anyone to talk. I’d been worrying a bit about my own coffers.
“And a Detective Rucker came by,” Nia said. “Yum!”
“Yum?”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, God, don’t tell me you didn’t notice. That curly hair, and those gorgeous white teeth.”
I studied my teeth in the wall of mirrors in front of us. “You know something? Everybody has white teeth these days. Ever since all those actors started having their teeth whitened, everybody you meet hassuper-white teeth. If they all got together in a room and smiled, they’d blind each other.”
“Yeah. Well, don’t laugh, okay? I’m thinking of getting mine done, too.”
“You’re kidding. Your teeth are already white enough. You’re beautiful, Nia. Don’t you know that?”
“Not in the teeth,” she said. “They’re more a sort of off-white. How can I ever compete in the date market with off-white teeth?”
“True,” I said in a hopeless tone. “I can see it all now. You as an old maid, living a joyless, loveless life with only your cat and your off-white teeth.”