The Last Cheerleader

by Meg O'Brien

  “What do you mean, the way he was murdered?” Patrick asked.

  “Oh, nothing,” I said, quickly changing the subject.

  Patrick’s eyes widened. “You mean, you thought they were gay?”

  “Well…”

  Patrick shook his head. “Tony would roll over in his grave if he knew you thought that. He liked to portray himself as quite the ladies’ man.”

  I smiled. “Oh, Patrick, you’re so quaint. It’s player these days, not ladies’ man.”

  “Scorn me if you like,” he said with a smile. “There are some women who like the old-world type.”

  “Patrick, was it the rape book that Tony and you talked about? Was that the synopsis you found?”

  “No. It was the newer one, the one I gave my other agent. I haven’t heard back from her, by the way. I did tell her I wanted to return to you.”

  “Well, she’s probably busy. Patrick, have you told the police that Tony plagiarized your book?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? They’d probably think I killed him.”

  I studied him a moment, and then I said it. “Patrick, you didn’t…did you?”

  Anger filled his eyes. “You really think I’d do that? Over a damn book?”

  “No…I mean, I don’t know. If you were counting on the book selling, and Tony stole it out from under you…”

  He glowered at me. “I never should have told you. If I even for a minute believed you would think that, I never would have. Thanks for your support, Mary Beth.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I do want to support you, and I don’t really think you did it. But anyone would have asked that question, Patrick. And if the police find out what Tony did, they’ll be asking it.”

  He stood, brushing his trousers off fastidiously, though there was nothing on them. The gesture was more like a nervous tic.

  “Thanks for the coffee,” he said. “I have to get home.”

  “You don’t have to leave yet, Patrick. Don’t you want to hear what I decided about representing you?”

  “No. If it’s a rejection, I don’t need to hear it right now. Maybe some other time.”

  “But—”

  I was going to tell him I’d like to represent him again, but before I could, he stalked out, his shoulders rigid, his walk stiff. I was astonished that he had become that angry over a mere question.

  Pouring myself a glass of orange juice, I sat on my deck and thought that over for a while. Patrick had been his usual charming self, even to wearing a burgundy velvet smoking jacket over his trousers, à la Nick Charles in an old Thin Man movie. If Patrick hadn’t been a writer, he could probably have pulled off a career in acting.

  Had he been acting with me? Only appearing not to have anything to do with Tony’s and Arnold’s murders?

  But why would he have killed Arnold? Just because he was there? And what about Craig?

  Yes, I thought. Anyone would have asked the question—if only because making a connection between the three murders had turned out to be so complicated.

  Or it could be complicated, if it weren’t for the theory of Ockham’s razor: The simplest explanation is always the best.

  I believed that. But now, what did I do with it? How did I apply it to this situation?

  The next morning I went to my office to check phone messages, mail, and return calls. I half believed Nia would be there, and I’d find she’d had a family emergency of some kind that kept her from leaving me a note. I knew that Dan had put out unofficial feelers around town, but he hadn’t gotten back to me yet.

  If Nia didn’t turn up soon, I would have to report her missing. My hesitation to do that was based on one other occasion when she’d disappeared for a day or two, and I’d later learned she’d been with a boyfriend and somehow lost track of all time. That was her story, anyway, and though I didn’t fully believe it, I figured it must have been something important to take her away like that. And since then, the incident hadn’t been repeated.

  At any rate I no longer seriously worried that the person who broke into my office had taken Nia and was holding her hostage. As Dan had said, it didn’t seem likely, since I hadn’t received any threatening calls, or an offer to exchange her for whatever the burglar had been looking for. So in the end, raising a ruckus at this point, and possibly embarrassing Nia in the midst of a romantic rendezvous, didn’t seem the right thing to do. Yet.

  After I took care of the phone messages and mail, I sat at my desk, wondering what the person who’d broken in had wanted. The piles of manuscripts had been straightened up by the cleaning crew, and I’d paid one of them extra to make a list of every single manuscript and who had sent it. I pretty much knew, therefore, what was in those piles, and nothing from that gave me a clue.

  Finally, I closed my eyes, picturing my drawers, my files, everything that I’d ever put anywhere, or that Nia had at my request.

  After I’d done that for five minutes or so, I had an idea: whoever had done this hadn’t touched my exercise room.

  At first look, there doesn’t seem to be much in there but exercise equipment. But behind the screen where Nia and I change our clothes, there’s a large wall safe inside a closet.

  The safe had been installed by a previous tenant, but I’d never used it for money or valuables. Until I moved here, I didn’t really have any valuables. As for money, I keep a small amount of petty cash in my desk drawer, but that’s all. Purchases like furniture and business supplies are put on my business credit card.

  The things I did use the safe for, and often with amusement, were odds and ends of material from writers I represent. As I’ve said, writers can be a paranoid lot, and sometimes the things they worry about don’t make a lot of sense. A few of them, for instance, regularly send me the first drafts of their proposals for books, accompanied by copies on floppy disks or CDs. They’re afraid of fire or computer crashes at their homes, and of losing a book that way. While that has certainly happened, they don’t understand that anything in an agent’s office is usually lost in a pile of manuscripts and all other kinds of chaos. They’d be much better off getting a safe-deposit box at their bank—or at least e-mailing their manuscripts to a friend.

  As for the rest, my authors sometimes sent me family photos and recipes. One person had sent me a pile of research notes, written in longhand, that might or might not one day mean something to her book. The book had sold years ago, without her ever once asking for those notes.

  The first time I saw the safe, though, I thought: Why not? There might never be anything of importance in it, but it would probably comfort a writer to hear that his or her materials had been locked up. So that’s where I kept things I barely looked at, once I’d realized what they were.

  Now I wondered if there was anything of value in that safe that I hadn’t noticed. Anything at all that might lead to the killers of Tony, Arnold and Craig.

  I made sure my front-office door was locked and went through the connecting door from my office to the exercise room. There wasn’t much in the change area, but Nia and I each left a set of clean business clothes and shoes in there, in case of an emergency. We never explicitly said what kind of emergency we thought there might be, but we’d both seen the movie Volcano, where L.A. is devastated by molten lava. Maybe we thought we might need a change of clothes to keep appointments with survivors, if fiction ever became fact.

  Other than the business suits, there were sweats and other workout clothes that, by coincidence, effectively hid the three-foot-high safe. I opened the lock and took out the brown carton of materials it held, taking them back into my office. There I spread them on my desk, going through each piece of paper one by one.

  After a while I began to get discouraged. Most of the papers in the box were outdated and really did need to be thrown out or returned to their owners. One more thing to do. It was a shock, then, when I saw a small blue envelope with Craig Dinsmore scrawled across the front in Nia’
s handwriting.

  I opened it with shaking hands, because suddenly I knew I’d hit gold. The envelope looked reasonably new, and I half remembered shoving it in the safe a while back. I had assumed it was full of the kinds of obscure ramblings I’d seen from him before, when he was drinking.

  I didn’t know at the time that Craig had quit drinking. If I had, I almost certainly would have opened the envelope. But when Nia put it on my desk without a note from her, I’m sure I just pushed it off to a corner of my desk until one day I filed it in the safe.

  The single sheet of paper inside was written in longhand, and with a pencil that hadn’t been too sharp. The writing was faint, so I smoothed the paper out on the desk to see it better.

  It was a list of pharmaceutical companies, from Eli Lilly to GlaxoSmithKline and a host of others, some I’d never heard of. Each name had a line through it, as if Craig had eliminated them or they didn’t meet his needs. But the second from the last was Courtland Pharmaceuticals. He’d underlined this one twice.

  I felt a shock run through me. What kind of connection could Craig have possibly had with the company Roger Van Court and his father owned? And was this just some weird coincidence, or an answer to who murdered Craig Dinsmore?

  I mulled this over on the way home, and by mid-afternoon I thought I was on the right track. I fixed a cup of coffee and put some crackers and cheese on a plate, for sustenance. Taking them into the living room, I sat at my computer and logged on to the Net, then went to Google.com, typing in the search line nonfiction books lives of the stars—the kind of manuscript I’d seen in Craig’s motel room.

  Those words didn’t bring up what I was looking for, so I next tried Hollywood stars expose. With no way of putting an accent over the “e,” I came up with a lot of sites about Hollywood stars exposing their naked bodies in magazines and on calendars. I waded through that and finally found what I was looking for.

  I wanted to shout, to pat myself on the back, and celebrate.

  But there wasn’t time for that. Instead I got in my car and drove to the closest library. There I looked for and found a book called Timing’s Everything, circa 1940s. Taking it over to a table, I opened it up and looked at the first ten pages. My smile must have been similar to the Cheshire cat’s.

  Next I called Lieutenant Davies at the El Segundo PD, asking if I might see the contents of Craig’s desk from the motel room. He pointed out in a not-too-friendly tone that since it was evidence, just as the manuscript was, I wouldn’t be able to see it until after the trial.

  “The trial?” I wondered if he meant mine, and if I’d made a mistake calling him. Maybe I shouldn’t have reminded him of my existence.

  “We’ll catch whoever murdered Craig Dinsmore,” Lieutenant Davies said. “And you can bet there will be a trial.”

  “Oh. Well, I hope you do,” I said briskly. “Find the killer, I mean.”

  I hung up and shrugged off the feelings of impending doom that had settled in around me at the sound of Lieutenant Davies’s voice. I had to keep my mind clear and not let anything get in the way of what I had to do now.

  Which was to get my hands on that evidence.

  I called Dan and left a message on his voice mail. When he called back, I said, “Is there some way I can get a list of what they took from Craig’s motel room as evidence?”

  “Have you tried asking the ESPD?”

  “Yeah, and that helped a whole lot. Lieutenant Davies really loves me, you know. He practically asked me for a date.”

  “A date, huh?”

  “You bet. The kind where he arrives with two big brutish officers to cart me off to jail.”

  Dan chuckled. But then he said seriously, “I wouldn’t joke too much about that, if I were you. It could happen.”

  “Don’t think I don’t know that. Look, I’ve got to get to Craig’s stuff somehow—anything he had in that motel room. I think I know something about Craig’s murder, and if I can prove it, they’ll be carting someone else off instead of me.”

  “And who might that be?”

  “I don’t want to say till I’m sure. But it’s big, I promise you that.”

  There was a brief silence. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do. But only if I’m the first to know.”

  “No problem. Any word on Nia yet?”

  “No. I’ve checked with the hospitals and the various law enforcement agencies around here. No one’s seen her. Which, in a way, is a good thing.”

  “You mean because she isn’t dead.”

  “Well…not so far as we know.”

  “Gee, thanks for the positive input. Listen, I’ll be waiting to hear back about that evidence.”

  “At your service, ma’am.”

  While I waited to hear back from Dan, I tried Nia’s apartment again for the fifth or sixth time. This time, someone answered who said she was Nia’s niece.

  “She went away for a few days,” the young girl said. “I’m just house-sitting.”

  “Do you know where she went?” I asked. “Nia works for me, and I’m just worried that I haven’t heard from her.”

  “Oh, you must be the agent. Mary Beth Conahan, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Nia talks about you a lot,” the girl said. “I’m Anita. You can call me Neets, though. Everybody does.”

  I smiled. “Well, Neets, I’d really like to talk to Nia. Did she leave a phone number with you, or tell you where she was going?”

  “Sure. She’s at the Ritz-Carlton in London. She went to visit my uncle. Her father, I mean.”

  I think my jaw must have dropped. “Oh. Did she leave a message for me?”

  “Not that I know of,” Neets said.

  “Do you have the number in London, then?” I asked.

  “Sure.” She gave it to me and I wrote it down.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Anytime. Ms. Conahan, can I ask you something? Would you look at a book I’ve written?”

  “You wrote a book?” I smiled. “How old are you?”

  “I’m seventeen,” Neets said, “but I’ve been writing all my life.”

  All my life. At seventeen, I remembered, it seems one has lived forever.

  “Sure, I’ll look at it,” I said. “But give me some time to read it and get back to you. I’ve got a lot on my plate right now.”

  “Hey, that’s okay!” she said excitedly. “I didn’t really expect you to say yes. Nia always says not to bother you because you’re so busy.”

  “Well, Nia’s right—about most things. But this is different.” Neets might be a budding New York Times best-selling author, after all. Who knew?

  We hung up and I looked at the London number. If anything, I was more concerned than ever. Why would Nia go so far away and not leave me a note or talk to me first?

  I’d forgotten about the time difference, but when I reached Nia at the Ritz, she was having a late dinner in her room.

  “Hi. What’s up?” she asked.

  “You didn’t tell me where you were going,” I said. “I’ve been worried.”

  “I’m sorry. You didn’t get my note?”

  “What note?”

  “I left it on my desk. I didn’t know I was coming over here until the middle of the night, and I thought that was too late to call you.”

  I couldn’t remember a thing on her desk. It was as pristine as she left it every night.

  “There wasn’t a note. Lots of stuff in my office, though.”

  “Oh?”

  “Someone broke in and rummaged through all the files.”

  “My God! Are you all right?”

  “Yeah. I was hoping you might have seen something before you left.”

  “Not a thing. Like I said, I left you a message. It was right on my desk. And when I left, everything was fine.”

  I heard a male voice in the background, and could tell that Nia had covered the mouthpiece of the phone with her hand. She was laughing, and sounded as if she was having way too much f
un.

  “Nia?”

  “Yes. Sorry.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Oh, nobody.” She giggled. “I mean, nobody you’d know.”

  “What about your father? Have you seen a lot of him?”

  “Not enough. I needed his expertise on an idea I’ve had.”

  “An idea?”

  “Yeah, well, I’m…trying to write a book.”

  “Nia! Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I thought you might laugh. Especially if you read it.” She chuckled.

  “Never!” I said. “Let me see it when you get back, okay?”

  “We’ll see. Anyway, that’s why I thought I’d take a couple of days, while business was slow, and fly over here. Dad’s been really busy, though. He’s working on something having to do with a new drug. Seems like he’s more and more into biochemistry lately.”

  “Oh.” Curious, I said, “Do you know what he’s working on?”

  Nia’s laughter was muffled again. “Stop!” she said to whoever was in her room.

  “I haven’t a clue,” she said to me, coming back. “I’ve been…a little distracted, shall we say, since I got here.”

  “When are you coming home?” I asked.

  “Why, do you need me?”

  “Not really. I just wondered.”

  “I’ve been thinking I might spend a couple more days here. Is that okay?”

  “Sure. You’ve more than earned it.”

  “Thanks, Mary Beth. You’re the best. Have the police found the murderer yet?”

  “I’m not sure how to answer that. They seem to think it’s me.”

  “You? That’s crazy!”

  “Tell it to the judge,” I said.

  “Don’t worry, I will.” She laughed. “Wait a minute, that didn’t sound right. I should have said, ‘Let’s hope I don’t have to.”’

  “Thanks.”

  When we hung up, I felt as if Nia were a million miles away. I wished, now, that she’d waited to go on vacation. Nia was really the only friend I had who I could talk to about the kinds of things that were going on here.

  Apparently, though, the police hadn’t told her not to leave town. They had interviewed her shortly after the murders, and must have cleared her of any suspicion.