I had to think for a minute because, although with Ernie it hadn’t been a fizzle — more like a final eruption — it was long enough ago that it felt like ancient history. “It must be twelve, no, thirteen, years ago now. In May. Late May.” Who am I kidding? That is ancient history.
“Thirteen years ago,” she repeated needlessly. And though her tone sounded flat, uninflected, I could hear the disbelief in it.
“Yes. When we broke up. I haven’t seen him since.”
“I see,” her friendly — breezy — tone hadn’t altered, and yet the temperature seemed to have dropped about ten degrees. “Thirteen years ago. And we just happen to run into you at a nightclub. And then you show up at his new office on the very day he happens to have been kidnapped. After more than a dozen years?”
This sounded thin, even to me. “Exactly. And you sound as though you doubt it. Though you didn’t sound as though you doubted the fact that I had nothing to do with the kidnapping.”
She met my eyes — a chilling, blue gaze — and just looked at me. I couldn’t quite gauge what she was looking for. An ally or an alibi? Someone reasonably unconnected from the situation to talk to? At length, she said: “I know you didn’t have anything to do with kidnapping him. At least, I think I know. Because I think he did it himself.”
Did it himself, my brain repeated stupidly. Did what himself? “Do you mean you think he kidnapped himself?”
She nodded.
“But why?”
“Why do you think, Madeline? Money.”
I thought about Ernie’s track record as a hard hitting CEO. And I looked at this beautiful woman across from me: the expensive manicure, the perfectly coifed hair, the designer clothes, the Boxster glinting at the curb outside the cafe. Miss Daughter-of-the-champion-of-feeding-the-hungry. She seemed made of money. I knew only too well, however, that looks can be deceiving. In more ways than one. And yet, what I knew about Ernie made me think there would be more.
“If what you’re saying is true, it wouldn’t just be about money, would it?”
She looked at me, but might as well have been looking through me. “Is anything ever just about money?” And then, thoughtfully, as though aware of the contradiction, “is anything ever about anything else?” She shrugged, “If you’re asking if he needed money for anything, I’d say no. Not that I was aware of, anyway. Langton offered him a very good package to come out here and he’s done quite well by the companies he’s worked for in the past,” I knew all of this. And what I hadn’t known, I’d surmised. I’d just thought that, maybe, there’d be something. What that something might be, I wasn’t exactly sure.
“But you said you thought he was doing it for money.”
“I did, yes. But I didn’t mean because he needed money. No drug problem, no gambling debts — that I’ve ever been aware of — no actual need, if you follow what I’m saying.”
“I think I do. What you’re saying is he wants money… for the sake of money.”
She nodded. Sighed. “To see who can make the biggest pile.”
What Arianna was saying was so on target — so along the lines of what I’d been thinking — I was somewhat suspicious. Though I wasn’t exactly sure why. Despite the fact that I had once known her husband — in the biblical sense — I was a complete stranger to this woman. And I couldn’t quite see her motivation for telling me as much as she had.
“Do you know where he is?” I asked.
She shook her head, no. “I don’t know anything. Not really.” She looked suddenly more vulnerable, as though she’d been at her best to try and catch me at something and, having failed, she was letting her guard down, perhaps having determined it was unnecessary.
“Tell me what you do know,” I said to her. And this suddenly seemed important. “Tell me why you think this.”
This time she didn’t hesitate very long before speaking. “We moved out here about a month ago, in anticipation of Ernest beginning to work with Langton. At first we’d thought I would stay in Connecticut and Ernest would commute. Then, he talked me in to coming out here with him. He said that it could be an adventure for us. Something different. So we rented a house here in Brentwood, thinking we’d wait to buy until after we got to know the city and what area we liked best or if we even liked it at all.”
I listened carefully as she spoke and I heard the things she was saying, but I could tell there was a lot she wasn’t saying, as well.
“Everything was fine — normal, for us — until about a week after we got out here. Then Ernie started acting strangely. Phone calls he’d have to take in the other room — something he never did before — and sudden dinner and lunch appointments… there was more and more stress on him and less and less time for… well… me.
“I could live with that. He’s a busy man and I knew what I was getting into when I married him. But it got worse. In days that I’d thought we’d spend together, buying things for the house and getting settled in, he was spending more and more time away from home, even though he wasn’t having to go to the office yet. And then I found this,” she rummaged quickly in her purse — Hermes, I noted, and not the sort to brook much rummaging — and produced a business card, which she passed to me.
“Paul Westbrook,” I read, “West Trade Financial.” I struggled to keep my face neutral: not sure how much to give away. Because, of course, I knew that name. And, having seen it revealed, something fell into place. Something indefinable at present, it was true, but it felt like a match of some kind. It was something I’d have to think about later.
The card was printed on inexpensive stock and heavily embossed: the type of embossing that’s meant to look costly but seldom does. The address was in Woodland Hills.
“I did some checking,” I must have covered my recognition of the name well enough because she didn’t seem to have noticed. “It’s a small, practically nonexistent investment firm in the San Fernando Valley. At first I couldn’t imagine why Ernest would have anything to do with them. Then, after he disappeared, I found this,” more Hermes rummaging, after which she produced an envelope which she passed to me and encouraged me to open.
I did. There were two carefully folded sheets of lined paper inside, like those torn out of a legal pad.
The first page was unmistakably Ernie’s writing. Just seeing his careful handwriting in the dark blue ink he’d always favored carried me back the dozen years to our little off-campus apartment: notes on fridges, a birthday card, one extremely passionate letter avowing his undying affection (he’d been drunk). All of these things danced quickly through my head before I managed to focus on context.
There was a doodle of a mountain peak under a cloudy sky at one corner of the pad. It was funny to think of Ernie still doodling after all these years, but it also made it clear, to me anyway, and likely to his wife, that he’d written the words and done the doodle while talking on the telephone.
There were only two words on the page in Ernie’s clear hand. At the top of the page, the word:
Westbrook
And, near the bottom:
Arrowheart
The way he’d situated the words made it look as though something should be between them. Or — and this was quite possible — he’d doodled these, as well. Parts of unfinished thoughts while he talked or listened.
The first word obviously related to the name on the card. “Who’s Arrowheart?” I asked Arianna. She shrugged elegantly again. “I have no idea. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to show it to you. I thought it might have meaning.”
I shook my head, even while I wracked my brain. But no: I was pretty sure I’d never heard of anyone — man or woman — named Arrowheart. I would have remembered. And she hadn’t asked me about Westbrook, so I kept my mouth shut.
The second piece of paper looked as though it had come from the same place as the first, but it would have been apparent to almost anyone — and certainly to me and Arianna — that it hadn’t been written by Ernie.
“Erni
e didn’t write this.” I said.
She shook her head, no. “The handwriting is unfamiliar to me.”
Again the lined paper, but this time the message was even more cryptic than before. At first glance and to most people, it might have looked like something written in code. Arianna watched me closely as I studied what was written on the paper in black ink and in a hand that clearly was not Ernie’s:
2225262728
_____________________________________________
65 1/243 1/23
-2-10-15-15+42
-179.5
+126
= 53.50
The meaning was not instantly clear to me. Just apparently unrelated numbers that mostly didn’t even add up. Not a calculation then. But the way the second line was notated, it could refer to a stock price. And if the first line represented dates, then… my face must have registered something as the notation’s meaning started to become clear — a widening of my eyes or just a look of sudden and shocked understanding. Arianna noticed right away.
“You see it.” Not a question.
I nodded. “I… I think so. Do you know what it is?”
“I think so, too.” I must have looked a question at her because she said, “I have a financial background. It’s how Ernest and I met.”
“But it’s crazy,” I said. “It’s beyond crazy. I can’t imagine Ernie doing something like this. Can you?”
The shrug again. “I don’t know what to think anymore,” she said softly. “I just wish he’d told me something. Anything.” Now it was my turn to watch closely: to gauge the expressions flitting across her face and calculate their sincerity. Honestly, though, there wasn’t much to see. Just that cool, clear profile. Arianna’s was a face that didn’t give much away.
“Did you show this to the police?”
She shook her head: No.
“Why?”
“If I’m correct and Ernest engineered this whole thing, well then, he’s doing it for a reason, isn’t he?”
I shrugged my shoulders. It was too big a mess to even contemplate engineering it.
“Well,” she said, considering, “that’s what I think. And then there’s another thing: what if I’m wrong? And what if I told the police I suspected my husband of doing this? And then they stop looking and something… something terrible happened? Then it would all be my fault,” the well bred control seemed to be slipping slightly. Arianna looked close to tears for a second. Then the cloud was gone, or I’d been wrong about it in the first place.
“But why are you telling me all of this? Why bother talking to me at all?” I had to ask.
“I thought about it a lot after I saw you earlier today. I had to stop at home to get these things and I checked on you before our meeting. You’re in this business,” she indicated the paper between us, “the business of stocks. Or you were. So I guess part of me wanted to know — to know, you understand — if you were involved on some level. That seemed important to me.” I could understand that. All of it. It was Ernie we were talking about.
“When I first saw you,” she went on, “I thought you might represent a missing piece. You know: an old girlfriend suddenly back on the scene. Quite a coincidence. Then, when Ernest was… missing… I thought… I thought maybe you were in on it. That maybe you knew things I didn’t. But you don’t, do you Madeline? You don’t know anything.”
Since this summed things up even more neatly than I would have done — after all, I’d been the one driving all over West L.A. and dressing up and getting myself caught on incriminating video cameras — I had to smile, if somewhat ruefully. She was right: I didn’t know anything.
“No,” I agreed, “I don’t know anything. And I haven’t had any kind of contact with Ernie since we broke up.”
“And I thought you’d know Ernest pretty well. You had a… a… connection with him, and so you wouldn’t wish him harm.” Which made me wonder if we were talking about the same Ernie. But whatever. “Also, you were at Langton yesterday and you went out of your way to find me downtown today, so you have some kind of vested interest. You might not know anything now, but, for whatever reason, you want to. Is that correct?”
I nodded, if somewhat cautiously.
“Also, the fact that you’re somewhat implicated makes you a good choice to tell. The police suspect, well, not you, but someone who matches your description. I thought it was unlikely you were on your way to the police. Am I right about that, too?”
And, I could only nod because, of course, she was. I knew nothing about anything except that I’d managed to put myself in a potentially… embarrassing position. Going to the police was not high on my current list.
There were a few things I was burning to know: all around Ernie’s actual disappearance. “Why do you think the note went to the office and not to you?”
Arianna looked stunned for a second, as though she hadn’t thought about this before. “I… I don’t know. But you’re right: things like this usually go to the home, not the office, don’t they?”
“That’s what I was thinking. And the kidnappers haven’t contacted you at all?”
She shook her head, no.
“Have the Langton people told you what the demands are?”
“No. That is, there haven’t been any demands thus far. Which only confirms what I’ve said. If this,” she indicated the paper with the figures on it, “is truly his object and it’s the reason he’s staged this whole thing, then he’d want all of the correspondence going through the place where there’d most likely be a press leak.”
“He might even have leaked it to the press somehow himself,” I said thoughtfully.
Arianna nodded. “That’s precisely what I thought. And, if any of what I’m guessing is correct, the demands will appear around the time the interest of the press begins to die down. Because that would build the pitch again.”
“And so,” it was my turn to consult the paper on the table between us, “if what you and I are both thinking is true, the stock bottoms next Friday and Ernie buys back in. So, if it does all go that way, would that mean he’s suddenly rescued or released on Wednesday?” It was a little scary: I was actually starting to see how it all fit together.
“Except, maybe,” Arianna was studying her shoes carefully now, “the ransom note finally shows up in the next few days, the ransom gets paid and Ernest gets ‘released.’”
I looked at Arianna sharply.
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
There was the potential to make an actual fortune by creating the LRG death spiral situation with the stocks, then pocketing a handsome tip in the form of the ransom money.
“Now I have a question for you,” Arianna said. “I really don’t understand why you suddenly reappeared at this time.”
And that was the crux of the whole matter, wasn’t it? It had all been getting so convoluted, I could barely remember, myself. And then, of course, I did: something to do with a new life and a good tip and then the vision of my mom’s stricken face. “It was the stock,” I said clearing my throat. “At Club Zanzibar, that night, Ernie told me to watch the stock. And I did. And,” without my willing it, my voice dropped to a whisper. “And I bought.”
“And then it dropped?”
I nodded.
Arianna watched me for a moment and I could see disbelief warring with the desire to accept what I’d said. “You really don’t know anything?” she said. And I could tell that part of her wanted it to not be true.
I assured her that I didn’t.
“Then where do you go from here?” she asked.
“Home, I guess. To be honest, I’m tired of thinking about the whole thing,”
She agreed, “I just wish I could do the same. Forget about it, I mean. But, Ernest…” she didn’t finish, but I understood. If all that she’d said was true, her predicament was worse than mine. By a longshot.
Chapter Twelve
I followed Sunset down to the Pacific Coast Highway. Not the most direct r
oute to Malibu, but it’s interesting and peaceful in a perverse sort of way. A lot of people aren’t crazy about driving in LA at the best of times. But I never seem to mind it. All of those years of not driving in New York, I guess. I mean, back there, I never even had a car. I wouldn’t have known what to do with one.
Sunset Boulevard is all it’s ever been cracked up to be… and more. From the most crass and plastic aspects of Hollyweird, to practically pastoral (for LA) Brentwood, to the peaceful Pacific Palisades. The whole snaking route can be like a car show: the lines of Benzes and Ferraris and Lexuses (Lexi?) — not to mention Porsches — is nothing short of decadent.
And that’s when you understand it clearly, the fullness of this place: This ain’t Great Falls, honey. This ain’t Austin. And sure: they also have eighty thousand dollar Toyotas in those places, but they’re generally the exception, not the rule. Which is where the whole Hollyweird thing stems from, I reckon. In Austin or Great Falls or Bremerton or just about anyplace, if you have a lot of money and you want to stand out from the crowd, things are simple. You don’t have to put a lot of creativity into it. You grab the nearest Lexus, the newest BMW or the flashiest Chrysler and you’re in business, turning heads. In West LA you have to go further to be impressive. A lot further. A purple Rolls Royce convertible might get a second look, but if it also has antlers on the hood and a rollbar, heads will turn. The fact that people might be laughing while their heads are turning doesn’t seem to faze some people.
If you’re at all interested in the ultramobile one-upmanship that Angelenos love to practice at every opportunity, Sunset — the great, serpentine length of it — is the place to do it. Sometimes it’s awful, sometimes it’s awesome, but it’s usually amusing.
Of course, this day my head was so full of what had happened at the Hestman School and with what Arianna had been telling me, I may as well have gone a different way. I’m capable of multitasking, so my driving was fine, but I kept going over the things Arianna had told me. And one of the things I kept wondering was if she was telling me the truth. I couldn’t think why she wouldn’t have been, but, at the same time, I had to wonder why she had told me her whole tale to begin with. Why me? Thinking about it made me uneasy. I wondered if I was being set up. Or perhaps it was something as simple as her hoping I would do some of the legwork for her. Or it might be something… less… appealing.
Madeline Carter - 01 - Mad Money Page 16