Second Guessing

by K. J. Emrick

  It’s something she’s probably not ready to hear yet.

  “What did you find?” she asks us, looking from me to Chris. “You looked into Donnie’s finances. You said you checked the bodyguard’s accounts, right? That’s what you said. Why? What’s going on, Sidney?”

  “It’s a lot to explain,” I tell her. “For now, I just need you to trust me. Everything’s going to be all right.”

  She wraps her arms around herself and looks absolutely miserable, even though she tries to sound defiant. “I’m the one paying you. I hired you. Damn it, I came all this way to make things right with you and I won’t have you freeze me out. I won’t. You need to tell me what you found out. Right now.”

  “We will tell you. I promise. You have to trust me.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, because my middle name is ‘trust.’”

  She looks at me oddly, blinking in surprise. “It is? That’s a funny middle name, especially since your parents named you after a boy…”

  Chris snickers at me, and I give him a look until he holds his hands up in surrender.

  “Amelia, that was a joke,” I explain to her. “I’m just saying, trust me. Okay? Just give us a little time and we’ll explain everything.”

  Which I will, when the time is right, but one other thing I’ve learned as a private investigator is that you don’t let your employer dictate how you run your investigation. You have things to do, and you have things you need to keep close to the vest, and sometimes you have to do things one step at a time.

  Amelia sets her jaw. “I want you to tell me who did this. Right now. If Donnie is involved in this somehow… if he was into something that got him killed… I need to know, Sidney. I just… need to know.”

  “Yes, you do,” Chris tells her. “But not now. Me and Sid have one more stop to make and then we’ll have all the proof we need.”

  She sniffs, but finally nods her head even though I can see she doesn’t really agree. “Where are we going?”

  I almost feel sorry for her. “You’re going to stay here, where you’re safe. Keep the door locked until we get back.”

  “What? No!” Her eyes are wide with panic. “I’m not staying here by myself!”

  “Amelia, no one will find you here.”

  “He did!” she shouts, pointing at Chris. “He found you, and he found me, and you can’t promise that no one else will do the same!”

  “That’s because he knows me. Nobody else knows you’re here.”

  “You can’t know that!”

  “Amelia—”

  “No, Sid, she’s right.” Chris’s voice is annoyingly reasonable. “You don’t know that nobody’s going to find her here.”

  “There’s nowhere else we can take her,” I point out.

  “I know. I’m just saying she needs some protection.” He takes out his cellphone and dials a number by heart. “Yeah. Hey, Apollo? It’s Christopher Caine. I’m going to text you an address in Hamtramck. I need you down here for a protection detail. Yeah. Okay. Ten minutes. Got it.”

  Smart man. If you can’t bring the famous movie star out in public, then you get someone you trust to come to her. While he’s giving Apollo more details Amelia looks over at me. “But where are you two going?”

  “We have a stop to make, like Chris told you.” Man, I really wish I had my gun. “We’re going back to see someone we already talked to. Seems she left out a few details.”

  When she realizes who I’m talking about, the tears fall all over again.

  Chapter Eleven

  This time when we get to the end of the second-floor hallway of the professional building and to the office door of Melissa Thorne, Agent to the Stars, Chris smiles at me, and knocks.

  “So polite,” I murmur in a low voice.

  “Can’t hurt,” he tells me, “considering how rude you were last time.”

  “Me? I was playing nice cop. You were bad cop.”

  “I don’t remember you wearing a uniform.”

  “Maybe,” I tease him, “you should just stop playing dress-up with me in your mind.”

  “You wish.”

  “You wish.”

  He knocked again with a smug expression that I really don’t think he earned in that exchange. This time, there was an answer from inside. “Come in, please.”

  I’m closer to the doorknob so this time I get to open it for him. I wave him through ahead of me. There. Serves him right.

  At his desk, Melissa Thorne’s weaselly looking secretary blinks his narrow eyes at us before jumping up from his desk.

  “No. No, uh-uh, no. No,” he says, covering every way the word can be used. “I am under very strict instructions not to let the two of you back into Miss Thorne’s office without her lawyer present. Very strict. I’m sorry, you’re going to have to leave now.”

  He shoos at us with both hands as if he’s going to herd us back into the hallway. His department store tie is flapping back and forth as he tries to get us to move.

  Only, we aren’t moving.

  “Hold on,” Chris tells him, holding up a single finger. “Your boss can’t kick us out this time.”

  The secretary looks at him uncertainly. “She can’t?”

  “No, she can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” Chris tells him. “We’ve got a warrant to search her records.”

  The guy’s face falls flat. “A warrant?”

  “Yup. It’s like a magic word that gets me into any door. Try it. Go inside and tell Miss Thorne that we have a warrant. It works just like magic.”

  My head snaps around when he says it that way. For a minute there, I was worried that maybe he knew more about how I’d gotten Amelia out safe and sound than he was letting on. Magic. Could he know? He didn’t look at me. Didn’t smirk. Didn’t wink. No… that was just Chris being funny.

  If only he knew.

  All the wind went out of the secretary’s sails, and he just stood there watching us. “You have a warrant? Show me.”

  From a back pocket Chris slides out the three pages he was carrying there, folded in thirds. He waves them like a paper fan under the guy’s nose. “Okay? These papers say I get to talk to your boss whether she wants me to or not. So. You going to open the door, or…?”

  I have to hold a hand over my mouth to hide my expression. Chris is pretty awesome to watch when he’s on his game. Kind of sexy, actually. Not that I’d ever tell him that.

  With a reluctant nod the guy goes to the door to the inner office and pushes it open just enough to tell Melissa Thorne that the police are back to see her. I heard her grumble something, but all I caught were the swear words. Then her secretary said something about us having a warrant, and the other room went silent.

  Then he was motioning for us to go in, just like magic. He even held the door for us.

  Chris made sure to close it once we got in.

  Thorne is sitting at her desk again. Actually, for all I know she might have never left that position since the last time I was in this room. I’m pretty sure those are the same clothes. Without her star client Amelia Falconi making money for the company, she must be working overtime to find new talent. That, and working to put distance between the murder and her agency.

  Tossing her pen down on the desk she glares at us. “You could have called ahead.”

  “Hi, Miss Thorne,” Chris says cheerfully. “Wow, I’ll bet you didn’t expect to see us again.”

  “No, I most certainly did not. Give me this warrant, and then I’m calling the agency’s lawyer.”

  “Well, see, that might be a problem.” Waving the papers again, Chris plops himself down into a chair on this side, hooking an arm over the back. “I don’t have a warrant. I lied.”

  I was expecting her to shout or try to throw us out again. Instead, she throws her head back, and she laughs. “Of course you did. You know what, detective? You would have made a really good actor yourself. Have you ever considered switching careers? With
that face and the way you can tell an untruth without a hitch, I think you’d be great at it.”

  “No. I’m afraid I couldn’t do that. See, I like my work too much. I like catching bad people and holding them accountable for the things they’ve done. Like for instance, the person who killed Donnie Sterling. I’m going to make sure they spend a very long time in jail for that. Maybe even the rest of their life.”

  “I didn’t kill Donnie Sterling,” she tells us, without having to even think about it.

  “Oh we know that,” I tell her. “Someone else did the killing.”

  “Then why are you here, bothering me?” she snaps. “Just leave and let me get on with my work.”

  I look down at Chris with a smile. He nods his head in agreement. “Yup. She didn’t even ask who did kill him. She’s not the least bit curious.”

  “Of course I’m not,” Thorne says. “It’s nothing to do with me. If you arrested someone else, then you obviously don’t consider me a suspect anymore.”

  “You don’t even want to know if it was Amelia?”

  Her hands fidget with a paper on her desk before she drops it on a pile. “Was it her? Is that who you arrested?”

  “No. She’s innocent,” Chris says. “No doubt about it. On our way here, we heard that the real killer was picked up and brought down to the Seventh Precinct to be processed for the murder.”

  “Well… good.” Funny, but she doesn’t sound relieved. “If it wasn’t Amelia then I don’t care who it was. So you don’t have any business here. You don’t have a warrant. I had nothing to do with this like I told you before and now you can leave. Goodbye.”

  “But, Miss Thorne,” I say cheerfully. “You are involved with the murder. You might not have done the killing yourself, but you are involved.”

  She looks back and forth between me and Chris. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “Oh, we’re very serious. And we can prove it.”

  Thorne shrugs and gestures with a hand to the papers Chris is holding. “I don’t see how you think you’re going to do that if that isn’t a warrant. I’m not going to just open my files to you on a whim. My agency would fire me if I start revealing private client information without an order from a court. And since you can’t prove I’m guilty of anything, I’m going to need to keep this job. You can show yourselves out.”

  “Ah,” Chris says, “but you see, this is better than a warrant.”

  “You just don’t quit, do you?” She stares at the both of us for a very long time, and then finally shrugs her shoulders. “All right. I’ll bite. What’s better than a warrant?”

  Unfolding the pages, he smooths them flat against her desk, and then sets them down in front of her. “The information the warrant would have gotten me. It’s much better to already have the answer in your hands, don’t you think?”

  Thorne’s face screws up with a sneer. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  And then she pushes her chair back, just a little, further away from what Chris is showing her. It scraped against the hardwood floor.

  In the world of private investigations, we call that a ‘tell.’ She thought we didn’t have anything on her, and we just proved her wrong. With the real killer in jail, all we have to do is prove the motive. The motive rests right here, in this office, and that’s where Melissa Thorne comes in.

  “You really should take a look at this,” Chris tells her. “I mean, it’s really interesting stuff. See, this is the bank account information for Amelia Falconi’s bodyguard. It shows deposits made from your agency into his account on a regular, bi-weekly basis.”

  “So what?” she snaps. “We were paying Donnie Sterling to protect our asset. Little did we know that he was sleeping with her. That was a fringe benefit that we definitely did not budget for.”

  And then she pushes her chair back a little bit more.

  Scrape.

  “But wait,” Chris says, adopting a comically confused look on his face. “Didn’t you tell us the last time we were here that you actually did know about the affair they were having? Didn’t she tell us that, Sid?”

  “She certainly did,” I say, enjoying the way Melissa Thorne is squirming. She knows we’ve got something, she just isn’t sure what. Not yet.

  Chris points to the papers again. “You knew about the affair between Donnie Sterling and Amelia Falconi, and you continued to employ him. You could have terminated him at any point. Why didn’t you?”

  Thorne flaps her hands in the air. “Look, I’ve got over a dozen clients that I’m responsible for all by myself out of this office. Amelia Falconi was just one of them. I can’t manage every minor detail of our clients’ lives. So they were having sex in every hotel room they stayed in for the last two years. Hotel rooms that our agency paid for. What’s that to me?”

  “I’ll tell you what that was to you, Miss Thorne. That was your excuse to get rid of a client who was refusing to work.”

  And the chair went back just a little bit further.

  Scraaape.

  Standing behind Chris, I put my hand on his shoulder as I pick up the story of what we’d figured out. “Amelia told us she basically gave up acting over the last two years. She was on sort of a self-improvement trip, going back to people she’d treated badly in the past and asking for their forgiveness. Kind of noble, I guess, in a way. But I have to believe that an actress as popular as Amelia has gotten lots of movie offers in that time. Even if I don’t care much for her movies myself, the rest of the world loves her. But if she’s not working, even an agent to the stars like yourself doesn’t make money. You don’t make residuals off the movies she’s already made. You only make money when she’s cast in something new.”

  Okay, so maybe I understand Hollywood a little bit. Then again, no work equals no pay in a lot of jobs. Mine included.

  Thorne glares at me. “So what are you saying?”

  “Amelia wasn’t making money for you. She is incredibly popular, and she could have her pick of films but she’s refusing to do anything at all. At the same time, you were paying for hotels all over the country. You were paying for expensive champagne. You were paying for her bodyguards to protect her. You would pay anything to keep a client like her, because you figured eventually she would take on a new movie and that would be a payday for you and your agency.”

  “Except,” Chris adds, “she didn’t. She kept turning down roles. You were hemorrhaging money when it came to Amelia Falconi, and you weren’t getting anything in return. How did that make you feel?”

  “Angry,” she admits without any hesitation at all. “I was furious with her. I called her several times and threatened to terminate her. She just laughed each time because she knew we wouldn’t let her go. We couldn’t. As you say, she represented a potential windfall for our agency if she ever took on another movie.”

  “But then you figured out that she wasn’t going to accept any new movie offer, right? Not until she was done taking care of her personal issues, and there was no telling how long that would take. You were tied to a sinking ship and you couldn’t do anything about it.”

  “Except kill her,” I said.

  “Right,” Chris agrees. “Except that.”

  A little smirk curls up the corner of Thorne’s lip. “But you already said you arrested someone else for the murder, and like I said you can’t prove I was involved. I was furious with Amelia Falconi. Of course I was. I should be getting rich off her, and I wasn’t. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever been that angry at someone, but that’s a reason for me to kill her, not Donnie Sterling. You’ve got someone else for his murder and as you notice, Amelia is still very much alive, so I didn’t kill her either. Looks to me like you’re just harassing me for no reason.”

  Chris leans forward and reaches out across the desk.

  The chair moves further back.

  Scraaaaaaaaape.

  He wasn’t reaching for her. Just the papers he dropped on the desk, though. He flips the
top page.

  “Here’s more entries, payments on a regular basis, made from the agency’s account and directly deposited into the bodyguard’s account.”

  Thorne didn’t say anything this time. She didn’t even look at the papers. She just glared at Chris with the same kind of heated anger that I imagine she felt for Amelia Falconi and her unwillingness to make money for everyone else.

  Chris flipped to the last page.

  “And more regular payments, but then there’s this one payment right here in the middle of the page. One huge lump sum. Five figures worth. Wow, that’s a lot. The funny thing is, this payment isn’t from the agency’s account. This one is from a personal account number that will trace back to you, Miss Thorne. It’s paid to Amelia’s bodyguard.”

  “Ha!” she snaps, pointing her finger down at the page even as her eyes stayed level with Chris’s. “Now I know you’re lying. You were lying about this being a warrant, and you’re lying about this having anything to do with Donnie Sterling’s account. I never, not ever once, paid that much money to Donnie Sterling!”

  Chris smiles. “Did I say you paid it to Donnie Sterling?”

  “Yes, you did! Yes, you did! You said this was supposed to be the bank account records of Amelia’s bodyguard and I have never paid that kind of money to Donnie Sterling. You both need to leave now before I call—”

  Chris clucks his tongue, interrupting her. “Oh, I get the confusion. No, see, I said this was the account record for Amelia’s bodyguard. I never said which one.”

  Her chair bumped into the back wall with a thud.

  “See, Miss Thorne, Amelia Falconi had two bodyguards. The man who was killed, Donnie Sterling… and the man you paid to kill him.”

  Every trace of color drained out of Melissa Thorne’s face. Her hand began to tremble so badly that she had to curl it into a fist and lay it into her lap. Her lips moved. No words came out.

  “What was the other bodyguard’s name?” Chris asks me.

  “Lucas Rudalpho,” I tell him.

  “Huh. You’d think I could remember a name like that. It’s almost like I forgot the guy even existed.”