This Pen for Hire

by Laura Levine

  “Here we go.”

  Elaine was back with a bag of cookies. She held it out, and I took one.

  “So,” I said, as she bit into a Mallomar with relish, “what was Stacy like?”

  “World-class bitch,” she said through cookie crumbs, chocolate gathering in the corners of her mouth.

  “Really?”

  “Sweet as pie if you were someone who could do her any good. Treated you like shit if you couldn’t. Men loved her, of course. Blond hair, big boobs. That’s what men really want. Forget all that crap about inner beauty, it’s what’s on the outside that counts.”

  She was right, of course. Life isn’t fair, especially to short, stocky nurses with a fondness for chocolate.

  “Your manager, Mr. Kolchev, sure seemed to be crazy about her.”

  Her face flushed with anger. “That moron,” she spat out. “I ought to sue him. He gave Stacy that apartment, when it belonged to me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The apartment next door. I told him years ago I wanted it. ‘The minute it’s vacant, I want it,’ I told him. It’s a big corner unit. With a den, and a terrace. Daryush promised he’d give it to me. Then two weeks ago, the lady who was living there died, and he gave it to Stacy.”

  She reached for another Mallomar.

  “She was only living in the building a year, for crying out loud. I’ve been here for ten. Stacy didn’t deserve that apartment. I did!”

  Her face was bright red, suffused with rage. Frankly, I was a little spooked. I made a mental note to never have a nervous breakdown at the UCLA psychiatric ward.

  “I guess I’d better be going now,” I said, a little too brightly. “Thanks so much for your help.”

  “Sure,” she said, normal again, as if she’d just woken from a bad dream.

  And as she walked me to the door, I asked myself: Could Elaine Zimmer have been angry enough to kill Stacy over an apartment? Stranger things have happened in the wacky world of Los Angeles real estate.

  She hesitated a moment before opening the door to let me out. My stomach lurched. Had she somehow sensed that I suspected her of killing Stacy? Was she about to bump me off with a UCLA coffee mug?

  She smiled a tentative smile. “Those letters you write, to get people dates. You think you could write one for me?”

  Thank God. She didn’t want to kill me. Like most of the women in Los Angeles, all she wanted was a date.

  “Sorry. I’m no longer in the love-letter business.”

  “How about Personals ads?” she asked hopefully. “You do those?”

  “Nope,” I lied. “Afraid not.”

  “That’s too bad.” She sighed, and opened the door.

  I felt sorry for her. Poor thing probably hadn’t had a date since the Carter administration. But no way was I going to get involved in someone’s love life. Not again. Not after what happened with Howard. I thanked her for her time and scooted out the door. On my way out, I shot a furtive glance at the stained blouse in the laundry basket.

  Sure looked like blood to me.

  Back out in the courtyard, the sun was shining, the birds were chirping, and the breeze was breezing. It was all so darn idyllic; you’d never dream a young woman had recently been bludgeoned to death on the premises.

  I stared at the police tape crisscrossed in front of Stacy’s door and wondered if the door could possibly be open. I doubted it, but what the heck. I reached through the tape, and jiggled the doorknob. Just as I’d thought, it was locked.

  I started to walk away when suddenly it occurred to me: I’d left my fingerprints at the scene of the crime. What sort of an idiot was I, anyway? Detective Rea had made that snide joke about arresting me. What if they found my prints on the doorknob and hauled me off to jail?

  I rummaged through my purse for a Kleenex, then raced back to the door to wipe my fingerprints away. I was standing there, rubbing the doorknob, picturing myself in one of those unflattering orange jumpsuits, when I heard someone approaching. I quickly stashed my tissue in my pocket and turned to see Mr. Blue Eyes. I smiled feebly, trying to look as law abiding as possible.

  “Hi.” He smiled, his blue eyes crinkling in a most attractive way. “Are you from the police?”

  “Yes,” I lied. Well, it wasn’t a total lie. After all, I’d just come from police headquarters, hadn’t I?

  “What’s going on?”

  “There’s been a murder.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Stacy Lawrence was murdered in her bed last night,” I said in my most cop-like manner.

  “My God, that’s terrible,” he said, running his fingers through a shock of thick, sandy hair. “But I don’t get it. Stacy doesn’t live in Number Six. Her apartment’s across the courtyard.”

  “Not anymore. Apparently the victim moved into Six after the former tenant died.”

  (Notice how I said “the victim” instead of “Stacy”? Very coppish, n’est ce pas? I couldn’t wait to work “perpetrator” into a sentence.)

  “But I thought Elaine Zimmer was supposed to get this apartment.”

  “So did Elaine.”

  “Wow, she must’ve been steamed,” he said.

  At least, that’s what I think he said. I wasn’t paying all that much attention. Somehow I found myself staring at those blue eyes that crinkled at the corners when he laughed. What the hell was I doing? I scolded myself. After my ghastly marriage to The Blob, hadn’t I sworn off men forever—or at least until I found one capable of asking for directions?

  We were standing there, him talking to me and me staring at him, when suddenly a piercing scream filled the air.

  “Whoops,” he said. “My teakettle. Gotta run.”

  “Wait! I’d like to ask you some questions.”

  (Like, are you seeing anyone? Do you snore after sex? Do you hog the remote?)

  “All right,” he said, motioning me to his apartment. “Follow me.”

  His apartment was, as they say in decorating circles, eclectic. He had sleek minimalist pieces alongside time-worn antiques. If I had tried something like that, it would have looked ghastly. But his place looked terrific.

  He settled me down on his minimalist sofa, while he brewed up some tea in the kitchen. First coffee, now tea—my bladder was getting quite a workout.

  “By the way,” he said, coming out from the kitchen with a pot of steaming oolong, “my name’s Cameron. Cameron Bannick.”

  “Jaine Austen.”

  He settled his lanky body into an armchair across from me. “Love your books.”

  “That’s Jaine with an ‘i.’ ”

  “Well, Detective Austen,” he said, “I’m happy to answer any questions I can, but I don’t know how helpful I’m going to be. I’ve been away all month.”

  Thank God. That meant he couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with the murder. Which meant we could start dating and get married and have a passel of kids with crinkly blue eyes.

  “I’ve been on a business trip.”

  Solvent, too. Thanks again, God.

  “Up in San Francisco, buying antiques for my shop.”

  Okay, cancel the wedding. The guy was obviously of the gay persuasion. Great decorator. Impeccable taste. Owns an antiques shop. You don’t have to be Stephen Hawking to figure that one out.

  “So,” he said, “what would you like to know?”

  Why are the good ones always gay? That’s what I wanted to know. But what I actually asked was: “Do you know anyone in the building who might want to kill Stacy Lawrence?”

  “Only Elaine, for cheating her out of that apartment. I’m kidding, of course. Elaine has a temper, but I can’t believe she’d actually kill Stacy.”

  “What about the other tenants?”

  “The Garibaldis in Number Two are in their eighties. Mr. Garibaldi uses a walker, and Mrs. Garibaldi isn’t exactly doing handsprings. I doubt they’d have the strength to kill her. There’s Janet Yoshida in Number Three—she’s a medical stu
dent at UCLA. Very quiet. Hardly ever here. I don’t think any of them had much to do with Stacy. The only one she was close with was Marian.”

  “Marian?”

  “The tenant who lived in Number Six before Stacy. She died about three weeks ago. I was in San Francisco at the time.” He sighed deeply. “She was a terrific lady, and a good friend of mine.”

  He picked up a framed picture from the coffee table and looked at it fondly.

  “That’s us, last year on her birthday,” he said, handing me the picture. “I took her to the Conga Room.”

  “The Conga Room? Isn’t that one of those terminally hip clubs for twenty-somethings with multiple body-piercings?”

  Cameron smiled. “That’s where Marian wanted to go. She was quite a pistol.”

  I looked down at the picture and saw a heavily made-up woman in her seventies with youthful shoulder-length blond hair. Think Kim Basinger, with liver spots. I could tell that in her heyday Marian had been a knockout, but by the time this picture was taken, she was far from her heyday. Cameron sat beside her in the photo, smiling into the camera and holding her hand.

  Exhibit A, Your Honor. Handsome young man, on a date with woman old enough to be his grandmother. If I’d had any fleeting hopes that Cameron was straight, that picture pretty much killed them.

  “Stacy got a kick out of Marian,” Cameron said. “You see, Marian had been an actress back in the forties and fifties. Made a lot of B movies. Abbott & Costello Meet Each Other. Stuff like that. She had a lot of terrific Hollywood war stories, and Stacy liked to pump her for advice.”

  “So Stacy wanted to be an actress?”

  “She was blond. She was beautiful. She thought her navel was the center of the universe. Sure, she wanted to be an actress.”

  “And Marian was fond of Stacy?”

  “She was flattered by her attention. Stacy reminded Marian of herself when she was young.”

  “Did Marian ever mention anyone in Stacy’s life who might have perpetrated the crime?” (Yes! I worked in “perpetrated”!)

  “You mean, like a jealous lover or something?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Stacy dated a lot. Plenty of boyfriends du jour. She was going hot and heavy with an actor for a while. I saw him at the pool a couple of times. I couldn’t help noticing he was a very handsome guy.”

  I’ll bet you couldn’t.

  “The macho type, very muscular. Could probably bench-press a refrigerator. He seemed crazy about Stacy. But I guess he wasn’t successful enough for her, because eventually she threw him over for someone else. Some hotshot agent.”

  Hmm. Spurned ex-boyfriend. Sounded promising.

  “Anyone else who might have held a grudge?”

  Cameron laughed. “You’ll have to take a number on that one. Stacy was a bitch. Lots of people resented her.”

  “Like for instance?”

  “There was a girlfriend of hers at the health club. Another aerobics instructor. I can’t remember her name. Iris, or Violet. Some flower name. Anyhow, she and Stacy were best friends, until Stacy made a play for her boyfriend, the hotshot agent. Stacy eventually managed to steal him away. So it’s just a wild and crazy guess, but I’d say the former best friend is holding a bit of a grudge.”

  Betrayed best friend. Rich agent-lover. Two more juicy suspects. I made mental note to check out the LA Sports Club.

  “If you couldn’t help her in some way,” Cameron said, “Stacy had no use for you. She once came into my shop looking for an étagère. She saw one she liked. When I wouldn’t go down on the price, she got all pissy and barely spoke to me after that.

  “Anyhow, lots of people didn’t like her. I have no idea if any of them was angry enough to kill her.”

  “Were you?”

  “Hell, no,” he said, shaking his head at the absurdity of the notion. “Stacy meant nothing to me, one way or the other. She was definitely not my type.”

  That’s for sure. Wrong gender.

  “More tea?” He held out the pot.

  “No, thanks. I’m fine.”

  He put down the teapot, and then, before I knew what was happening, he was actually saying, “Look, if you’re not doing anything Wednesday night, maybe you’d like to catch a movie.”

  “With you?”

  “Yeah.” He grinned. “With me. They’re playing one of Marian’s old films at a revival theater in Silver Lake.”

  I’m afraid I just sat there, gulping, for an unattractive beat or two. Was Cameron Bannick, he of the glorious blue eyes, actually asking me out on a date? Was it possible he wasn’t gay, after all? That he was simply a breathtaking stud with an affinity for armoires?

  “I probably shouldn’t be asking you out on a date. I don’t know if the department would approve.”

  “What department?”

  “The police department.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “So, how about it? Are we on for the movies?”

  Somehow I managed to nod yes.

  Chapter Seven

  My heart was pounding. My pulse was racing. And my palms were sweating. No, it wasn’t sex. Or a heart attack. It was Starbucks. I swear, they put enough caffeine in their lattes to jump-start a diesel truck.

  I was sitting across from Kandi, taking cautious sips of a mocha latte, listening to Kandi let off steam. And she was plenty steamed. In fact, I couldn’t decide who was letting off more steam—Kandi or the espresso machine.

  Kandi’s date with the Antonio Banderas look-alike had been an utter disaster. Which I could have predicted. Men who look like Antonio Banderas don’t need to join Foto-Date.

  “The guy was short and fat and wore a toupee so obvious it practically had the price tag still on it.”

  “Where on earth did he get that picture he sent you?”

  “From Antonio Banderas’s fan club.”

  “You mean, the picture he sent you was actually Antonio Banderas?”

  “Do you believe the nerve of that guy?” she said, tearing her napkin into angry shreds. “When I asked him if sending out Antonio Banderas’s photo wasn’t just a tad dishonest, he said, ‘Of course not. After all, I look just like him.’”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I was so upset, I practically choked on my Chicken McNuggets.”

  “He took you to McDonald’s? Wasn’t he supposed to take you to a restaurant on the beach?”

  “Yeah, right. The closest I got to the water that night was the ladies’ room, where I spent a good twenty minutes trying to escape through an overhead window.”

  “You poor thing.”

  “And remember how he said he was a doctor? He’s a doctor, all right. Of phrenology. He reads the lumps on people’s heads.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “He shares office space with a psychic named Wamsutta.”

  She drank the last of her espresso with an angry slurp.

  “I’ve had it with Foto-Date. I should have known better than to sign up with a dating service that advertises in the National Enquirer.”

  “Look, I hate to say I told you so—”

  “Then don’t,” she said, grabbing my napkin. Having already ripped hers to shreds, she now began to mutilate mine.

  “And if all that weren’t bad enough,” she moaned, “the cockroach has a hernia.”

  “What?”

  “Carl, the actor who plays Freddie the cockroach on Beanie & The Cockroach, has a serious hernia problem, so we’re going to have to shut down production for a whole week. And we’re way behind on scripts as it is. I don’t suppose you’ve come up with any cockroach stories?”

  “No, the cockroach muse hasn’t struck.”

  She shot me a dirty look, then flounced over to the counter. Minutes later she came back with a chocolate chip muffin the size of a Volkswagen.

  “Here,” she said, cutting it in two. “Have half.”

  “I can’t. Really. If my thighs get any bigger, I’ll have to rent them out as condos.”r />
  “C’mon. It’s a muffin. Muffins are healthy.”

  “There’s no way I’m eating this muffin,” I said, grabbing my half. We sat and chewed companionably for a minute or two.

  “Oh, well,” Kandi said, obviously mellowed out by her chocolate fix. “The cockroach’s hernia will heal, and I’ll live to date again. Which reminds me. I heard of a great new way to meet guys—Christie’s auction house.”

  The woman is tireless in her search for a mate. Utterly tireless.

  “The place is loaded with eligibles. The script supervisor on Beanie met her fiancé there. A stockbroker. They were bidding against each other for a painting. He got the painting, and she got him. I’m sending away for their auction schedule. We’ll go together.”

  “I don’t think so. Those kind of ritzy places intimidate me.”

  “Don’t be silly. You’ve got to start dating one of these days.”

  “Actually, I am dating.”

  Kandi put down her half of the muffin. “You are?”

  “Well, not exactly dating, but I do have a date.”

  “With who?”

  “Someone I met while I was investigating a murder.”

  “A murder? Oh, my God. Tell me all about it.”

  And I did.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said, when I was through. “You’ve been impersonating a cop?”

  “And a newspaper reporter.”

  “You’d better be careful or you’ll wind up in His ’n Hers jail cells with Howard.”

  “Oh, come on. They don’t arrest you for telling little white lies.”

  “Just be careful, will you? This whole thing sounds dangerous to me.”

  She was right, of course. It was dangerous. And I realized, much to my surprise, that the danger was a turn-on. For the first time in a long time I had some adrenaline pumping through my veins alongside Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey. And it felt good.

  “I can’t believe you’re dating one of the suspects.”

  “I told you. We’re not really dating. We’re just going to a movie together. And he’s not really a suspect. He was away in San Francisco at the time of the murder.”

  “That’s what he says. There’s a crazy new invention called an airplane that whisks people from San Francisco to Los Angeles in no time at all.”