Everybody Takes The Money (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries)
Page 5
The black window in the center of the computer screen turned into an image of a middle-aged man with dark olive skin and salt-and-pepper eyebrows. He was staring at the screen as though he might challenge it to a duel.
He’d probably win. Winning is his thing.
“Trudy, are you all right?” my stepfather asked in his melodic Spanish accent.
I’d only had my current name for a year at this point, and already it sounded much more normal than my birth name. Trudy just sounded all sorts of wrong at this point. “The name’s Drusilla.”
“Mr. Ross told me you were in the hospital. I can see you’re hurt. Tell me what happened.”
“I had a little accident on a scooter. One of those Vespa things. They’re unbalanced crap.”
There was a long pause. “I don’t believe you.”
My stomach muscles clenched and I felt the familiar wash of adrenaline down my spine. Exactly how much did Roberto know and, if he knew, why was he playing with me like this?
And then it dawned on me: of course I would have lied to the lawyer. Roberto would expect me to lie to Nathaniel. The lawyer would have expected me to lie and would have told the Vespa story as though it were a lie. I had the best lawyer on the planet.
“You can look up Vespa safety ratings online, Roberto.”
“What happened, Trudy?”
“My name’s Drusilla. If you can’t remember a simple name, Roberto, perhaps you ought to look into getting tested for Alzheimer’s. Which would be a terrible development for a CEO, right?”
My stepfather is an extraordinarily wealthy man and head of one of the largest investment banks in the world. He managed that feat on his own, well before he married my mother. His sigh was both dramatic and melodic. “Drusilla. Tell me what happened.”
“Oh, all right,” I said. “I was riding on the back of a motorcycle with a friend—”
“Who?”
“Uh...Raven. I think.”
“Raven. Is that her given name?”
“His stage name. Maybe. Wasn’t what I liked about him best, if you know what I mean. Anyhow, we weren’t going very fast and we took a little tumble. That’s it.”
“Were you drinking?”
“Yes, but I wasn’t driving.”
“And this other person?”
“Took off. No idea what happened to him.”
I waited to see if Roberto would take it. After all, going off drunk on a motorcycle was exactly the kind of thing he expected me to do. Hell, it was the kind of thing I had done all the time as a teenager in Manhattan and London. I hadn’t done it in years, though. Not for a very long time.
“Mr. Ross will take care of it,” Roberto said. I would have pumped my fist in the air but I was on camera. “However, this won’t happen again.”
“Oh, come on, Roberto. I didn’t ask for this trouble.”
“And yet miraculously you keep finding it. Perhaps you enjoy bad situations.”
Rolling my eyes seemed like a better video chat choice than flipping him off. Though I was sorely tempted.
“Enough about your issues,” he said. “How are things going with your project?”
Ah yes. The project. The project to get me out of Los Angeles and home to New York.
Eleven years ago I murdered someone. I’d had a very good reason to do it, but murder is still a huge and horrible thing. My mother, who’d washed her hands of dealing with me when I was fifteen, refused to so much as answer the phone when I called for help. When my father found out what I’d done, he sent someone to track me down and kill me. After all, I’d cost him a lot of money when I killed his business partner, and money is all that man cares about.
Not surprisingly, I got scared, and Stevie and I went into hiding for eleven years. I’d had very good training from my bodyguard, who was former Special Forces. I knew how to hide.
My mother, not knowing whether I was alive or dead after I vanished, had me declared dead privately and with no tabloid fanfare. Then she hired actresses to play me in public. It’s not hard to arrange that sort of farce when you have more money than Croesus. And when all of Croesus’s money was at stake. From what Stevie had been able to piece together, my being dead put the issue of the vast fortune I was supposed to inherit under a huge cloud. Having actresses pretend to be me pushed the day of reckoning for what would happen to all the money off until my thirtieth birthday.
It also complicated my simply being able to show up and get my money without my family’s approval. Not only would I have to prove I was who I said I was, but they could fight me every step along the way. If I revealed publicly the reason for my disappearance—the name of the person I had killed—the firestorm would be immense. No doubt my father would show up to join in the fun.
Keeping my money from possibly ending up in my father’s hands has been a family priority for decades.
When my mother married my father, her grandmother Ida didn’t like him one bit, because she was a wise, wise old woman who believed thirty-five-year-old men had no business marrying seventeen-year-old girls. Too bad no one listened to Great-Gramma Ida, despite her pocketbook. When I was born she announced she was leaving ninety-five percent of her fortune to me, which probably made my father ejaculate with excitement on the spot. Then she added that I wouldn’t inherit until I was thirty. Ida figured thirty years was long enough for me to become my own adult. And long enough for me to learn what kind of man my father really was.
When my brother was born, Ida split the pie between the two of us. That probably really irritated my father. Now there were two people he’d have to hide his true nature from for thirty years. And, to no one’s surprise, he couldn’t do it. When I was five years old, he introduced me to my little sister Stevie. Her mother was our former ski instructor. That was the end of his marriage and the start of a very complicated trans-Atlantic custody arrangement.
Ida died two years after I disappeared. I wished I’d been able to say goodbye to her.
Stevie was not only the reason for my parents’ divorce, but also the reason I had not yet returned to New York despite Roberto having found me. My mother hated Stevie from the moment she was born. My return to New York was going to make all hell break loose on its own. Stevie accompanying me was an absolute no-go.
The project was to get Stevie standing on her own so that I could leave her.
Roberto hadn’t even told my mother he’d found me alive and well after eleven years of not knowing. The consequences of that omission on their relationship were going to be bad enough. Bringing Stevie along with? No.
“It’s not going well. I think I told you last week we were going to see another psychiatrist. Complete bozo. Ten minutes in, he starts discussing medication.”
“There are several medications which can assist—”
“Roberto, I don’t have any concerns about why someone might want to take drugs. The more the merrier. But he didn’t even know the reasons why yet. Have you ever been to a psychiatrist?”
He answered a tad too quickly. “I have not.”
Ooo. Liar, liar. “Then let me tell you how this works. The first session is a get-to-know-you kind of cocktail party thing. The two of you chat, but you stay vague on the particulars until you get to know one another. The three doctors we’ve seen have been bozos, giving diagnoses right off the bat. And they’re also expensive. Maybe I should become a therapist. There’s really good money there.”
“Yes, but therapists have to listen to people,” Roberto said. “Your skills lie elsewhere. Which brings me to the subject of this chat. You need to start developing the expertise you’re going to need in New York.”
“Doing coke at parties in Tribeca?”
Roberto did not laugh at that. On the up side, he didn’t get angry and end the call, either.
He finally responded with, “No. That is not what I meant. You will have family responsibilities.”
“Don’t we have fleets and fleets of top MBAs to handle things for us?”
“You’re an investment banker, you ought to know.”
He waited a second. “Yes.”
In case I haven’t mentioned this, Roberto the investment banker is the least avaricious and most normal and reasonable person in my family. More than once I used to wish he’d been my real father. My life would have improved immensely on Day One, starting with me being a different person.
“What’s Chance doing?” I asked.
Chancellor was my brother, younger than me by fifteen months. Everyone talked about how close we ought to be, us being practically Irish twins and all. Everyone would have done better to discuss how we were different species created out of the same genetic material. Chance was the kid everyone hated in school: he was smart and he worked hard, with excellent grades and a focus on being the top at everything he did.
The last time I spoke to him was shortly before my entire life went to hell in London and my father had plans to ship me off to boarding school in Switzerland. Chance’s response: “Maybe you’ll learn something for once.”
“Chance is doing excellent work. He has a JD/MBA from Harvard. Did you know that?”
I’d never even heard of a JD/MBA degree, although I could parse what it was from the initials. That seemed about right for that stuck-up prick. “Good for him.”
“Currently he’s senior vice president of sales and marketing at van der Laan.”
My mother’s family giant cash cow. “Then the family’s taken care of.”
“You really want to leave your future to your brother’s care?”
Oh.
Excellent point.
Once Chance was in charge, my future would look very sketchy indeed. I would inherit my half fifteen months before he got his. Chance was both educated better than I was and had real-world business experience. I was doomed.
“You have some work to do to get ready. While you seek out help for your sister, you need to work on a few things for yourself. I have the name of someone I’d like you to work with.”
“Roberto, I’m never going to be much of a reader.”
“No. But you can be functional. Next.”
Functional. Fuck you, Roberto.
“You need to buckle down and find someone to help your sister process past events. This should be your full-time job. You need to put everything else aside.” He smiled. Maybe it was a smile. Debatable. “Including motorcycle rides from men named ‘Raven.’ Or this other adventure, last week, a visit to an imprisonment camp for Cambodian illegal immigrants? Did I read that correctly?”
He knew about Anne and me going to Baldwin Park. Was he following Anne’s career? He must be.
Whether he was or he wasn’t, I was absolutely certain now that Roberto knew the motorcycle story was bullshit. And it wouldn’t be long before he found out what had happened.
“Visiting doctors is expensive, Roberto.”
He nodded. “That’s why you’re going to start working for me, Drusilla.”
“Amongst the things that are never happening—”
He sighed. “It’s money. Of course you’re going to do it.”
On the one hand, I clearly needed money. Unlike most people, I admit freely that money is a great motivator in my life. Money, after all, was the main reason I’d gone with Anne to interview Courtney at a crappy motel in Koreatown. On the other hand, working for Roberto was a very bad, terrible, awful avenue to take toward even greater financial dependence on him. Money is control. Always has been, always will be.
“I want to help you out, Tru—Drusilla. You know this to be true. The sooner you can figure out a stable situation for your sister, the sooner you will return home to where you belong. And the real work can begin.”
I stared directly into the tiny black hole that marked the computer’s built-in camera.
He was right, of course: either I figured out how to set Stevie up to become stable and happy on her own, or Roberto would get tired of waiting and take over the problem for me. Stevie would vanish off my radar forever. He was being generous in allowing me to give it the old college try.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
“Nothing immoral or illegal,” he said.
I shrugged. My definitions of acceptable morality and legality are adjacent but not identical to the widely accepted ones.
“Or even difficult,” he continued. “This doesn’t even involve falling off the back of anything.”
I waved my hand in the air. “Stop telling me what it’s not and start telling me what it is.”
“A friend of mine—”
My face may have betrayed my doubt in that description, because Roberto nodded.
“A gentleman of my acquaintance, who I’ve had the pleasure to get know, is setting up a charity venture in Los Angeles. He has asked for my help. I am sending him two things: money and you.”
A million possibilities ran through my head: Perhaps Roberto had a mistress. (No. My stepfather had issues, but despite being Spanish he despised men who cheated on their wives. I wouldn’t believe he had a mistress if he showed me pictures of her himself.) Or maybe Roberto had a drug dealer. (Who he kept stashed away with the mistress. Not a chance.) Gambling, corporate espionage, corporate sabotage, international political spying, jewel thievery, or high-seas piracy, perhaps. Came up with a “No” on all of them.
I was all the way to the possibility of “Nazi art theft” when Roberto said, “Oh good Lord. The look on your face right now.”
“Be a lot more specific about how I fit into this,” I said.
“He is having trouble working out the details of a function. A party. You are good at partying. I believe you can help him work out the problems he’s having. And he might be able to help you with a few problems you have.”
“Let me make certain I understand. I set up a party, and you’re going to pay me for this?”
My stepfather showed me a real smile. “And you’re going to earn every penny. And by the way, Drusilla? Many happy returns.”
“It’s March, not New Year’s, Roberto.”
“March thirty-first, in fact. Happy birthday.”
My surprise must have shown. “It’s not—” Oh Hera. It was. I was turning twenty-eight years old tomorrow. That much closer to thirty. “Instead of this stupid job you want me to do, you could send me a birthday check and make up for all the years you and Mama missed.”
“No,” he said, and he switched off his camera.
CHAPTER FIVE
STEVIE HAD NEVER been to Anne’s house in the Beachwood Canyon area before. For one thing, we lived near the Pacific Ocean, and Anne lived near the Cahuenga Pass, east of Hollywood, off the 101 freeway. In Los Angeles, this was like us living in separate states.
Also, Stevie had little need to visit Anne. She was my friend, not my sister’s.
I drove up Beachwood Drive on autopilot, doing this for the forty-first hundredth time. It took me a while to notice that my sister had launched forward in her seat and was staring rapturously out the windshield.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
She pointed before turning to me, the sweetest smile on her face. “The Hollywood sign,” she said.
“Yeah, Anne lives right near it.”
She giggled nervously. “There it is.” Her voice was breathy.
At that moment I realized we’d been living in Los Angeles for two months and I hadn’t yet taken her to see the Hollywood sign. My sister loves television and movies to an unholy degree. Over the past decade watching TV and movies has been her main way of dealing with humanity. And yet here we were, in the center of the galaxy for TV and movies, and I’d never taken her to see the archetypal symbol for the entire industry.
I also hadn’t taken her on any studio tours, to any of the theme parks, or to an actual film se
t.
On the plus side, however, I had gotten us free room and board with an Oscar-winning film star who was enraptured by Stevie’s cooking. That had to score me some points in her book.
Eventually it would. After all, anything was possible.
“It’s no big deal,” I said. “It’s just a stupid sign.”
“And it’s there. It really looks like that.”
I grunted. “Oh, all right. We can drive up closer.”
She shook her head. “I can see it from here.” Her face was blissful.
I reminded myself that once I had my inheritance back, I was going to own a significant portion of one of those theme parks and Stevie could go any time she felt like it. Provided I played my cards right and was allowed to keep in contact with her.
Which meant getting Roger Sabo’s crap under control. And fulfilling Roberto’s little task.
Anne’s house sat up one of the many winding, shady side streets that branched off of Beachwood Drive toward the top. It was a tiny, whitewashed, two-story, two-bedroom house that had no garden to speak of but did have a garage, so it was the kind of house that had everything the modern Angeleno needed. Her parents (who, like everyone else in town, worked in film and television production) had helped her buy it a few years before.
I parked on the driveway, on the right side. Her white VW convertible, as always, was parked on the left side. She never parked in the garage, because she had already filled her garage with too much junk to ever open the door again.
One upside of being itinerant was that Stevie and I had trained ourselves to carry the bare minimum with us, which often meant one box that had papers in it and nothing else.
We knocked on the front door and after a couple of seconds I turned the handle and went in. Eventually Anne was going to learn basic home safety, although keeping her doors locked hadn’t kept me out of her house in the past.
“It’s your neighborhood burglary squad,” I called.
“Only steal the bad stuff! I’m upstairs,” Anne yelled.
Stevie looked around inside. There was a small entrance foyer that led off to the living room on one side, the kitchen on the other, and the stairs up to the bedrooms. The kitchen had a breakfast nook, a sliding glass door to the side patio, and a small bathroom. It was tiny and fussy, with mirrors on the walls to make the place seem bigger and a tiny Oriental rug over the tile floor in the foyer and a standing Tiffany lamp stuck awkwardly by the coat closet that held three coats.