“I know, but it gave me some quality time with my son so not all was lost, an excuse to come out here to be with him.” Mary lived in Illinois, her son in L.A. and it was obvious he’d never move back to the Midwest.
Charlie wondered if she’d ever look at Libby with that kind of wistful acceptance. Nah. With Libby it was all scary dread. “You have other children?”
“He has two sisters. They moved to the East Coast.”
Keegan arrived at last and Kenny poured him a margarita without being asked. “I wish I’d listened to you, Charlie, about not taking this thing on. Why didn’t I?”
“Because you enjoy your success and being adored.”
“Well, I’m all over the lust for adoration, let me tell you. God, do you think they’ll call off the banquet? Surely they’ll have to. I want out of here.”
Charlie left the Baja Café through the marina-side exit planning to call Luella, but grabbed a moment to enjoy being alone, surrounded by quiet, sun, a cool breeze off the bay messing with her hair. Hard to believe Solomon and crew weren’t after her by now. Maybe they’d rounded up Maggie and saw no need to bother with Charlie. But Maggie had never been near Grant Howard. Even though it was another drowning of sorts there was no reason to link her to this last murder just because she was in the building. The VanZants could have driven down and murdered the Institute’s leader, or their son or any of the Sea Spa staff.
She walked around a sand patio with deck chairs—closest thing to a beach on a marina the size of this one—and turned up the walk on the other side of the Islandia that led eventually to the parking lot, but first to the area beneath her balcony and Kenny’s. One message from Luella, they were at the Islandia Restaurant, a separate building across the courtyard from the café and bar in the building hosting the convention and Charlie’s room, with Nancy Trujillo, the lawyer. Another from Mitch. He’d heard about Howard’s death. Did she need help? Another from Libby threatening to take off for San Lucas in her car and never return if her mother didn’t get back to Long Beach and take care of Betty Beesom. Jacob Forney had left for his mystery convention and she was there alone. “I am not a nurse and I don’t intend to ever be one. Grandma’s pissed too because you haven’t called her yet.”
And one from her secretary/assistant Larry Mann who had also heard of Grant Howard’s untimely death and wanted details on that and on troublesome matters on the MacArthur contract. “I gotta tell the lawyers something and can’t deal with this office alone, boss, because I have no clout and because Richard the Lionhearted has taken up roaring again.”
Charlie stood on the walk, toeing at the roots of the waxy-leaved bush she’d noticed grounds keepers investigating earlier and deciding on the triage method. She’d return Luella’s call first, but her scattered thoughts brought up something totally out of context with that even before a voice on a balcony seven floors above her said, “Here you are again, Ms. Greene.”
Was there a similarity between the scam going on at the Spa and/or the pharmaceutical industry’s persuasive advertising campaign and the Film Institute’s misleading advertising of the odds for screenwriting success simply for purposes of profit? Was it so different from the promises of riches in the stock market, or vibrant health throughout increasing longevity in medicine? This is how a goodly proportion of people make a living—selling impossible dreams, Hollywood foremost among them. Is it necessarily evil? Excluding greedy CEOs, mass murderers, and sexual child abusers in powerful and respected positions, are dream merchants actually a necessary part of society? And wasn’t Charlie actually a member of this group?
“What?” she asked the man without eyebrows leaning over her balcony rail.
“What is it you’re looking for?”
“A little sanity would be nice about now.”
“You won’t find it in this.” He held a tube or vial between thumb and forefinger, could have been a short pipe. It looked a lot like the ones under the bushes near to her foot. “I want you to stay right there, Ms. Greene, until I can join you. Deputy Saucier up here will watch to see that you do.”
The clipboard deputy came to stand beside him, her expression both weary and wary. She took a revolver or whatever it was from the holster at her belt and leaned over the balcony rail.
Charlie didn’t run off, merely punched Luella’s number and knelt to look under the bush. There were several plastic medicine bottles there, all bearing the prescription label for one Margaret Mildred Stutzman. Just before Gordy Solomon arrived to show her that the one in his hand did too and that it was found next to Grant Howard’s body, Luella informed her with a tone of panic Charlie had never heard in all the years they’d worked together, that Maggie had disappeared. She and Attorney Trujillo were in the midst of a frantic search.
Twenty
“I’d like to speak with Margaret Mildred Stutzman,” Solomon said patiently, reading the name off the prescription label on the vial in his hand. The contents of which, barring evidence to the contrary from toxicology, he suspected was dumped into a glass of scotch, which was then imbibed in Dr. Grant Howard’s Jacuzzi tub early this morning.
“He was pretty well sloshed the last time I saw him late yesterday afternoon in the bar at the Bahia. If he kept drinking into the night he could have died from alcohol poisoning or fell in the tub and hit his head and drowned,” Charlie diagnosed through her hat.
“We also have reason to believe that when he was helpless for one reason or another, someone held him under the water until he drowned. We also happen to know there was a female in the room with him.”
“Look, Maggie didn’t even know who he was and there were all kinds of females in this hotel last night. Plus which she and I spent the night in the same room.”
“We have reason to believe—”
“Will you stop that? Jesus, you sound like a corny TV mystery.”
“We’re fairly confident that you spent the night with a gentleman. A Mr. Kenneth Cooper who I believe you introduced to me at the Sea Spa at the Marina del Sol where there have been two recent suspected murders by drowning also.”
“Maggie and I spent the night in his room and he in ours because … a mutual friend suggested it.” Charlie would have continued but realized she was digging herself a hole here. None of this made sense, so Solomon et al needed to connect dots any way they could. Housekeeping might never look in the closet but you can bet the police had. Someone obviously put that medicine bottle in Howard’s room to implicate Maggie and connect the murder here to those at the Spa. Sort of ruled out the random theory. “Besides, Maggie is suddenly missing.”
“How convenient.”
Besides Detective Solomon and the deputy, Lydia Saucier, most of the officers about Charlie’s room and Kenny’s were city cops and homicide. She, Kenny, and Deputy Saucier (pronounced, she’d informed them, “saucy-A”) sat on the balcony of his room now while who knew what was going on inside.
“You okay, Charlie?” Kenny reached over to knead her shoulder.
“No, I’m worried sick for Maggie. And now I can’t even reach Luella. I don’t know what’s happening.”
“How about the lawyer—what’s her name?”
“Nancy Trujillo. Solomon’s got my cell. And I can’t describe her—I’ve yet to lay eyes on her.”
When Detective Solomon stepped out of the room it was with another plainclothes Charlie assumed was city. “Luella Ridgeway’s room is in order, all her stuff there except purse and car keys. Her car is not in the lot here. Could she have spirited Ms. Stutzman off the premises?”
“I have no idea. Let me try to call her again.”
“Check your messages first.” Solomon handed her cellular back. “She might have been trying to get a hold of you.”
Another even more frantic message from her gorgeous secretary, Larry Mann. Another even more threatening message from her daughter who was not going to hang around a “bitchy old sick lady another minute if help doesn’t arrive right now!” A guilt-trip
message from her mother in Boulder, Colorado wanting to know what the hell was going on “out there” and threatening to hop on a plane and get “out there” if someone didn’t talk to her “pretty goddamned soon!”
Three different well-known major banking institutions in a row wanted her to use the equity in her home to borrow money from them. Another shark wanted to consolidate her credit card debt to avoid bankruptcy. A dream vacation was hers, practically free, if she just “dialed” this number. Charlie was paying for all this crap, paying the bill for creeps to use her phone to harass her when she needed to contact someone on what could be a life and death matter. Luella still didn’t answer and Charlie left a message on her cell.
The telemarketing slugs were dream merchants too, as bad as the pharmaceutical pushers. And God wanted us to spread this slime to the rest of world? “God, you sure about that?”
“She talks to herself,” Kenny told the mildly startled officers. “She’s also paranoid.”
Charlie, still holding her phone when it tinkled, answered before Gordy Solomon could grab it. It was Nancy Trujillo wanting to know if Charlie knew where Maggie and Luella were.
Nancy Trujillo, a chunky blue-eyed blonde—go figure—stood in front of the Islandia Restaurant holding a purse the size of a briefcase to her chest like a closed book or file folder. Charlie would have walked right on by her if she hadn’t been the only person standing right where they’d agreed to meet. And if the lawyer and Detective Solomon had not greeted each other by name and with decided reserve.
The breeze was a tad more insistent on this side of the tall hotel and grew distinctly chilly as a cloud blanket overtook the sun, just a friendly reminder that April is winter in Southern California.
The restaurant was in a separate building from the hotel and other adjacent buildings and at one corner of the property that curled around the marina and bay here. It served dinners and Sunday brunch at this time of year but was to open an hour early today for cocktails because of all the conferences being held this week at the Islandia. The lawyer, Maggie, and Luella were waiting outside for the doors to open, standing at the end of a line when Maggie disappeared.
“Luella and I got to talking about I can’t remember what now and before we knew it Maggie wasn’t in line with us. Luella rushed off to the lobby building to see if she’d headed to the ladies’ room there and if not was going to check the parking lot. I was to search the pool and garden area here, the café in the hotel, and the ladies’ room there. We were to meet back at this spot no later than fifteen minutes and check with each other every five. The last I heard, Luella hadn’t found her in the lobby ladies’ room and was on her way to the parking lot. That was nearly an hour ago.”
“Ms. Ridgeway’s car is not in the lot. She’s not answering her cell phone. Everything but her purse is still in her room.” Solomon arched the forehead over one eye and nodded knowingly. “What was Margaret Stutzman’s mood like while you planned strategy? Cooperative? Grateful for your services? Worried?”
“Pretty much detached, compliant, nervous.”
“Preliminary lab work on your and Margaret’s bodily fluids indicate no drugs in her system, but enough in yours, Charlie, to confirm Deputy Saucier’s suspicions about the fruit and cheese platters. Might explain your friend’s nervousness, since she had a drug problem. Maybe she went off looking for some. Did she have any friends in San Diego?”
“None that I know of, but I don’t know all her friends. She’s fragile. We need to find her and Luella too.” Charlie grabbed her phone from her purse before the first tinkle got a good start, praying it was Luella and that she’d found Maggie. But it was Larry Mann, her assistant.
“Charlie, I’ve just been cleaning the garbage out of your e-mail inbox and you are getting some scary stuff coming in here. It’s even coded.”
“Then how do you know it’s scary? And have you heard from Luella in the last, say hour or two?”
“One of the FBI dudes running around here was looking over my shoulder. He says it’s their code. I haven’t heard from Luella since she left for San Diego again.”
“Is the e-mail about Maggie or the Sea Spa?”
“No, it’s about the explosion at the Celebrity Pit.”
Charlie had managed to get her agency in trouble with THE agency several times and it was a given, after having had computer files screwed up by THEIR invasions, that she had her e-mail automatically downloaded to her laptop at home as well. Doug Esterhazie, son of Esterhazie Concrete who was going to marry his third this Saturday, was so adept at adapting computers that he managed to screen out most of the spam junk in the process.
When she called Libby at Betty Beesom’s and got Doug instead, Charlie was glad and she was furious. She needed Doug right now and he shouldn’t let Libby use him like this. But if anybody could break a code it was Doug Esterhazie. He already had her password because he and Libby had gotten her out of more than a few Internet jams before this.
“I can’t leave Mrs. Beesom. Don’t you have your laptop with you? Can’t you access your e-mail with your PDA from there?”
There was no way to explain to the Dougs of the earth that Charlie delighted in getting away from the Internet, that she couldn’t figure out how to use half the features on her Personal Digital Assistant, that she actually had a life, that as much as she’d appreciated it the last few days, truth be known she even got pretty sick of her cellular on regular occasions. “Look, Doug, just run next door and grab it. It’s still at the desk in the dining room. Run it back over to Betty’s. You can work on it there. You know my password. Larry thinks it’s FBI.” She could hear the disappointment in his sigh. “Look, they could have gotten a lot better at it by now with all the national security beef-up and all the available laid-off techies.” His second sigh added impatience to the disappointment. “It’s about the explosion at the Celebrity Pit.”
“You were mixed up with that?” Now there was shock, but some interest.
“No, but they might think so—you know what a suspicious character I am. Call me back when you decode it. And if you see your friend Libby Abigail Greene, tell her I’m going to throttle her.” Charlie came back to the visible world with a start to find Nancy Trujillo, Gordy Solomon, and Deputy Saucier gawking at her. Oh boy. She tried to replay in her head the pieces of conversation they had heard on this end.
Deputy Saucier had just arrived to inform her boss that Luella’s car was spotted heading up the coastal highway not far from the Sea Spa at the Marina del Sol. And that Keegan Monroe was checking out of the Hyatt Islandia.
Twenty-One
The San Diego Film Institute Screenwriting Conference was in grave disarray, conferees leaving en masse, demanding refunds not forthcoming, Thursday’s sessions and banquet called off. Charlie wanted only to pack her stuff and get out before the Institute officials decided not to comp her room after all. She doubted she’d ever see the honorarium. The important thing now was to find Maggie and Luella. Nancy Trujillo had gone to her office, prepared to return the minute a sign of Maggie turned up.
A sheriff’s deputy sent to the Sea Spa at the Marina del Sol reported back to Solomon that there was no sign of either woman, nor of Luella’s car. All their luggage was still here at the Islandia. What to do?
“What was that about the FBI?” Solomon asked Charlie up in Kenny’s room. He rifled through Maggie’s suitcase while she searched hers for Brodie Caulfield’s treatment.
“Oh, Congdon and Morse had some trouble with them over a client who left the country while under suspicion, went to Spain to—”
“Evan Black, the producer? That was a great flick. And your friend Hilsten was in it. Black got out of the country with all that money, went to Spain to blow up Vegas on screen and get even. Man, the back story on that, what was it, um—oh yeah—Paranoia Will Destroy Ya, was as good as the film. They run that whole thing on E! every other month. And I hear it’s out on DVD now. What are you looking at me like that for?”
“Oh yeah, cops love pyrotechnics—we’re just suckers for it. You know what’s really wild? I know a lot of firemen who do too.” He looked off into the distance to recall a fond memory in his head—which he shook to come back to work. “So, this screenwriters’ conference—do these things produce a lot of screenwriters? Why are you still looking at me funny?”
Well, for starters you have one of Maggie’s bras dangling by a strap from your index finger. And you don’t have any eyebrows and you wear a rug. And for the first time you seem like a real person somehow. But she said aloud, “If you’re trying to come on as a lamebrain, I’m not buying in.”
“Look, there’s been a murder at this conference. I’m a cop and I’m curious, and got a right to be.” He noticed the bra and shook it off like he’d surprised a cobweb.
“You’re talking funny again.”
“Well, I’m trying not to sound like a corny TV mystery.”
“The odds against any of the attendees of this conference making headway in a career as a screenwriter, gaining contact with someone in a position to buy, recommend, judge, produce, make it happen are staggering.”
“But there’s four Hollywood agents here, as I understand it. Where else can you go and find that many in one place?”
“Two are crooks. The other two are here under duress—one of them a story editor or analyst, not an agent—neither looking for material but in fact drowning in it. The market is very selective.”
“That why you’re looking around so hard for that treatment? Seems like somebody made a contact here.”
“It’s just that Brodie’s been helpful and useful and not pushy. He’s inventive and he can pitch. I’m curious to see if he can conjure. Does San Diego homicide consider Maggie a suspect in Howard’s death?”
“City guys seem to feel there’s no connection between the murders at the Sea Spa and Dr. Howard’s. He work at the university or what?”
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