“They won’t be able to do that.” Though I believed that they couldn’t, panic rose, and I tamped it down with irritation.
“Hopefully not. What’s going down today? We going to school?”
I sat up in the bed. “I have Hector and Sam looking up articles. We’re supposed to meet them before class. I know we’re missing something. I’m just not sure what it is.”
“I’m going to lie down. I was sitting at a cold metal table all night. I need to take a little nap. Call me if you find anything. Otherwise, I’ll see you in an hour at ‘Half a Cup’. We can go to school from there.”
An hour wasn’t very long, but the man knew how long he needed to nap for, and it wasn’t my job to be his mother. So I bit back the urge to tell him to sleep for longer. Wasn’t my business.
I dressed and headed out into the cold to find Hector and Sam at ‘Half a Cup’. They were at a seat in the corner nursing some of the bizarre concoctions that the store specialized in. They greeted me, barely looking up from their searches. Sam told me, with clear excitement, that they’d discovered lots of things before my arrival. They were really enjoying this.
Weirdos.
I slumped into a chair. “You guys do know that we aren’t Mystery Inc., right?”
I felt Harrison’s breath on my neck before I realized he was there. I didn’t know how I knew it was him without looking. I just did. He leaned over my shoulders and took in the scene. “If we are, I get to be Daphne,” he said.
I turned, repressing a shiver. At the surprise of being breathed on. Or something. “Aren’t you supposed to be sleeping?”
Hector moved over to allow space for him to pull up another chair. “Hmm. And yet I’m not.” He sat backwards in his chair and rested his chin on his crossed arms. “I think I’m too amped up by Wallace’s style of interrogation to sleep.”
“Who’s Wallace? Is that Bad Cop?”
He laughed. “Bad Cop? I guess I could see why you would call her that. You’re almost worse than Nate was with names.”
I shrugged. “I have my own system.”
Harrison actually seemed to be smiling at the memory of his cousin. “He did too. He’d give everyone a nickname because he couldn’t remember who they were. Hat Head Guy, Sports Screamer, that kind of thing.”
I paused. “What if C.A. isn’t initials. I mean, not for a name anyway. What if it’s his system? Like Constipated Astronaut or Constant Arguer.”
Harrison put his head down on his hands. “That makes sense. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before. All that time wasted looking for someone with the right initials. Of course, it could still be anyone. That doesn’t help narrow the field.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“Well.” Hector pulled another laptop out of his messenger bag and placed it between Harrison and me. “I brought an extra.”
I didn’t have the heart, or the energy, to tell him we’d given up on that long ago. We were mostly silent at the table for the next half an hour. Hector was the fastest among us, flipping from one screen to another with a speed that suggested he wasn’t actually reading anything, only opening and closing windows. He went back for so many refills that he might as well have hooked himself up with an IV infusion. Sam was slower and more thoughtful, though once when I glanced at her screen she was on TMZ reading an article about naked Prince Harry.
Harrison and I were silent, sharing the same computer and reading through fifty million articles I’d already seen. Many of them on people I’d already discounted as suspects. But at this point I didn’t know what else to do.
“Noah Pince and Gina Wilson are getting divorced,” Sam told us.
Noah Pince was a fellow director who had lost a hit show to Van through dirty pool. Ana had given us the name on her list. But the event in question had happened ten years before, and Gina, a twenty-year-old starlet from British Columbia, had been in elementary school at the time. There was little chance that there was any connection. But it was exactly the kind of information I had asked she and Hector to find for me, so I made a note and thanked her.
Hector discovered that one of the people on Ana’s list had died last week of cancer. I crossed the name off. Harrison and I found a note that Van’s first wife, with whom he had no children, had moved in with an Orlando Bloom look-alike in Flagstaff, Arizona.
But I still wasn’t sure how any of it mattered.
Sam glanced up at me. “Okay, I’ve got a hit on Vickie Bridges. Do you know she was my mom’s favorite actress? She makes me watch all those awful early 90’s teen movies all the time.” Sam made a gagging face.
“Okay, what is it?” I decided to redirect Sam before she went off on a tangent.
“Oh.” Sam glanced at the screen again. “She’s going to be in some production of As You Like It at the Kimo. It was just announced yesterday as her return to public life. Mom is going to be thrilled.”
Harrison’s head jerked up. “Wait, what?”
“She’s agoraphobic,” I objected.
Sam looked back at the article. “Well, it says she’s been suffering from agoraphobia for almost fifteen years, but she’s considered in good health now and is quoted as looking forward to her return to acting.”
Harrison and I met gazes. “Her nurse said she was dying,” I added.
Sam bit her bottom lip and returned to her screen. “It’s the only article about the play I could find. There’s also a note in an industry magazine that her agent is in talks for a small part in a television show next year.”
“Her nurse lied to us,” Harrison said.
“Okay, I think it’s time to go back to Vickie Bridges.”
I asked Harrison to call Ana and get the name of the psych hospital where Vickie had been treated, or even better the name of the doctors or nurses who had treated her. I scanned articles trying to figure out where As You Like It rehearsals would be. I wanted to see Vickie Bridges for myself.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Rules of the Scam #46
Lie like your life depends on it…
I was writing down the name of the community center where the rehearsals would be, when Harrison returned with a short list of names. “These are the only ones Ana could find. The hospital Vickie was treated at in LA is no longer in use. The staff have all retired or moved on to other hospitals.”
I looked at the paper. There were only three names. A man and two women, all with numbers in the LA area. There wasn’t time to pop over there and interview them, even with Harrison’s plane. “I guess we’ll start at the top and work our way down.”
I hadn’t yet decided what I would tell these people, but I would figure it out when they answered. The man turned out to be a doctor, and the hospital at the other end of my phone line informed me without sympathy that he’d died of heart attack thirteen months before. I thanked the receptionist and crossed out his name. The second number was also a hospital, a private drug rehab place in Beverly Hills with a name synonymous with the Hollywood party set. The nurse I was looking for was no longer employed there. The girl who answered said she was a friend and would take my number and pass it along.
Running out of hope, I dialed the last number, and when it was answered with a simple hello, I realized I’d reached a residence and not another hospital. I looked at the sheet again. “Could I talk to Cindy Leshman?”
“Who’s calling?” she asked with enough suspicion that I knew I was talking to her.
I stood and moved away from the table. “Hi, my name is…Talia Jones.” I didn’t know if I was too tired or defeated or just out of ideas. Or maybe Cindy Leshman came across as someone who would respond best to honesty. Either way, I was too exhausted to care.
There was a long silence where she was perhaps debating whether or not to demand more information before revealing herself. “This is Cindy Leshman.”
“Hi,” I said again, not sure where to go from there. “Look, this is kind of weird, but do you remember working with Vickie Bridges
when she was in the Sunset Home?”
I was greeted with another long silence. Maybe that was the way she answered questions. “I do.”
She wasn’t very forthcoming. I decided to dump it all out there. “Okay, well, I’m here with Harrison Poe. He’s the son of Van Poe, the producer whose movie she was working on when she went all nuts.”
She made a noise that I assumed meant she was listening to me and waiting for more. “So anyway, Harrison’s life is in danger. I mean, someone is trying to kill him. Frankly, I’m kind of wondering if maybe it might be Vickie Bridges. I mean, she lives nearby. I thought she was a shut-in, but now I read she isn’t, and I don’t know what to think. Did she seem dangerous to you?”
This time the silence was so long I started thinking maybe she’d hung up, but finally, she said, “I shouldn’t talk to you about it. But there are two reasons why I will. I’m retired now and will never nurse again, and also because, frankly, you’ve frightened me.”
Good, I was frightened too, and I was glad that someone else was with me.
“Vickie Bridges was a mess at first. I won’t go into details of her exact diagnosis, but she was not a well person. It wasn’t until she began to repair herself that it became apparent that she was incredibly resentful of Van Poe. She’d been getting divorced at the time of her breakdown. She felt she’d lost custody of her two children entirely because of Van.”
“Was that true?”
“I can’t say. But she definitely felt that it was true. She was very clear that if she couldn’t get her children back, there were two of them if I remember correctly, with very common names, Michael and Jessica I think, she would get revenge.”
This time I blamed my shivers on the powerful air conditioning, not on the darkness in Cindy Leshman’s voice. “Did she get them back?” I was almost afraid to ask.
“I don’t know. She hadn’t when she went from our hospital to another care facility. But I don’t know what happened after that. Last I heard they were grown, and one of them is a real estate agent and the other is a nurse.”
“So you think she might be dangerous?”
“All I’m saying is that she swore if her kids didn’t come back to her, she would pay Van back in kind.”
I thanked her and hung up the phone, having passed the point of being a little nervous and moved on to plain out alarmed. There was no guarantee that Vickie Bridges was the person we were looking for, even with the information Cindy Leshman had given me. But it was certainly worth looking deeper.
I grabbed Harrison. “Come on, we’re taking a little trip.”
Hector looked up. “Where are you going?”
“Bandervale Community Center. It’s up the road. If we aren’t back in fifteen minutes, alert the media.” I purposely kept my voice light because I didn’t want to give them the impression that we were doing anything important. It was one thing to ask Sam and Hector to play detective behind a computer screen. It was another to put them in danger.
When we got back to the car, Harrison’s mouth twisted into a grim smile. “Alert the media?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t want them to worry.”
“You found out something bad, didn’t you?”
I belted myself in. “Maybe not bad. Maybe just weird. But definitely worth checking. We’re going down to the community center, and we’re going to try to catch Vickie Bridges there. She can’t pretend she’s afraid of seeing people when she’s already out in public.”
I gave him a rundown of my call with the nurse while we drove the seven blocks up and three over from our neighborhood to the downtown location of the Bandervale Community Center. Bandervale was an old building, but I was new to the neighborhood, and it was unclear if it had always been used this way. Either way, the building itself had definitely seen its better days. The door to the community center was between a rundown church crisis center and an unidentifiable business called Sepi and Associates. A lawyer?
Harrison pulled up to park in front, but I laid my hand on his arm. “Let’s park on the side and see if there’s a back entrance. Maybe if we try for the element of surprise, she’ll be less likely to be able to avoid us.”
He shrugged and pulled up to the curb on the tree-lined street next to the building. From where I was standing on the thin, cracked, sidewalk, I could see there were back doors to the building. Three of them. Positioned between green dumpsters that looked like someone had purposely rammed them with a car.
It was possible that the owners kept the back doors locked, but it never hurt to check. We picked our way down the alley, through garbage and three homeless guys taking a nap in the sun like kittens, until we reached the middle door.
It not only wasn’t locked, but also it wasn’t entirely on its hinges. Sitting lopsided in the frame, the door handle was hanging slightly off, and the word exit had suffered so badly that the only letter left was “i.”
Harrison reached for the handle, and I stared at the door. Feeling very wigged out, I reached over and grabbed his arm. “Harrison…” I was whispering though there was no good reason. We weren’t in a library, and I was unwilling to call what I felt right now fear.
Because I was unwilling to believe my mom was actually less of a con artist and more of a psychic.
But I couldn’t help but remember her words on the first day that Harrison had come into the shop. Mom had gone on and on in that weird state, telling him to fear the eye. No. It was don’t open the eye. That’s what she’d said. The eye is death.
But what if it wasn’t the eye, but the“i”? What if whatever was behind that door was more of a threat to Harrison than anything had been up to this point? More threatening than Jagger in drag trying to shoot him in the head? Seemed almost impossible. But still I hesitated.
“What’s the matter, Talia?” He sensed my tension and responded in kind, immediately prepping for fight or flight, his body tense from head to toe.
“I don’t know. It’s just that…” I didn’t know how to explain what I was thinking. It was stupid and it didn’t entirely make sense.
“Well, hello there.”
Before I turned I knew who it would be. Because that was the kind of sucky luck that we had. Vicky Bridges, I was glad to see, didn’t resort to the wearing of fur coats at all times. Just when she left the house intending to commit crimes, it would appear. When crimes came as a surprise, like the one coming up had, she was left to resort to looking almost like a normal person.
Her crazy hair was in a flyaway ponytail instead of sticking out all over. There was nothing to be done about her lip job which had not gone well. She still looked like Chord Overstreet had a terrible, terrible accident. Her pink track suit was so cheerful, it seemed bizarre and discordant. The gun in her hand, trained on Harrison, was also pink. Which was nothing short of absurd. But that didn’t stop me from viewing it with a healthy dose of caution. The fact she hadn’t already shot Harrison suggested she had a different plan at the moment.
Though I couldn’t imagine what it was.
Harrison didn’t seem scared, which I had to admit I kind of admired. He lifted his hands and cocked his head to the side. “Why are you doing this?” he asked, his voice very low and calm.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know who I am. I know you came to my house.”
“Yes, I know who you are. But why kill Nate? Why try to kill me?”
Harrison seemed to be engaging her, and that was good. I didn’t have enough real information about her yet to know which buttons to push. I might be able to get us out of this, if Harrison could keep her talking long enough. I was really, really good at telling people what they wanted to hear. And it had never been as important as it was right now. But first I needed her to keep talking.
“I killed Nate because he deserved it. He promised he’d play right. But then he got an attack of conscience. Swore he could hear the demon recording in his own room. Said he couldn’t sleep at night and that the guilt was consuming him. He was going to tell
you. So I had to kill him.”
It seemed ironic to me that the first time Nate had ever tried to do the right thing, he’d been murdered as a result. Go figure.
“Why me? Why have Nate try to make me think I was being hunted by a demon? Why so elaborate?”
“Your father owes me.” Vickie waved the gun in Harrison’s direction, her attention not particularly focused. “How better than to make you insane?”
“He lost you your career?” Harrison’s voice was gentle, understanding even.
I looked out the alley mouth, but no one was around. A police car sped past, siren blaring, but it wasn’t headed our way. It didn’t slow. One of the homeless men stirred, but they were very unlikely to be of any help. We were on our own this time. Maybe the others would take me seriously and alert the media. Or, at the very least, the cops.
“My career,” she spat, her horrible mouth twisting. “Who cares about that? I told Van I couldn’t handle it. But he wanted it to be authentic. He’d keep me locked up for days in between shooting. I didn’t lose my job. I lost my children. I would have done anything for them. Van took them away.”
She turned to me for a second and seemed confused as to why I was there. Then she focused back in on Harrison. “And now I’m going to take away Van’s child.”
“But I didn’t do anything to you,” Harrison said rationally, as though rationality was likely to help in this situation. “I was like six years old when you went to the hospital.”
“This isn’t about you,” she explained patiently. “This is about making Van pay. He made my children spend their lives with their father. He abused them every day. He hurt them!” A tinge of hysteria was starting to enter her voice. I started to understand who she was and what would help us right now. “Van made them suffer. Now I’m going to make Van suffer.”
“But aren’t you doing exactly what Van did?” I asked, following Harrison’s advice and keeping my voice steady and calm. “You’re going to make a child suffer because you aren’t happy with his dad.”
The Tell-Tale Con Page 22