Distracted, I let my eyes wander over the crowd—they couldn’t find anyone else familiar to settle on. I struggled through the loose sand, clambering up to the edge of the pit. Putting a hand down, I sat on the edge, my lower legs dangling. I concentrated on keeping myself still, quieting my mind, and slowing the hammering of my heart. The needling pain of each shallow cut and scrape was a sharp reminder of the fine line between life and death and comforting evidence of which side I fell on.
Romeo returned, looming over me as he stuffed his note pad back in his pocket. Dropping down beside me, his mouth was set in a hard line, his face closed and angry.
“From the looks of you, I’m guessing nobody saw who was in the cab of that crane.”
Romeo snorted. “With our luck? Nobody saw anything. None of the camera crews had any footage, either—everyone focused on the drama.”
“Figured.”
“It coulda been an accident.” Romeo sounded hopeful.
“Right.” I looked him in the eye.
His hope deflated. “But you don’t think so.”
I turned my attention back to the pit and the hole Dr. Phelps had disappeared into. “Kid, there’re a lot of things I don’t believe in, even though I’d like to: Santa Claus, Cupid, the Tooth Fairy. It’s a long list that includes coincidence and easy answers.”
He mulled that over for a moment. “You don’t believe Cupid is flapping around piercing us all with arrows tipped with the elixir of true love?”
“Hell, no—the little fairy is long gone. Some dissatisfied customer strangled the life out of him centuries ago.”
“That’s not like you at all.”
“Someday, I had to grow up.” I shot him a hopeful smile. “I’m done looking to anyone else, real or imaginary, for my happiness.”
He returned my smile. It was still his turn to dole out the hugs—I took it like a man.
A figure behind us cast a shadow, blocking the heat of the sun as it dropped lower toward the west. The sudden coolness tickled the nape of my neck. A shiver chased through me as I turned, shielding my eyes with one hand.
Brett Baker gave us a tight, worried smile. “May I join you?” He motioned to the spot next to me.
“Sure.”
He crouched, levering himself with one hand as he dropped his feet over the edge and settled in. “What’s going on?” he whispered.
I brought him up to speed.
“Wow. You think they can bring that dude back.?.”
“Right now would be a great time for a miracle.” I took a deep breath, marshaling my thoughts. Romeo glanced at me, but didn’t say anything. The floor was mine. “Brett, I know this is an awkward time, but would you mind if I asked you some questions?”
“Questions?” He glanced at me, his expression open. “I guess so.”
“How do you know Jean-Charles?”
“He recruited me to work for him in New York. I’d just finished training in Japan, and really had few contacts in the States.” As he talked, Brett stared into the pit, watching the paramedics work. “I interviewed with Chef Bouclet. He hired me. I rotated between his three restaurants refining the fish preparation, adding some sushi where appropriate. He has been a wonderful mentor.”
“And Adone Giovanni? Any bad blood between you two?”
His eyes flicked to me. “Not for me. I can’t speak for Adone. He is a great chef, very talented. But he’s an ass.”
Romeo nudged me—I got the hint. “How so?”
“Too much ego. Too much anger. This is a tough business—we all have put in many years of long, hard days. He thinks it is his time.”
“Is it?”
Brett gave me a knowing look. “That is for time to decide.”
“Ah yes, timing is everything.” I trotted out this little banality as I watched the paramedics working around the hole where Nick and Dr. Phelps were hidden from view. Talking helped. “Do you still do any work with Jean-Charles in New York?”
“No. I left about a year ago. Moved to L.A.” He rubbed his thighs with both hands—the evening had turned a bit cool for shorts. “Loved the restaurant I worked for there, but I fell in love with the whole idea of this food truck thing. You know it’s really big on the West Coast.”
“And here as well.” I tucked my hands under my thighs. Mr. Baker had made me aware of the chill. “Of course, trends travel the short distance between Southern California and here pretty quickly.”
“I bought a truck, and here I am.” Brett seemed amused by that fact.
“Who is your supplier here?”
His smile faded. “Not sure now. It was Fiona Richards.”
“How was her quality?”
If he thought the question odd, he didn’t let on. “The best. She could get anything, even the most rare stuff.”
“And Chitza? Where did you meet her?”
“I’d never heard of her until I came here. I met her at the meeting earlier, the one you held.” He must’ve sensed my next question, or he saw it in my eyes, I don’t know which. “She came by today. Wanted to see my truck. Just curious is all.”
Silence enveloped us once again, and time slowed to a crawl. To be with this many people with no sound other than the passing of the traffic sorta creeped me out a bit. And worry was making me twitchy. Metro had set up a perimeter, moving the crowd back farther so the paramedics could work. Nick was taking an awful lot of time—I didn’t know whether that was good or bad. I chose the former on the theory that manifesting, or “wishful thinking,” as I liked to call it, really worked.
After a seeming eternity, I heard a sound. Cocking my head, I waited. It came again. One beat, then two. Then a steady rhythm pulsed through the speakers.
The crowd cheered. We all reached for those within hugging distance to share the joy.
Romeo jumped down and began giving orders. He pointed to a couple of officers, young guys with strong backs and large arms. “You two, come here.”
Nick had left a metal cage stretcher next to the opening Romeo and I had cleared. Romeo nodded toward it. The young men bent and eased it into the hole, one of them carrying the front, the other guiding the rear.
Romeo returned to his spot next to me. We both continued our vigil.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, you?”
“I’ll be better when I know he’s okay.”
With nothing else to do, I silently bartered with the universe, offering anything if he could just come through this whole. Glancing around, I noticed others doing the same thing, their lips moving in silent prayer or incantation. Beanie’s food truck sat open yet abandoned—I assumed he was waiting somewhere in the crowd.
Everything looked pretty normal. Except for one noticeable exception:
Brett Baker and his truck were gone.
Chapter Fifteen
“We’ve been worried sick!” Miss P. jumped from behind her desk and rushed to greet me when I pushed through the office door. “We heard what happened.”
Obviously feeling the emotion, the bird flapped his wings as he yelled, “Fucking bitch. Fucking bitch. Bad, bad girl. Smack you bad.”
I would’ve smiled, except I wondered where exactly he had learned to say that . . . and what had happened to the “bad, bad girl.” The thought made me sad, angry, and afraid.
Miss P. took both of my hands, one in each of hers, then stood back. “Look at you.” She turned my hands over—bloody and torn, they weren’t pretty. “Oh, baby.”
“Have you heard anything on Dr. Phelps’s condition?” I wandered back to my former office and looked in the closet. As luck would have it, some of my clothes I kept there for just this sort of thing were back from the cleaner’s. I pawed through them, trying to ignore the increasing pain in my hands—and trying not to get blood on any of the newly clean clothes.
“I pulled rank with the hospital operator, told her I was you.”
I snorted as I pulled an outfit out—jeans and a warm sweater. “That’ll get you
a cup of bad coffee and a spot at the end of the line.”
“It got me through to the attending physician. He said somebody got to the young man just in time. His heart, already under strain from losing blood from his compound fracture, had stopped under the weight of the rocks on his chest. Quick thinking and a tourniquet stabilized him, the paramedics did the rest.”
Relief washed through me. My legs went all wobbly, and I sank onto the toilet in the small bathroom and set about shucking my clothes, replacing them with a cleaner, more hearty set. The shoes, too. Flats were definitely in order.
When I returned, somewhat cleaned up—I hadn’t the nerve to do much with my hands other than run them under cold water—Miss P. waited where I’d left her. “We tried to call, but you didn’t answer your phone.”
I let her help me to one of the chairs by the window. “Really?” Once seated, she backed off and I reached for the thing, but the holster was empty. “Better order me a new one—apparently, I’ve lost this one.”
Brandy waltzed through the door with an air of efficiency, until she saw me. “Whoa. What happened to you?”
The bird let out a piercing wolf whistle.
I pointed to him. “Enough out of you.”
To my amazement, he sidled to the corner, pulled his head down low, and ruffled his feathers.
“Okay.” I nodded, feeling a bit like the man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz, but I rolled with it. Between the report on Dr. Phelps and my momentary magic over the bird, I was feeling a bit more bucked with life as I brought her up to speed.
“Too coincidental to be an accident.” Her face clouded. “Romeo? He’s okay, right?”
I pressed a hand to my chest, which I tried to puff out with feigned indignity. “You wound me to the core. Of course he’s okay. Do you really think I’d let anything happen to him?”
“Well, you did let Jeremy get shot.”
“Grazed. Thank you very much.” I gave her a haughty look.
“Whatever.” Like so many of her age group, Brandy tossed that word out with the obligatory eye roll when she couldn’t think of a clever retort.
I chose to ignore it—engaging in verbal thrust and parry with one of the under-twenty-five crowd would be like challenging Olive Oyl to an arm-wrestling match.
“Proving, once again, inches matter.” Miss P. said that with a straight face, earning my grudging respect, as she proffered a glass of amber liquid, Wild Turkey 101. “For medicinal purposes.”
As I grabbed the glass, my respect was complete and total. I threw back the whole thing in one gulp, then winced as the jolt of heat traced a path to my stomach, bringing tears to my eyes. “I dropped Romeo at his car. He wanted to head home to clean up, and get another shirt—the one he had he donated to the cause.”
“You good?” The young woman eyed me as if convinced of my invincibility.
I wasn’t about to disappoint. “Just in need of a new uniform and a manicure, then I’ll be good to go.”
As she turned away, she said, “I just saw Mona in the lobby. She was looking for you, and she had that look.”
“What look?” I eyed my assistant warily.
“Like a lion stalking a gazelle.” With one hand, Brandy batted away my concern. “Don’t worry. I told her you were off-property.”
That wouldn’t put Mona completely off the scent, but it would buy me some time, so I relaxed a bit. “Dr. Phelps had sure set up quite the circus act. You wouldn’t believe who all was there.”
Both heads swiveled my direction as my staff said in unison, “Who?”
Holding up my hand, I ticked them off, one finger at a time, “Gregor, Mr. Livermore, Chitza, Brett Baker, Chef Wexler—the whole cast of characters, well, almost. But a curious little bunch, and I wouldn’t think any of them would be that interested in some new RFID technology.”
Brandy held up a finger. “I just thought of something.” Stepping to her desk, she returned with a magazine, folded open, which she handed to me. When I took it, she reached over and pointed to a picture and short blurb. The column was titled “We Came. We Saw. We Consumed,” and the byline read The Phantom Phoodie.
I glanced up at my young assistant. “The Phantom Phoodie? Really?”
“No one knows who he is. He’s like this hip, cool food critic. Last week, he broiled Chef Wexler’s entrails, really eviscerated his menu, his preparation . . . everything. Don’t you remember?” She paused. Clearly, she expected a response.
“If it doesn’t concern this hotel or Cielo, in all likelihood, I wouldn’t give it more than a passing interest—my brain is full, if I add new information, old stuff spills out the back, so I have to be careful.”
Watching me for a moment, weighing my words, she acted like she believed me. “I noticed that.” She lifted her chin toward the column, refocusing my attention. “Anyway. It just goes to motive, since we’re plucking at straws. If Wexler is on the ropes financially, and now his rep gets totally ripped, well, he just might be looking for a fight.”
“Good thinking.” I made a mental note to keep Brandy out of the murder game from here on out. Although she seemed to have a nose for it, she also had that youthful air of invincibility that had gotten her in trouble and damn near killed last time. And I didn’t want her blood on my hands . . . unless I wrung her neck myself.
She seemed pleased. “And there’s something else.”
My eyes followed her as she stepped to her desk, then returned with an iPad mini. “Where’d you get that?”
“They were issued to all the C-level staff last month.”
C-level, that would be me, unless I’d gotten fired and was now slaving away for free. It struck me, since the whole Teddie thing, I’d just let the details of my life go while I remained mired in self-pity. Boring. I was so done with that! I lowered my head and looked at Miss P. from under my eyebrows. “And mine would be?”
She gave me a flat look that conveyed her feelings perfectly, along with the deadpan delivery. “Under the stack of papers you haven’t touched on the left side of your desk . . . held there by the phone you don’t answer.”
I shot her a tight little smile lacking in appreciation for her sarcasm. “Thanks.” I turned to Brandy. “Show me what you got.” When she kneeled next to me, I didn’t object.
She folded back the cover and brought the screen to life. “We have another picture of the cockroach thing.” She rotated the device and handed it to me.
And there it was, in full color, sitting on the corner of a black-and-white photo of a man. I looked more closely. Then I smiled and shook my head.
Brandy piped up. “Do you know something I don’t? I haven’t a clue who that old dude is. And why would anyone take a picture like that—no one looking at it would know what it meant.”
“Except the person it was meant for.”
Brandy’s eyes widened. “You?”
My smugness evaporated just a bit. “Well, I don’t know for certain. But I suspect Jean-Charles is sending me these pictures. He knows I like old movies.” I pointed to the screen, then touched it when it went dark, bringing it back to life. “And that is John Barrymore.”
Brandy snatched the iPad, looked at it for a moment, then clutched it to her chest. “This is so romantic!”
Miss P. and I both looked at the girl like there was no way we could imagine ever having said anything that inane. Although, truth be told, we both probably had had our swooning moments—I mean Miss P. was a Dead Head back in the day. And she still wouldn’t tell me if she’d slept with Jerry Garcia—a fact that rankled a bit. I’d get it out of her if I had to resort to torture . . . but not today. I tentatively flexed my fingers, but couldn’t get them to move much. The scrapes were drying out, the skin stiffening until it felt like a leather glove that had been soaked in water, then dried in the sun.
Finally, shot down by our lack of giddiness, Brandy returned to earth. “John Barrymore. Should I know him?”
“No.” I sighed. When people no l
onger knew who John Barrymore was, well, the world just seemed less kind somehow. “But you know of his granddaughter, Drew.” I waved silent her burgeoning excitement. “But that’s irrelevant. There’s a restaurant called The Barrymore. It’s in a refurbished hipster joint just north of the Riviera called the Royal.”
“I’ve heard of that,” Brandy’s voice held a hint of awe. “Romeo has been saving money to take me there. He thought maybe by New Year’s. It’s supposed to be fabulous.”
“It is. And here’s your chance. Call Romeo. Tell him you both can have dinner on me—tonight. Tell him about the photo; he’ll know what to do.”
Brandy dropped the iPad to her thighs—thankfully, she still held tight with both hands. “Seriously?”
“Order the foie gras appetizer. And tell Romeo he needs to have the burger, but it’s not on the menu.”
Brandy gave me a quizzical look.
“It’s a secret. Kobe beef, special buns—they only order enough each day to serve twelve of them. But you have to be in-the-know.”
“And one of the first twelve,” Miss P. felt compelled to point out.
“It’s early in the week. A holiday week as well. You should be okay.” I made a sweeping motion with my hand as if moving her along. “You better hurry, though.”
She bolted to her desk, set the iPad down, then grabbed the phone.
After that, I stopped paying attention. Leaning my head back, I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, letting the day seep out of me. Before my thoughts could coalesce, the office door burst open and Mona barreled in, scattering them once again. When her eyes landed on me, she stopped, mouth open . . . apparently unable to throw the mental switch so she could change tracks. “What happened to you?” She bent over me, brushing the hair off my forehead.
Not wanting to relive each moment one more time, I deflected. “It’s a long story.”
“I have a long time,” she said in a businesslike tone. When she grabbed one of my hands and I winced, her eyes softened, but the tone remained. “You’re coming with me. Those hands need some attention. I’ll clean them up while you tell me all about it.”
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