by K C Ames
After hanging up with Benny, Dana walked into the store. Compared to yesterday, it was quiet. She realized then that the few minutes she had stood out front with TJ and then on the phone with Benny, not a single customer had entered the shop.
As soon as Dana stepped inside, Mindy was on her.
“Why was TJ so adamant to talk to you? He hung out there for an hour, waiting for you to arrive. It was freaky,” Mindy said without even a good morning.
Leo popped his head from the kitchen. “Don’t you worry, Dana, I had my eye on you two. If he tried anything...” Leo waved a bagel knife in the air.
“Settle down there, Rambo,” Mindy said teasingly.
Dana laughed. “Thanks, Leo.”
“Well, what did he want with you?” an impatient Mindy asked again.
“Oh, nothing, really. Benny and I ran into him last night during our walk on the beach. He was drunk, so he wanted to make sure he didn’t say anything inappropriate and to apologize.”
“He seemed like he had just woken up from a massive bender,” Mindy said, looking out the window as if to make sure he was gone.
“He’s gone, right?” Dana said, looking outside.
“Yes, he walked away onto the footpath,” Mindy replied.
“He’s probably staying at the resort,” Leo said.
Dana had heard that the production company had blocked about thirty percent of the resort so that even when the production team and cast members were supposed to be filming on the island, they still had a place to stay while Picado investigated Rose Budd’s death.
Dana couldn’t imagine how much Gustavo Barca was charging for that, but the production company and the television network that ran the show had deep pockets.
But the work stoppage ordered by the police probably had them sweating bullets. Time is money, after all, and now everything had come to a screeching halt except for the money being spent by the studio on a show forced to stop shooting.
“Did he get out of line with you last night?” Mindy asked.
“Oh, no. I was with Benny anyway. He said nothing really, just talking drunken gibberish is all. He was just embarrassed, and he apologized.”
“He seemed so nervous. He was here when I showed up to open up. At first I thought he was just eager for some coffee and food, but he asked where you were right away. He was acting strange, freaky. I was going to call you to warn you but then I got slammed with the door-opening morning rush.”
“It’s fine. He’s harmless,” Dana said, trying to sound like she believed it.
Nineteen
Later that day in the afternoon, Russ Donnelly walked into Books, Bagels, and Lattes like he owned it.
Dana was in the bookstore side, going through inventory. She looked up when the door chime trilled and saw Donnelly walking towards her. He strutted like he was Tony Manero on a Brooklyn sidewalk. All that was missing was polyester clothing, for him to be holding a can of paint, and the Bee Gees belting out about staying alive on the stereo instead of the calypso/reggaeton/salsa fusion Mindy had on.
He flashed the same fake Hollywood smile she had been used to seeing when she lived in LA.
It was surreal for Dana to now see those same bright, white, toothy smiles all over Mariposa Beach along with other surgical augmentations.
It made her squirm. Come to think of it, Dana thought, he had flashed those bleached teeth the first time she had met him outside of the Qué Vista Restaurant when he was trying to contain the bad publicity Rose Budd and Robbie Gibbons were cooking up that night. It was the same smile. She wondered if he practiced it in front of a mirror. She assumed Russ Donnelly spent a lot of time gazing into mirrors, lost in his own big, bright blue eyes.
“I’ve been meaning to pay a visit to your establishment since I got back to town,” he said. He stopped in the middle of the store and looked around.
“I believe this was a video store last time we were here for Season Nine. That must have been six or seven years ago.”
“Good memory, Mr. Donnelly. This used to be the only video store in a fifteen-mile radius. It lasted longer, but it too went the way of Blockbuster,” Dana said.
He smiled. More bleached teeth.
“I like this much better,” he professed magnanimously. “And please, call me Russ.”
Dana forced herself to smile, not really caring what he thought about her establishment or what he wanted her to call him. She realized that she didn’t care much for him.
“What can I get for you?” she asked. There weren’t any other customers in the store, so Mindy was in the kitchen, prepping for the mid-afternoon rush with Leo. Amalfi was manning the counter. The aroma of fresh pineapple and coffee permeated the entire store, and it smelled delightful—a bonus that Dana enjoyed after combining her bookstore with Mindy’s cafe.
Dana looked him over with an equal amount of disdain and curiosity.
Russ Donnelly was in his early fifties, but he was fitter than most twenty-somethings. He was handsome, tanned, and a multimillionaire reality television powerhouse.
Dana had googled his net worth, and according to one of those websites that professes to know celebrities’ net worth, he was worth a cool $300 million dollars. It was hard to fathom that the man standing right in front of her in her little shop in little old Mariposa Beach was so stinking rich and powerful.
He wore his thick mane of black hair combed back with just the right amount of product to hold it in place without giving away that he had a product in there to do that. His entire bon vivant demeanor and attire—a $400 Versace polo shirt tucked into $500 Dolce and Gabbana drawstring-waist shorts, a $1,000 Versace messenger bag over his shoulder, and a $30,000 white gold Rolex perpetual chronograph watch wrapped around his right wrist—fit into the five-star luxury of the Tranquil Bay Resort a few miles up the mountainside, but he might as well be from another planet compared to the laid-back, sleepy town of Mariposa Azul Beach, which was more up to speed for bird watchers and beachcombers.
He oozed confidence, but he knew how to turn on the charm to get what he wanted from people he couldn’t intimidate with his power or money.
Dana had had her fill of entitled rich men living in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and she didn’t care about him or his television show. She figured he could sniff her contempt right off her, so he turned on the charm level with her high enough that the needle in her imaginary bull detector was bouncing into the thick cheesy zone.
“You opened this place by yourself?”
“I opened the bookstore, then Mindy moved her cafe here a couple months later.”
“Very impressive. You moved into a new country. Different culture. And within months you’re running your own business and you get the most popular eating spot in town to move in with you to boot.”
“Is there something I can help you with?”
“Sorry. I’m a known ear-bender. I was in sales before getting into show business, so old habits die hard. I’m curious, are all your books for sale in English? Being that you’re in a Spanish-speaking country and all.”
“Actually, we have a Spanish section, but my target customers are American and Canadian tourists and the expats that are scattered up and down the coast and up the mountain. So the majority of my books for sale are in English. You’re interested in buying a book?”
Donnelly picked up a copy of James Michener’s Hawaii and whistled at the heft of the book, which had over a thousand pages. “Oh, I remember his books. They were the epitome of door stoppers.”
“You like to read?”
“In another lifetime. Aside from scripts being pitched to me, I don’t really have time for reading something like this beast,” Donnelly said, putting the Michener book back on the shelf. “You know, we’ll be back to shoot another season down here in a year or two, and I’m always looking for locals on the ground to help the production. Like your next-door neighbor, Big Mike. Maybe we can hire you as a consultant,” Donnelly said.
“Thank you,
but I had my fill from the whole LA scene.”
“You lived in LA?” he asked, but Dana had the distinctive feeling that he had done his research about everyone living in town, so he already knew that. But he looked at her all quizzically, so if it was an act, he was just as good of an actor as he was a producer and studio executive.
“Something tells me you already know that,” Dana replied with a grin.
His tanned faced betrayed a reddening. He put his hands up in the air in surrender.
“Guilty as charged. My research team is very good,” he said.
“So what can I get for you, Mr. Donnelly?” Dana said, giving him a frosty look.
“Actually, can I speak with you... in private?” he replied, glancing over at Amalfi and Mindy.
Dana sighed. “Sure. We can talk in my office. It’s in the back. Follow me. I’ll be right back, Amalfi.”
Dana walked into her office. She stood by the door as Donnelly went inside. She followed him and closed the door.
“Please, sit,” she said, sitting down on the chair behind her desk. There were two guest chairs on the other side of her desk. Donnelly sat on the one to the right. He sat straight, with his feet firmly planted on the floor. Confident.
“Thank you for talking to me privately. As you can imagine, this whole situation with Rose Budd has brought on a lot of havoc to my life.”
Dana was picking up a pattern talking with the likes of Dakota and Russ Donnelly. The death of Rose Budd was being a major inconvenience to their Hollywood life. How dare she get murdered? Such an inconvenience. Dana fought the urge to roll her eyes at the man.
“Okay,” she said, not knowing what else to say.
“You and your friend had that unfortunate encounter with an inebriated Rose and Robbie, and it’s my understanding you recently had an encounter with an even more inebriated TJ.”
It surprised Dana. He must have eyes everywhere up and down the coast.
“What exactly do you want, Mr. Donnelly?” an exasperated Dana asked.
“Direct and straight to the point. So non-Hollywood, I love it. And please, like I said before, call me Russ,” he said, smiling.
She glared at him.
“Okay, okay, I’ll get to the point. I know this will come across rather crass, but I have a brand I need to think about and protect despite the terrible news about Rose. Over two hundred jobs are at stake. People only see the talent or the executive producers like myself involved in a television show and they think everyone is a fat cat millionaire, but most my staff are hardworking men and women that do the work behind the scenes such as camera operators, makeup artists, boom operators, location scouts, accountants, and such. Many people behind that curtain work in the non-glamour jobs we associate with Hollywood. And if this season is lost, so will a lot of jobs. And in a reality show, the talent are amateurs, trying to win the big prize or to catch a break with their modeling and acting careers,” Donnelly said, maintaining eye contact with Dana the whole time.
“So you’re worried that I’m going to talk about what I saw to TMZ?”
Donnelly laughed. “It has crossed my mind. The paparazzi are bottom feeders that pay for gossip to publish, and they’re going to be all over this once word reaches Hollywood.”
“Well, don’t worry, Mr. Donnelly, I’m not planning on chatting with paparazzi.” She refused to call him Russ.
“Great,” Donnelly said, reaching into his expensive Versace messenger bag and pulling up a thin folder.
“I have two nondisclosure agreements for you and your friend to sign.”
Dana was stunned. She felt ambushed. Then angry.
“I’m not signing anything right now. You can leave them with me and my friend, Benny, who is a lawyer, can look over them with me. And then I’ll consider it. But I’ll be honest with you, I’m not keen on signing any legal documents,” she said. The whole thing sounded more absurd the more she thought about it.
If Donnelly was disappointed, he hid it well. His facial expressions and body demeanor didn’t change one iota. He just smiled and told her he understood that and encouraged her to have it looked over by her attorney.
That said, he got up, shook her hand, and he opened the office door and walked out. Dana sat there for a moment, stunned. She composed herself and headed back to the shop. Donnelly was ordering a coffee to go from Amalfi. Dark roast. No sugar. No cream. Big-teeth grin shining bright.
Twenty
Her encounter with Russ Donnelly and his nondisclosure agreement he wanted her to sign left Dana hot and bothered for the rest of the day.
Mindy and Leo were just as shocked as she was, and then Leo got plain angry. “He comes to our town, takes it over for a couple months, and now he wants to tell you what you can and can’t say you saw on our public beach,” Leo said, shaking his head.
“This looks scary,” Amalfi said, reading the document. She quickly handed it back to Dana as if to not get infected with its bad juju.
Dana’s emotion soon joined with Leo’s. “Who does he think he is?”
“Someone who’s worth multiple hundred million dollars and probably has an army of skivvy Hollywood attorneys at his beck and call. Be careful, Dana,” Mindy said, sounding worried.
It was hard for all of them to carry on with business as usual for the rest of the day until closing time.
Dana had taken a picture of the agreement with her phone and sent it to Benny. He would look it over and they would talk about it when Dana got home. He agreed to meet her at Casa Verde at seven o’clock p.m. He told her he would bring dinner. Dana appreciated the gesture, since she was so upset about Donnelly’s NDA that she had a hard time focusing at the shop. Dinner was the last thing on her mind. If it weren’t for Benny’s thoughtfulness, she probably would have had a piece of toast or something. The thought of eating made her queasy, but then she reminded herself it wasn’t food making her feel that way—it was Russ Donnelly.
Benny arrived at 7:10 p.m. It was unusual for him to be late, but he told Dana that he drove up to Nosara to the only Chinese food restaurant nearby. Dana thought that was sweet of Benny, since he knew how much she liked Chinese food. And luckily for her, the only Chinese restaurant around, Dragón Trópico, was delicious. The food was good, but a little different from what she was used to in San Francisco. It was Chinese food with Costa Rican influences.
Dana had met the owner of the restaurant, Miguel Chen, when she attended her first Nosara District Chamber of Commerce meeting.
He was a tico through and through. He hardly spoke Chinese, much to the heartbreak of his ninety-nine-year-old grandmother, who had immigrated to Costa Rica when she was a child and her father joined his brother to work for the Panamá Canal Railway.
The family eventually settled in Puntarenas, where Miguel Chen was born and raised. Sensing a terrific opportunity to open the first Chinese restaurant in the Nicoya Peninsula, he moved to Nosara years ago, and his restaurant, located in downtown Nosara, had been going strong ever since.
Dana perked up when she saw Benny walking in with two white bags from Miguel Chen’s restaurant.
“I went a little overboard,” Benny announced, putting the bags on the kitchen counter.
The restaurant’s logo was visible on the bags. It was a traditional Chinese dragon wrapped around a palm tree. Dana loved that branding.
Benny started to remove the ubiquitous Chinese food to-go boxes from the bags, revealing chow mein, pork fried rice, and a nice mix of dim sum: zongzi wrapped in a bamboo leaf, shrimp har gow, moo shu pork, and pineapple buns.
“Are we expecting more people?” Dana teased.
They ate for like ten minutes, chatting about other things and enjoying the food. Dana was glad she didn’t settle for avocado toast.
She tried not to get into it right away, but Donnelly’s NDA sat on the counter, mocking her. She was unable to ignore it any longer. “The nerve of the pompous blockhead,” she blurted out, tapping on the NDA documents with her chopsticks.
Benny smiled. He picked up the NDA. “It’s a whopper of a document he wants us to sign. It’s very heavy-handed, even for an NDA.”
“Can he really put that in there about not saying anything?”
“That’s not uncommon, since this is a legal contract trying to get us to agree to keep what we saw and heard confidential. To not pass on that information to any third parties.”
“I’m assuming he’s worried we have TMZ on speed dial.”
Benny laughed.
“So he is threatening to sue us from here to kingdom come if we tell anyone about Rose Budd and Robbie Gibbons’s drunken brawl and TJ’s drunken crying about his love for Rose?”
“Basically. He also wants jurisdiction for any legal matters related to the NDA to be in the United States. In Los Angeles County, not Costa Rica.”
“Yeah, like I’ve been telling you, the nerve of that pompous pinhead.”
“You said he was a blockhead before,” Benny said with a smile. He was trying to bring some levity to the situation.
“Blockhead, pinhead, idiot, you get the gist.”
“I do. Well, we’re not signing it. That’s for sure,” Benny said.
“I’m glad you agree with me on that issue.” It had worried Dana that Benny would push for them to sign the NDA.
As an attorney, he had the skill to look at things in a dispassionate way and decide based on sound legal footing, not letting emotions get in the way. And that was a good way to look at these types of things and why he was a successful lawyer, but Dana wore her heart on her sleeve and had heard more than a few times in her lifetime that she was as stubborn as a spotted mule.
Donnelly had tried to increase the odds of them signing the NDA by offering a big cash incentive in the amount of $15,000, which insulted Dana versus enticing her to sign.
“So if he’s offering fifteen thousand dollars to each of us, he’s probably doing the same to everyone else involved, like Maria and her staff at the restaurant, since they witnessed Rose and Robbie’s public meltdown. And what about who was there for dinner? That’s over one hundred thousand dollars, easy,” she said, following it with a long, drawn-out whistle.