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Back at Craig’s room, I slid the key into the lock and pushed in fast, before he could know what I was doing and push me right back out.
“Listen, Craig! I’ve been negotiating my ass off to get you a good deal—”
I stopped in my tracks. He wasn’t here. There was only the one room, with a door to what must be a bathroom in back. Was he in the bathroom, then?
I walked closer to the door and called out, “Craig? It’s Mary Beth. Are you in there?”
No answer.
Then who had moved that curtain? Was it just the wind, coming through that plastic-covered window?
But there hadn’t been any wind that I had noticed. Not enough to have caused even a ripple.
On a round table in front of the window was a laptop computer that seemed fairly new. I wondered if Craig had bought it with money from the sale of his car. To the left were several used foam cups with dregs that must have been coffee, as well as the last crumbs of some sort of pastry. There was also an inexpensive, drugstore-variety answering machine that held nineteen unanswered calls, according to the blinking green light. A small portable printer was attached to the laptop and next to it were sheets of manuscript paper, about an inch high. An El Segundo library card was propped up against a lamp, and on the floor around the table were odd crumpled sheets that Craig had obviously tossed away as not right.
So he had been working. That was good. I started to turn back to the front door, but couldn’t resist a peek first at the finished sheets of manuscript. They were upside down, so I turned the entire stack over and saw the title: Under Covers.
Odd. Did he mean Undercover? A spy novel? That didn’t sound like Craig. He was more into investigative nonfiction like Lost Legacy, where real-life mafia slugs were found under upturned rocks.
A look at the next few pages revealed that the title was a play on words, and the book seemed to be a fictional account of the Hollywood scene “between the sheets.” He’d written about old Hollywood in the 1940s, accounts of wild exploits of high-level directors with young female stars, sexual harassment, and the fact that actors were forced to cover up their homosexuality to make them more of a heartthrob to female viewers. Names of stars, though, had been changed to protect the noninnocent.
I’d had no idea Craig was writing a book like this, and I couldn’t see Paul Whitmore paying the same thing for this book as he was offering for Lost Legacy. While its mafia-don story had been told before, Craig had added a psychological edge to it that had made Whitmore take notice. This book, though it seemed well written, was as stale as yesterday’s news. The casting-couch angle had been done before, over and over. In fact, some of it seemed familiar, as if I’d read it somewhere before.
What the hell was going on?
I’d taken a speed-reading course years before, so it didn’t take me long to read the first few chapters. Confused and concerned, though, I stopped reading at page thirty-four. Setting the page down, I did something I’d never done before. Pushing the “on” button on Craig’s computer, I sat on his chair and tried to bring up the Under Covers document. I was pretty good with computers, but there was something odd about this one: there were no documents on the hard drive. None at all. No letters, no memos, no books. If anything had ever been on the hard drive, it had obviously been wiped clean. Puzzled, I opened the CD-Rom drive and the floppy disk drive, but both were empty.
Before I had time to think it through, I heard a slight noise that seemed to be coming from behind the motel. A thud? Someone hitting the wall back there? Images of O.J. and Kato Kaelin came to mind—someone running into an air conditioner with blood on his hands.
Then I realized the sound must have come from the bathroom. Without thinking, I strode over there and threw the bathroom door open, determined to confront Craig about why he hadn’t been answering his calls and why the hell he was hiding from me. It was his own fault, I thought, if I caught him on the john.
But Craig wasn’t hiding at all. He was right there on the floor, blood all over his forehead that was slowly seeping onto the old, grubby tiles.
In shock, I could barely move. I looked at the window, which was open. Cheap plastic curtains in a gaudy flower pattern were blowing in a light salty breeze that came off the ocean from this side of the motel. There were marks on the sill that seemed to be blood, marks that might have come from a killer, possibly escaping that way.
I knelt down beside Craig, feeling for a pulse. I couldn’t find one anywhere. I touched his cheek. Still warm. He hadn’t been dead long.
Stroking his forehead, I couldn’t hold back tears. The poor guy never got the chance to get out of the hole he’d dug himself into. And we were so close to getting what he wanted.
Then, as if in a nightmare, I saw that the blood had originated at a large gash on Craig’s forehead, and that lying by his side was a bloody Chinese dildo—made of ivory, and intricately carved to please, I supposed, in all the right places. It looked very much like the one in Tony’s apartment the night before.
I knelt there for a long moment, so staggered I wasn’t able to stand. I guess I noticed the draft, finally, that slammed the front door shut. Grasping the bathroom sink, I pulled myself up slowly and realized there was blood on my skirt and my knees.
I was still standing over Craig’s body, blood all over me, when the police banged on the front door and piled in. “Don’t move!” they ordered, guns pointed directly at me.
I didn’t even breathe.
El Segundo is a smallish town along the coast, south of Santa Monica and north of Redondo Beach. It’s a nice town, growing perhaps too quickly, but the cops, I’d heard, were generally pretty friendly.
My experience, however, was a bit strained because I’d been found at a crime scene, with blood all over me.
Inside the El Segundo police station, I’d been allowed to wash most of the blood off me. A female officer stood outside the bathroom door, “just in case I needed help.”
Yeah, right.
After I’d done the best I could, I was escorted to an interview room where a Lieutenant Davies sat across from me at a table. He didn’t tell me much, but I knew by now that he was wondering if I’d also killed Tony and Arnold. Although the ESPD and the LAPD were entirely separate entities, surely they shared information when something as important as murder was involved.
The one thing that probably kept me out of jail, at least for the moment, was the open bathroom window and the blood on the sill. I could have set that up, they thought at first, to make it look as if someone else had killed Craig Dinsmore and then escaped out that window. But when my prints didn’t turn up on the murder weapon and there was a third, unidentified person’s blood type on that sill, they couldn’t charge me.
Which did not, however, exonerate me entirely. I could have been an accomplice, the lieutenant said, and just didn’t make it to the window before the police broke in.
“I’ve been wondering about that,” I said. “How did you know to show up when you did?”
He hesitated again, but shrugged. “We had an anonymous phone call saying a murder had been committed in that room.”
“Do you mind telling me when that call came in?”
He hesitated, but said, “One-forty or thereabouts.”
“So, whoever it was, they called you while I was in Craig’s room.”
He didn’t answer that, and for good reason, I thought. If I were an accomplice to the crime, why would the other killer call the cops at a time when I’d be caught there?
I spent the next couple of hours in the interview room dealing with questions I had no answers to. In between questions I had time to think, and I figured that whoever had killed Craig did it while I was pounding on the door the first time. When I came back with a key, the killer was just getting ready to go out the window, but he hesitated when he heard me come in. The noise I’d heard while I was looking at Craig’s manuscript must have been the killer climbing, finally, through that window. I’d been so quiet, he probably thought I’d gone.
Or maybe he was afraid that I might decide I needed to pee.
“Ms. Conahan,” the lieutenant said at last in a hard voice, “I don’t believe in coincidence. There were two murders last night in Brentwood, and the LAPD says that both men were closely connected to you. Now there’s this third murder. I would think you might be getting nervous about that.”
“Well, I’m not nervous,” I said calmly. “I’m sad. I’ve lost two very good authors and an ex-husband who didn’t deserve to die. But I didn’t do anything, so there’s nothing for me to be nervous about.”
Lieutenant Davies fell silent, and I suspected he was using that psychological technique of not speaking, which usually forces the other person to break the silence by saying something.
He’d probably never had an agent as a suspect, and didn’t know that we were well-versed in those kinds of tricks, from constant negotiations. Though, come to think of it, the odds that no agent had ever committed murder upon an author were probably worse than an old, broken-down nag winning at the Hollywood Park racetrack.
I reached for my purse on the table and stood. “Unless you intend to arrest me,” I said firmly, “I’m leaving. I have work to do.”
It was a bluff, but a safe one. If he’d had enough evidence to hold me, I’d be booked and behind bars by now.
The lieutenant smiled, but it was a tight smile, not quite making it to his eyes. I noticed that his teeth were very white against his tanned skin, and that there was an odd little scar on his left cheek. Overall he might be considered quite handsome, but the eyes took away from that. They were all business, not giving anything up.
“I have to ask you not to leave town,” he said.
“I wasn’t planning to,” I answered.
He nodded and stood. “I’ll walk you out.”
I stopped by the office before heading home, and found Nia still there. She hadn’t left at three after all, but was in my workout room, which connected to the office. She was sweating away on the exercise bike, a cordless phone from the office on the floor. The door from the workout room to the reception room was open, which meant that she’d been listening for anyone who might walk in.
“Hi,” I said, dropping my purse on a chair and stepping behind the Chinese screen that served as a changing room. Pulling off my suit and tugging on workout clothes, I did my usual stretching exercises, then climbed on the treadmill next to Nia and started it up.
“Anything new?” I asked.
“I talked to Paul Whitmore after your last call about Craig, and it was weird. After how hot he seemed for Craig’s new book, he didn’t sound all that upset to hear he was dead.”
“Really? How did he sound?”
“Quiet. Didn’t say much, just to tell you he was sorry to hear it. Hung up rather quickly.”
“Hmm. He was probably signing another author already. Whatever it takes to keep the coffers filled.”
Not that I was anyone to talk. I’d been worrying a bit about my own coffers.
“And a Detective Rucker came by,” Nia said. “Yum!”
“Yum?”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, God, don’t tell me you didn’t notice. That curly hair, and those gorgeous white teeth.”
I studied my teeth in the wall of mirrors in front of us. “You know something? Everybody has white teeth these days. Ever since all those actors started having their teeth whitened, everybody you meet hassuper-white teeth. If they all got together in a room and smiled, they’d blind each other.”
“Yeah. Well, don’t laugh, okay? I’m thinking of getting mine done, too.”
“You’re kidding. Your teeth are already white enough. You’re beautiful, Nia. Don’t you know that?”
“Not in the teeth,” she said. “They’re more a sort of off-white. How can I ever compete in the date market with off-white teeth?”
“True,” I said in a hopeless tone. “I can see it all now. You as an old maid, living a joyless, loveless life with only your cat and your off-white teeth.”
She groaned. “That so possible, it isn’t even funny.”
I slowed down my pace. “So you think Dan Rucker’s hot?”
“Well, I didn’t say he’s hot. I just think he looks like he could be, under that untidy disguise. What do you think?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t like his attitude.”
“Figures. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, and I doubt he’s gay. Why would you like him?”
“Oh, shut up.”
We worked out silently for a while, until Nia said, “Why do I feel like I’m riding a horse? This seat hurts like hell.”
“You want me to get a recumbent?”
“Really? You’d do that?”
“Anything for you, my treasure trove.”
Nia was so good at her work, I had been thinking of making her a partner. I thought that I’d better wait though, to see how things went with Craig’s book and my income from it. Would Whitmore withdraw his offer now, or still publish it?
My guess was that since the book was finished, he’d go ahead and publish it. But could I still legally represent Craig in the sale? I’d never had a situation like this before, but I knew my contract with Craig gave me the right to sign for him if for some reason he wasn’t able to. For instance, if he’d just been impossible to reach and I had a great offer like the one from Whitmore, I could have signed for Craig rather than risk his losing the contract.
But what about when he was dead?
Damn. I wished now that I’d accepted the seven-figure offer from Whitmore that morning.
“By the way,” Nia said, breaking into my thoughts, “he’s coming back.”
“Who?”
“Detective Rucker. He called a little while ago and said he’d be coming back.”
“To see me?”
“What else? He’s already seen me, and I don’t recall any rings or bended knees.”
“What does he want?” I asked, frowning.
“I don’t know. He just said he had a few questions.”
“But how did he know I’d be here, when I didn’t know it myself until I left El Segundo?”
She grinned. “Maybe you’re star-crossed lovers, meant to be together from the beginning of time. Like, he just knew.”
“Oh, right. More likely he was following me. Or having me followed. I’ll bet he called you from the cell phone in his car, not twenty feet behind me.”
“Wow. He must really want to see you again, if that’s the case,” Nia said, laughing.
I couldn’t help laughing, too. “Hardly. The El Segundo police are ready to arrest me, now that I’ve got bodies falling on the ground all around me. Detective Rucker probably wants to be the first to arrive with handcuffs.”
“Handcuffs, eh? Now there’s a picture worth taking.”
“Oh, stop it!” I took the towel off my shoulder and wiped my face and neck with it. Bending over, I reached for my water bottle on the floor. I was standing with my back to the door, my butt in the air, when I heard from behind me, “No cuffs this time. If that’s what you like, though, I’ll make a note of it.”
I whirled around and saw Detective Dan Rucker with his arms folded and the first smile I’d seen on his face. He hadn’t shaved, but he was dressed in clean jeans and a black leather jacket over a white T-shirt. I almost thought I saw what Nia meant when she’d said yum.
“Whoa, Nelly!” she said now, slipping off the exercise bike. Looking at me pointedly, she said, “I’ll betcha I have some work to do in the other room.”
She disappeared into the outer office, pulling the door shut behind her and leaving me red-faced and with no sharp dialogue as backup.
“Have a seat, Detective,” I said, taking refuge behind the Chinese screen. “I need to change.”
Nia’s teasing rang in my ears, along with the idea she’d put in my head—that Dan Rucker might be interested in me as something other than a suspect. I felt awkward, and my hands shook as I pulled off my workout clothes and wriggled back into my suit. Getting stockings on wasn’t even an issue. I left them on the chair, rolled into a small bundle. Slipping into my heels, I was aware that Rucker could hear every movement I was making, and I felt like a little girl in fourth grade. That little boy behind her? He’d just sent her a note saying, I like you—do you like me? Was he looking at her braids, and were they straight or messed up? Was her dress buttoned at the neck in back? What did he really think of her?
The fact that I cared surprised me, and I wanted to disappear. What on earth was I thinking? There was nothing for it but to go out there with my chin up and confidence streaming from my pores.
“Now, then. What can I do for you?” I asked briskly, leading Rucker into my office. I took a seat at my desk and put my best negotiating face on. Detective Rucker didn’t sit in the chair across from me as expected, however. Instead, he came around beside me and plunked his butt onto the edge of my brand-new-to-me antique desk. He was so close I could smell the oranges again, and I gritted my teeth and resisted the impulse to grab my letter opener and stick him in the thigh with it.
